How Collective Team Identification Facilitates Team Performance

Recently, there is a surge in interest in social identity related topics, expecially identification. We focus on collective team identification which represents the shared sense of identitfication of team members. Identification consists of twe key components—cognitive component and affective component. Yet, most of the extant studies investigate the mechanism of identification from the affective perspective, neglecting the more crucial cognitive component. Therefore, after reviewing related literature structureally, we tried to investigate how team identification facilitate team outcome from the cognitive perspective.In first study, based on social identity theory and team learning theory, we used 71 teams'data which consisted of different sources from team leaders and team members to examine our hypothesis that team learning mediates the positive relationship between collective team identification and team performance/team innovativeness. The results only supported the mediation role of team learning on the former path between collective team identification and team performance. The reason is that internal team learning and external team learning facilitate team performance in different ways, that is, internal team learning positive relates to team efficiency, while external team learning contributes to team innovativeness significantly. On the other hand, for the limited cognitive resources, collective team identification is likely to influence the internal/external learning tradeoff. So we designed study 2 to get to know the working mechanism of collective team identification further.The second study investigated how collective team identification influenced internal team learning and external learning according to the social identity theory and in-group favoritism theoy. The results from 71 working teams'sample supported our hypothesis that collective team identification positively related to internal team learning, and team psychological safety moderate the relationship between collective team identification and external team learning, that is, when psychological safety is high, collective team identification facilitates external team learning; but when psychological safety is low, there is a inverted U shape relationship between collective team identification and external team learning.Our research efforts find the explanation mechanism of how identification facilitates team performance in cognitive perspective which is the key component of identification construct and has been neglected for a long time. Besides, our results revealed the negative effect of identification on team process (external team learning). Accordingly, our research made a notable improvement on identification theory and team learning theory. At last, some practical suggestions and theoretical implication for futher research were offered.