The Research On The Relationship Between Team Design Variables And Team Performance

Team researchers are limited to research of the relationship between single team design variable and team performance, because of traditional empirical research method being not useful in getting enough valid research data about team. But it is being changed as agent-based social simulation technology applying to business management research, especial organization theory. Computational and mathematical organization theory is a new thing that is the combination of organization theory and agent-based social simulation. Much of the research in this area falls into four areas: organizational design, organizational learning, organizations and information technology, and organizational evolution and change. Much of the work in this area has been focused on the issue how should organizations be designed.Because the application of agent-based social simulation is just beginning, team is still out of the eyes of most researchers of Computational and mathematical organization theory. So, this paper makes three important studies of theoretic value and practice significance on the front of this research:(1) According to artificial society and artificial organization, I propose the concept of artificial team and discuss the foundation of artificial team.(2) According to the artificial team, I developed one model that is firefighting and rescue artificial team.(3) Using the model of firefighting and rescue artificial team, I performed some research and found some new relationship between team design variables and team performance.These new findings include two aspects. New findings about team member attributes: Member attributes can be divided to three kinds: variables with one quality, variables with two qualities, and variables with three qualities. Variables with one quality must be positive with team performance. Variables with two qualities and variables with three qualities have a critical value which may be depend on other variables. There are six relationships among Member attributes: equality-independent, equality-coupling, leading-deciding, leading-complementary, leading-concerning, leading-intervene. Compare to general mental ability, task-specific ability has more influence on performance. As designing team, we should pursue "excellent team" but not "perfect team".New findings about team structure: Factor of authority can be divided two kinds: factor of autocracy, factor of autonomy. Compare to factor of autocracy, factor of autonomy has more influence on performance. Team size's influence on performance is independent on Factor of authority, but Team size has influence on Factor of authority.