Congruence of interdependencies Sample Clauses

Congruence of interdependencies. Within teams it is very likely that members experience several types of interdependence at the same time (Lindenberg, 1997). The level of task interdependence is to a more or lesser extent set by the organization and is the foundation for other interdependence types (Wittek, 1999), meaning that functional interdependence (what makes a team a team in organizations) serves as the basis for cognitive and affect-based interdependence to develop. Functional interdependence among team members –like we hypothesized before- is likely to have an impact on the group outcome. We hypothesize that both cognitive and affect-based interdependence facilitate the effect of formal task interdependencies. This reasoning is in line with studies that find a positive effect of informal relationships on job performance (e.g., Xxxxxx, 1999) because the informal relationships reduce the transaction costs. Suppose for instance a team in which every member is task interdependent with every other member. The existence of cognitive and affect-based interdependence relationships within that team might help the coordination in that team by facilitating understanding and navigating the complex task interdependence structure. Second, when functional interdependence in a team is very low (or even absent), we expect that the existence of cognitive and/or affect-based interdependence will distract members from executing their task(s). Establishing and maintaining informal task-related knowledge exchange relationships and friendship relationships costs time and energy that cannot be devoted to task execution. Moreover, unlike the situation described above in which all team members are functionally interdependent, in this case it is unlikely that the team’s job performance will benefit from the cognitive and affect-based interdependence relationships. In fact, cognitive interdependence and affect-based interdependence may detract from performance in this situation. This implies that in situations of low (or absent) levels of functional interdependence the cognitive and affect-based interdependencies need to be low (or absent) as well in order to reach effective performance levels. We therefore expect that the different interdependencies need to be congruent within a team (i.e. either high levels of all interdependence types or all low levels) to enable a team to reach effective performance levels: Hypothesis 4: Congruency of functional, cognitive, and affect-based interdependence is positively...