Suchergebnisse

Informational faultlines, the alignment of team member task-related attributes to form subgroups, are important in explaining team performance. Although informational faultlines may promote specialization and division of labor, they may also increase communication and coordination costs. Integrating work on the categorization-elaboration model, social identity theory, and contingency theory, we posit that facets of a team's external environment moderate the effects of informational faultlines on performance. Using a sample of 380 top management teams, we examine moderation effects of environmental dynamism, complexity, and munificence. We find that informational faultline strength positively affects firm performance under low environmental dynamism, high complexity, and high munificence, but it negatively affects firm performance under high environmental dynamism, low complexity, and low munificence. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.

We advance the literature on faultlines by theorizing about how and why perceived faultlines (i.e., realized subgroupings as perceived by team members) not only influence team characteristics (e.g., decision-making structures), but also change in response to these team characteristics over time. Drawing on current team theories, we reason that strong perceived faultlines lead teams toward a decentralized decision-making structure (i.e., distributed decision-making responsibility), but a decentralized decision-making structure weakens future perceived faultline strength. We also build a theory suggesting a decentralized decision-making structure mitigates the dysfunctional effect of perceived faultlines on team performance. We find support for our theory in a sample of 230 undergraduate students in 48 teams, and we discuss implications for faultline and team research.

The authors elaborate a multilevel model of faultline perceptions across individuals in groups. They develop the concept of individual perceived faultlines and build logic about an individual-level antecedent—expectations for relationship conflict held even before a group is formed. They explain how its impact persists over time to influence individual satisfaction with the group, and how individuals update faultline perceptions in response to common contexts and social processes. Findings indicate that expectations for relationship conflict, despite being held before the group forms, influence individuals' satisfaction with the group. The effect is mediated by initial and later-stage individual perceived faultlines.

In this study we examine a moderated model of group faultlines, team identification, and group performance outcomes. We extend research on faultlines by showing how different faultline bases (social category and information-based faultlines) may have differential effects on the performance of groups. In addition to faultline strength (the extent of demographic alignment across members within a group), we examine the distance between faultline-based subgroups (e.g., two members of age 20 are closer in age to two members of an opposing subgroup of age 25 than of two members of age 50). We test our model using an archival field methodology and multiple-source data (qualitative and quantitative) from 76 workgroups in a Fortune 500 information-processing company. Our results revealed that groups with social category faultlines had low team discretionary awards. Faultline distance further exacerbated the negative effects of strength in groups with social category faultlines and produced similarly negative effects in groups with information-based faultlines. Team identification served as a moderator enhancing performance of groups with information-based faultlines.