The Relationship Of Task Characteristic, Shared Mental Model And Team Performance In R&D Team

Equipment manufacturing industry is a stratigic industry of China. It's also a pillar industry of our national economic development. Facing the ever-changing wave of technological innovation, how to improve team performance of R&D team has become the key of building the core competency of equipment manufacturing industry. Due to the particularity of the industry, it is necessary to understand their team task characteristics, and thus targeted for task configuration, effectively improving team performance. In this process, the role of shared mental model can not be ignored; it provides a new perspective for team performance research from four dimensions as follows: teammates, knowledge or skills, tasks, and team interaction.This paper is based on the analysis of literature, and we carried out interviews and questionnaire survey. After a careful data analysis, we studied the relationship of Task Charactoric, Shared Mental Model and Team Performance in R&D team of equipment manufacturing industry. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) The R& D team has the following five task characteristics: Skill variety, task completeness, task significance, job autonomy and task feedback.(2) In R& D team, task characteristics and team performance have a significant positive correlation.(3) In the impacts of shared mental model to team performance, teammates shared mental models, team interaction shared mental model have significant positive correlations with team performance, task shared mental model has a negative effect on team development.(4) In general, task characteristics and shared mental model show significant positive correlation, but task significance has played a negative role to shared mental model in two dimensions.(5) Shared mental model plays the role of partly intermediary in the affect process of task characteristics to team performance.Finally, according to the above conclusions, this paper put forward practical recommendations on improving team performance of R&D team. And the limitations of this study and future research directions are pointed out in the end.