Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts: Isomorphism in Measures of Team Consensus Constructs

Doctoral Candidate Name: Elizabeth Clayton
Program: Organizational Science
Defense Date and Time: June 1, 2021 – 12:30 PM
Defense Location: https://uncc.zoom.us/j/99962901314?pwd=d0lWQ3NvdUFmRU9nOHY5aTEzbmhIZz09
Committee chair’s Name: Dr. David Woehr
Committee Members: Dr. Eric Heggestad, Dr. Janaki Gooty, Dr. Scott Tonidandel
Abstract:

Work teams are an ever-growing structure as organizations seek to become more agile and achieve better outcomes (Bersin, 2016; Deloitte, 2018). Therefore, organizational researchers seek to accurately understand and capture various aspects of team dynamics. Measures of team phenomenon typically operate in a dynamic team theoretical framework in which team-member perceptions and characteristics (i.e., inputs) influence team dynamics (i.e., processes and emergent states) thus influencing team outcomes (e.g., team performance and future team member perceptions; See Input-Mediator-Ouput-Input framework Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; and Input-Process-Output framework Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). Therefore, these measures function in a multilevel framework in which team members perceptions are used to characterize attributes, cognitions, and beliefs about the team. When these perceptions are shared among team members, team consensus constructs (e.g., team cohesion, conflict, psychological safety, satisfaction, task interdependence, liking, and viability) shed light on team functioning and performance. However, researchers typically assess the psychometric properties of these measures at the individual level via a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) without examining how the strength of and relationship among measures’ indicators (e.g., items) vary at the between-team level where the constructs theoretically operate. To examine the consequences for this misalignment in the theory of the construct and its measurement, the current study consists of a systematic literature review cataloging the psychometric properties of team consensus constructs and empirical study on in over 3,000 project-based teams using archival data examining the degree of psychometric isomorphism among measures. The results in the current study demonstrate that measurement and theory need to be aligned when examining for measurement quality details the consequences regarding convergent and discriminant validity when they are not in alignment, provides recommendations regarding team-member agreement and the ability to model latent factors, and provides researchers with information on how to model team consensus constructs and examine their quality via a multilevel CFA.