[6] However, larger teams can also experience coordination problems that interfere with performance[10] and motivation losses caused by a dispersion of responsibility.
[15] However, external factors are important to consider when deciding on which type of team to compose for completing any certain objective.
When a team is in its initial stages of forming, members may use demographic traits, such as gender, to place themselves into a sub-team.
[19] In severe cases, the members of a sub-team may feel like the split is irreconcilable and break away completely from the team or organization.
[6] One facet of these compositional attributes reflects demographic and work-related diversity among individuals, making it a relevant area for further understanding of inputs that affect team functioning, such as experimenting, admitting mistakes and seeking feedback.
[21] Diversity of age, gender, and race are considered to be the most important demographic factors resulting from team composition.
[27] However, older team members also tend to be less willing to adapt to evolving work environments and are less likely to implement innovative strategies, preferring instead to stick to tried-and-true methods.
[30] Race is a third demographic factor of team composition and has gained additional salience due to the globalization and increasing diversity of the workforce.
[34] Abilities can include multiple dimensions ranging from scope (general vs. specific) to origin (innate vs. learned) to focus (task vs.
[6] Diversity of abilities within a team offers the advantage of allowing members to learn from each other and to generate new ideas by combining or merging their qualifications.
The requirements include conflict resolution, collaborative problem solving, communication, goal setting and performance management, planning and task coordination.
[6] The Big Five personality traits include extraversion (positive emotions, sociability and warmth), conscientiousness (competence order and self-discipline), agreeableness (trust, straightforwardness), openness to experience (new ideas, experiences and imagining), and neuroticism (anxiety, self-consciousness and sensibility).
[6] However, most of these studies have been conducted in laboratory settings using creativity as the performance criterion, meaning that they are disjunctive rather than additive tasks.
[6] Relatively little has been done to understand the relationship of personality to the performance of actual work teams completing production tasks that are additive.
[6] Consistent with individual-level research, team-level conscientiousness appears to be a fairly potent positive predictor of team effectiveness.
[38] Although conscientiousness has been most frequently studied, some research suggests that other Big Five personality factors, such as extraversion[39] and agreeableness[40] may also play a role in determining work team effectiveness.
[52] The following distinction can be made between three measures of team outcomes: Measures of performance effectiveness assessed in terms of quantity and quality of outputs, e.g. efficiency, productivity, response times, quality, customer satisfaction, and innovation, Member attitudes, e.g. employee satisfaction, commitment, and trust in management, and Behavioral outcomes, e.g. absenteeism, turnover, and safety.
[53] Levels of conceptualization, measurement, and analysis have tended to be either ignored or to be treated simply in much of the research on team composition.
[54] Such issues are critical for developing a sound understanding how team member attributes combine to form higher-level constructs and must be carefully articulated.
Well-defined models of emergence need to guide the representation of individual-level characteristics at the team level.
Some theoretical research has developed models of the knowledge, skills, and abilities required of workers organized into teams[55] but the association between individual trait characteristics and team performance generally has not been studied in actual field settings, with the exception of a few studies examining composition in terms of member ability.
[56] Another reason is that a focus on teams rather than individuals requires composition variables to be measured at an aggregated level of analysis.
This higher level of analysis is often difficult because there is not an established theoretical approach for proper aggregation of individual characteristics into team-level constructs.
The appropriateness of any operationalization depends largely on the nature of the task being completed by the team, the research questions being asked, and the specific traits being analyzed.
[54] There has also been a relative lack of attention to the latent constructs that underlie variables of interest within research on team demographic composition.
Individual studies tend to report results for only one of the approaches; consequently, potentially important relationships between the various team-composition operationalizations and team processes and outcomes cannot be detected.
[59] General Mental Ability (GMA), conscientiousness, agreeableness and emotional stability are examples of a team composition attributes that could be operationalized utilizing the mean.
[50] Conscientiousness, agreeableness and extraversion are examples of team composition attributes that can be operationalized utilizing maximum and minimum scores.
[50] The most common approach has examined the effect of demographic variables on team performance and adopts indexes based on the variance of individual scores for a particular trait.
[66] Combining these areas may help researchers better focus on identifying mediating characteristics relevant to both types of composition factors.