Forging Work Teams: Effects of the Distribution of Cognitive Ability on Team Performance

The relationship between team cognitive ability and team performance was studied in a real-world, semi- autonomous work team environment. Four models (i.e., additive, conjunctive, disjunctive, and heterogeneity of variance) of the relationship between team member cognitive ability and performance were investigated. Group leaders provided performance ratings for 97 work teams formed from 917 employees. A composite of scores from the General Aptitude Test Battery was used as a measure of cognitive ability. The results showed that certain combinations of cognitive ability were significantly related to team performance, with the most significant impact occurring for teams with fewer than eight members. A complete PDF version of this article can be obtained at www.radford.edu/~applyhrm.