A Multi-level Study On The Impact Of Team Ability Disparity On Individual And Team Performance

From enhancing competition in the market,team,as an important system in the modern organizations,will become a trend of management and an essential topic in organizational fields.Ability disparity between team members is part of the characteristics and the key element which affect the behavior choice,behavior integration and interaction in teams.Therefore,it results from significance to study the influence of team ability disparity and the mechanism and boundary.Ability diversity has great impact on individual and team performance,however,most of the existing studies on the relationship between ability diversity and performance are from the perspective of social classification and information decision-making,ignoring the perspective of social comparison and status difference.Results concerning relations between ability diversity and performance are therefore mixed and imperfect.There are two kinds of ability.One is working ability directly related to the task and the other is political skills indirectly related to task.There are limited studies concerning working ability and political skills,which remains a limitation.Founded on the theory of social comparison and status differences,this study began with the team working ability and political skills disparity and analyzed their impact on team conflict.In turn,affected the individual and team performance.We built a hierarchical model comprising of team working ability and political skills disparity,team conflict(task conflict and relationship conflict),team goal interdependence(cooperative goal and competitive goal),leader political skills,individual performance and team performance.We used SPSS,HLM and other statistical software and applied data analysing strategies including descriptive statistics,ANOVA,hierarchical regression and Hierarchical Linear Modeling(HLM)analysis and Bootstrap to empirically verify the theoretical model.The main contents are as follows:(1)Exploring the relationships between working ability and political skills disparity and individual / team performance.We chose the diversity as disparity which has representative influence on team process and team output from the perspective of social comparison and the status difference,and the key attribute of disparity named team working ability and political skills disparity to study.We operated the exploratory research with the laboratory experiment and team leaders interview method and then we used the leader-member matching survey questionnaire to verify this exploratory results and theoretical assumptions.Based on the results,we built a hierarchical model regarding the relationships between working ability and political skills disparity and individual/team performance.(2)Analysis of the mechanism of working ability and political skills disparity on individual and team performance.Depending on literature review and leader interview,we found that team's working ability disparity was negatively related to task conflict and team members' perceived task conflict.Yet,team's political skills disparity were positively related to relationship between conflict and team members' perceived relationship conflict.We also found that team task conflict and team members' perceived task conflict were positively related to team and individual performance respectively,and team relationship conflict and team members' perceived relationship conflict were negatively related to team and individual performance respectively.Thus,we suggested that team conflict is the mechanism between ability disparity and individual/team performance.And then,we verified the results with a leader-member matching survey questionnaire comprising of 70 teams and 85 teams respectively.(3)Exploring the boundary of the effects of working ability and political skills on individual/team performance.Team goal interdependence(cooperative goal and competitive goal)determines team interaction,and influences the relationship between team working ability and political skills disparity and team conflict.Empirical results indicated that the cooperative goal strengthen the negative impact of team working ability on task conflict,weakened the positive impact of team political skills disparity on relationship conflict;the cooperative goal also strengthen the negative impact of team work ability on team performance,weakened the negative impact of team political skills disparity on team performance.On the contrary,the competitive goal weaken the negative impact of team working ability disparity on task conflict,strengthen the positive impact of team political skills disparity on relationship conflict;the competitive goal also weaken the negative impact of team work ability on team performance,strengthen the negative impact of team political skills disparity on team performance.These conclusions provided the operational idea and direction for relieving the negative effects and enhancing the positive effects of team ability disparity.(4)Exploring the boundaries of the effects of team task conflict and relationship conflict on individual and team performance from a leadership perspective.In this study,we introduced leader political skills into the research model,and discussed its role in promoting the positive impact of task conflict and in inhibiting the destructive impact of relationship conflict.The results indicated that team leader political skills strengthen the positive effects of task conflict on team performance,weaken the negative effects of relationship conflict on team performance.And team members' perceivedpolitical skills of the team leader strengthen the positive effects of perceived task conflict on individual performance,weaken the negative effects of perceived relationship conflict on individual performance.(5)Appling various empirical tools to monitor and correct the model comprehensively based on the theoretical model.on the basis of the empirical study conclusions and the overall studies,we put forward management suggestio ns and strategies at the multi-level of individual,team and leader.Limitations and the future directions of the research were further prospected.