The Effect Of Self-regulation Behavior On Team Performance In Temporal Teams With Temporal Consensus As The Mediate Variable

Organizations today, faced with constantly changing competitions, generally employ temporal teams to effectively meeting deadlines or solving problems in a creative way. People with diversified knowledge or skills from different functions and even companies are gathered together to optimize the allocation of manpower and material resources, which all facilitates the team to fulfill tasks in a limited time and maximize its performance.The construct of temporal organization was first put forward by Goodman et al. They defined temporal team as a group of people working together on certain complex tasks over a period of time. The notion has been enriched in later research from different aspects, such as the temporality or time control of teams. Generally speaking, temporal teams are set up only when temporal tasks occur. They have to meet deadlines in a relatively short period of time. Team members often feel it difficult to fit in the team and communicate or cooperate with others, since they are unfamiliar with each other when they join the team. Temporal teams, with its flexibility and dynamic nature, could benefit in its competitive advantages by integrating resources rapidly, and also, on the other hand, face big challenges of team management owing to these characteristics.Effectively achieving team goals in time has been recognized as one of the essential problems for temporal teams, while a number of which could not achieve this objective. So the question is what factors have effect on the timely team performance. By reviewing related research we focused our attention on the self-regulation mechanism of temporal teams. In goal-oriented tasks, teams could take a series of self-regulation actions, including temporal planning, temporal reminders and temporal reflexivity, to improve the ability of effectively using time, achieving optimum benefits and meeting deadlines to complete the performance in the end. Moreover, we found that the self-regulation behavior of temporal teams does not directly affect team performance, but the relationship is mediated by temporal consensus.Based on above analysis and relevant studies, we built our theoretical framework with its core of a mediating effect. After conducting survey on temporal teams and exploring unknown propositions neglected before, we obtained several conclusions. We proved that temporal consensus indeed mediates the relationship between temporal planning/reflexivity and team performance. However, the mediating effect of temporal consensus on the relationship between temporal reminders and team performance was shown insignificant. As a result, we suppose it necessary for temporal team to enhance its planning and reflection related to time and timing as a way of forming shared temporal cognitions among team members and thus forcing teams to achieve performance more timely and effectively.