The Direct Effect From Group Cohesiveness To Performance

With globalization going on and the technology and consultation spreading far and fast, the job task becomes more and more complicated as the circumstances keep changing. So the team work becomes the new wave in organizational development. (Katzenbach, 1998).In the past, scholars referred to various concepts about the research on team work. Some scholars focused on the effects of cohesion on team work.(O'Reilly et al., 1989)High cohesion means high attraction among the group-members and high desire to be cooperative. In a word, team cohesion is the core of teamwork. From this it is clear that the group cohesion is very important for teamwork. To a great extent, a good result of team work is measured by team performance. Then the article will analyze the team performance in terms of the team cohesion.For reasons such as noted above, I reviewed the literature about the research on cohesion-performance. I found that there's a long way to go for the internal scholars compared with the foreign scholars. The research on cohesion overseas started in1930s and a fairly complete theory system of cohesion had already been established. Quite the other way, the research on cohesion started late at home. So much so that, the domestic scholars don't attach enough importance to cohesion.The domestic scholars's achievements on cohesion center on the summary of the achievements abroad. However most of the conclusions haven't been proved right in china as that conclusions have mostly application in Kinematics, Sociology, Social Psychology, Psychological Consultation, Military Psychology, Organization Behavior, Pedagogic Psychology etc except the enterprise application.There are some articles shows that the cohesion applies to the enterprise which the research objects are limited to the executives.Chongming Wang&Xuefang Liu found that the conclutions were very different in china and oversea.So this article tries to research on the relationship of team cohesion and team performance including group size which impacted on the cohesion-performance based on the series of achievements abroad.Therefore, this paper sheds light on the definition of cohesion, and thinks that the cohesion is the assembler of affection whichput everybody together and overall strength which keep everybo-dy together to finish the team tasks when helping each other. About the dimensionalities of cohesion, the article identities the viewpoints of KB Henry etc(1999) including emotion coherence, behavior coherence and task coherence. The author'opinion on performance concludes process and results. So the article takes the Sundstro&Mcintyro's ideas(1994)that we can evaluate the performance from three aspects: organization effectiveness, external satisfaction and member satisfaction.The scales this chapter used comes from the maturity scales abroad and Results. The scale had good reliability and validity, The Cohesion scale rooted in the scale of Henry,K.B.,Arrow,H.&Carini, B.,"A Tripartite Model of Group Identification: Theory and Measurement",Small Group Search October 1999,PP.58一581,There are twelve items in the scale. At the same time, performance scale composited the team performance scale of Hack man(1990), Eri(c1990), Kennech1990),Tjosvold(1998)and the single dimensionality of efficiency scale of Pulakos, Arad(2000,Flood(2000) which measured the team performance from only the members'points but not the team manager. This chapter put the group size into the basic information. In case the different objects of study, I did a research in Chang Chun to advance. Totaling three items were deleted from the draft cohesion scale after reliability test, item analysis, and factor analysis. Meanwhile the performance scale came out good reliability and validity. Of the 200 sending questionnaires, totally 153 questionnaires were retrieved of which 131 questionnaires were valid.Data showed that the scale used in this study still has good reliability and validity for R & D team of Chinese enterprises. In this study, it is verified through correlation and regression analysis that a team cohesion has a significant positive correlation on team performance, and it is found to have shown a significant positive effect between the team cohesion and team performance after analyzing the three dimensions of both the team cohesion, team performance and the team performance, team cohesion. And the impact of team cohesion brought by "emotional consistency" and "task consistency" on team performance is greater than the impact of "behavioral consistency" on the team cohesion. This validates the model assumptions. The regression equation is built in this article to find the regulating role of team scale, and it is validated through multiple hierarchical regression that team scale plays a very significant role on regulating the relationship between team cohesion and team performance, which also supported the second major assumption: compared to the bigger teams, in smaller teams, team cohesion has a more direct impact on team performance.The study's conclusions are suggestive for the operators, who can improve team performance by improving team cohesion. And the ways to improve team cohesion, in addition to the team scale factors the article already proved, are including the team performance, leadership roles, team goal setting and other aspects, but they are not studied in this article, which will need the further reserch on the relationship between team cohesion and team performance.