Research On The Relationship Between Team Efficacy,Team Learning And Team Performance From The Perspective Of Collectivism

Team,a basic operational unit in an organization,has always been the study focus for both theorists and practitioners in management.One of the study focuses by experts and scholars at home and abroad is concerned with how to set up an excellent team and how to bring team efficacy into full play by scientific and effective management,since team with high efficiency is vital for enterprises to meet challenges outside as well as to construct core competence inside.A great number of researches have shown that team performance is influenced by various factors.Among these,the impact of team efficacy on team performance is an on-going study focus by researchers.Researches have already verified that team efficacy is an evident predictor to team performance.As is pointed by scholar Gibson(1999),however,the impact of efficacy at team level is not as simple as that at individual level.More often than not,he influencing effect of team efficacy is affected by situational factors.The relation between team efficacy and team performance is always mediated by other factors.Therefore,it is of great significance to elaborate the functioning mechanism of team efficacy on team performance.In what way does team efficacy influence team output through the process of team cognition?Why the influencing effect of team efficacy in eastern culture background is greatly different from that in western culture background?In what circumstances,can team efficacy be brought into full effect so as to become the driving force of team performance?The thesis aims to find answers to the above questions,which will be the theoretical guidance to business management practice and also to enrich and perfect theoretical researches on teams.The research samples are five typical R&D teams in enterprises featuring scientific and technological innovations.Through literature review of Social Cognitive Theory,Organizational Learning Theory,Social Cultural Theory and other related study findings,the study is conducted from the perspective of team learning and collectivism orientation,which include the following five parts.Firstly,the study results of team efficacy,team learning,team performance and collectivism orientation are reviewed systematically and the need of this study is taken into consideration,base on which related conceptions and their implications are defined.In addition,the dimensional construction,influencing factors and effects of the research variables are clarified and the preliminary conceptual model is set up,which lay a solid theoretical foundation for further study.Secondly,based on previous literature review and field research,multi-case study is carried out in order to check the feasibility of the original conceptual model.Through in-depth interviews and open-ended questionnaires,a large amount of first hand material and data are collected and then a data base is compiled.Adopting step-by-step coding research design and extracting relevant conceptual dimensions,an in-depth analysis is offered and a corresponding research proposition is proposed.The findings of the quality research support the preliminary hypothesis and will provide necessary data for the following empirical research.The third part is concerned with the mechanism of the impact of team efficacy on team performance.Based on a systematic review of relevant researches on team efficacy and team performance,as well as Organizational Learning Theory and Social Cultural Theory,two concepts of team learning and collectivism orientation are introduced and then a theoretical model is established and empirically tested.According to the model,team efficacy will affect team performance through the mediation of team learning and the regulation of collectivism orientation.The study reveals that team efficacy affects team performance through team learning process.The influencing power of team efficacy on team learning is not evident when collectivism orientation is low.However,when it comes to teams with high collectivism orientation,team efficacy will promote team learning and team performance.Through these findings,the impact path of team efficacy on team performance is elaborated,and the reasons why there is a big gap between the impact of team efficacy on team performance in eastern cultural background and that in western cultural background are explained scientifically.Furthermore,through the test of structural equation model,the relations among team efficacy,team learning and team performance are analyzed in detail from different dimensions,which provide guidance for future researches.Finally,inspired by findings of this research,some management suggestions are provided as theoretical guidance to team development and performance improvement from the perspectives of organization and human resources management as well as team value guidance.