The Factors Team Leader's Prestige, Members Training, Communication Time And Their Interaction On The Team Performance: An Experiment Perspective

With teams have been applied increasingly in modern organizations, researchers and managers are more and more concerning with a new leadership style emphasized on teamwork and anticipation. Leader'prestige, a personal influence based on expert power and exemplar power, are different from position power for its softer appealing to team members. Researches of leader's prestige mostly theoretically explained its importance and the improving methods, etc. but rare researches studied its relationship with team effectiveness.This research based on theory of team effectiveness advanced by Cohen & Bailey, attempted to make use of the decision-making game of island survival to analysis the structure of leader's prestige and the influence of the factors leader's prestige, members training and communication time on team performance.There were two experiments in this study. In experiments, the quality (correctness) of task was tested, and some factors including decision satisfaction, team satisfaction, opinion-understanding extent, etc. were assessed by questionnaire method after experiment. Experiment l, a laboratory experiment with 54 subjects, explored the structure of leader's prestige and its influence on team performance; Experiment 2, also a laboratory experiment with 144 subjects, explored how team leader's prestige, members training and communication time influence on team performance.The chief eventual results were as following:(1)Experiment l, there was remarkable significant difference on team task performance and personal decision satisfaction degree among three teams. There was no significant difference between assigned leader team and non-prestige team, but team task performance of leader's prestige team was better than that of assigned leader team or non-prestige team, and personal decision satisfaction degree was lower. These confirmed the Hypothesis 1.(2)The main components of leader's prestige were expert power and exemplar power. Expert power is a fundamental role for building efficient psychological task model. Exemplar power must build above expert power. Only with the two combined, team performance could be enhanced.(3)As to team member training, there was remarkable significant difference on team task performance, team decision satisfaction degree and team satisfaction degree. The team task performance of member training team was better than that of non-member training team, and those satisfaction degrees was higher. These confirmed the Hypothesis 2.(4)As to communication time, there was remarkable significant difference on team task performance and personal decision satisfaction degree. The team task performance of sufficient communication time team was better than that of insufficient communication time team, and personal decision satisfaction degree was lower. These confirmed the Hypothesis 3.(5)In experiment 2, the main effects of leader's prestige, team member training and communication time were significant, in the other word, there was significant difference between the two levels of those three factors; but interaction effects of those factors were not significant. So theory of team effectiveness was partial proved.(6)The average degrees of team decision satisfaction, opinion-delivering extent and opinion-understanding extent were very high almost in every situation, which showed the unique advantage of this kind of team communication and decision form.