مدیریت عملکرد تطبیقی در تیم ها : اصول و شاخص های رفتاری برای اندازه گیری

Various types of organizations must manage rapidly changing operational contexts. To respond to these demands, organizations are relying more heavily on team-based work arrangements. Effectively managing such performance requires a systematic, broad approach to measuring team effectiveness that is comprehensive and sound, yet unobtrusive. One aspect of teamwork that is critical to success in these types of environments is adaptation. Teams must be able to react quickly and accurate to the changing environment. To effectively manage adaptive team performance in such contexts, there is a need to better understand team adaptation as well as to generate better team performance measurement systems. To this end, a review and synthesis of the empirical, theoretical, and methodological literatures concerning team adaptation, performance, and measurement is conducted to develop theoretically-based principles to guide development of effective team adaptation measurement systems as well as to inform future research. We propose six guiding principles that capture core features of team adaptation and serve as an aid in the development of team performance measurement systems. These principles are rooted in recent theoretical work on team adaptation and are presented at a level of abstraction suitable for generalization across performance measurement contexts and purposes. Behavioral markers describing processes associated with each principle and example measurement strategies are presented to illustrate development of specific measurement tools and metrics, based on the principles. The principles and behavioral markers presented can guide development of measurement systems to assess, train, and improve team adaptation, a core capacity of effective organizations. Future research needs to expand upon the principles advanced here to provide theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous tools to help performance management professionals develop adaptive team capacities.

In a ‘matrixed organization’ where project teams are formed to address specific and unique client needs from pools of personnel with different types of expertise, the effectiveness of a team is in large part a function of the quality of the inputs to this process such as the characteristics of the individuals selected for the team (Bell, 2007). An extensive body of work is available to guide organizations in managing the performance of the individuals in this scenario. However, team interaction processes as a whole also contribute greatly to the effectiveness of outcomes (LePine et al., 2008 and DeChurch & Haas, 2008). Consequently, a comprehensive approach to performance management in situations such as the one described above must represent aspects of both the individual and the collective. Sole focus on one level at the expense of the other can lead to performance decrements (e.g., DeShon et al., 2004) and maladaptive performance such as social loafing or lack of focus on collective goals. Aguinis (2009) outlined six purposes of a performance management system: strategic, administrative, communication, developmental, organizational maintenance, and documentation. In the context of adaptive team performance, the strategic (i.e., linking goals across levels), communication (i.e., providing personnel with information on their level of performance), and developmental (i.e., providing feedback to drive coaching) are the most salient goals of a performance management system. Measurement underlies the capacity to systematically manage performance and meet each of these goals. However, performance management research and practice has not widely incorporated the concepts or methods of measuring team adaptation. The remainder of this article presents the state of the science of team adaptation and its measurement to both inform practice and guide future research into this growing research and application domain.

The goal of this article is to address a critical issue in performance management: a focus on the effective measurement of team adaptation. To this end, the authors integrated literature on team performance, adaptation, and measurement in development of six principles to guide efforts regarding team adaptation measurement. The six principles are descriptive of the core features of team adaptation. These theoretically-grounded principles are derived from an understanding of performance measurement systems that address teamwork in particular. Specifically, such systems must capture both changes in the patterns of lower level performance contributions of team members and more global shifts in performance strategies in response to changes. This represents capturing aspects of the ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ nature of adaptive team performance. Fundamentally, adaptation is about response to change. Thus, comprehensive measurement systems in team-based environments must capture the processes by which a team senses external changes in the environment or tasks. Additionally, these measurement systems must capture the processes by which a team deliberately analyzes past experiences and codifies these experiences into changes in team performance processes during future performance episodes. As emergent cognitive and affective states are tightly coupled with team processes and team context, they too are a critical component to a comprehensive team-based measurement system that includes adaptive performance. Lastly, managers should not settle for snapshots of performance. To capture team adaptation, the preceding principles must be applied to investigate performance changes over time. These principles and example behavioral markers have been developed to help bridge the gap between recent theory on team adaptation and the need for more robust approaches to measuring, and ultimately managing, team adaptation within modern organizations. The guiding principles and example measurement strategies are offered to address needs identified by Salas and colleagues (2009), specifically, needs for better theories of team adaptation and better measurement practices in team research. A comprehensive performance management system must capture all important aspects of performance to avoid deficiency. Given the strategic importance of teams in most organizational contexts, and the dynamic nature of business work processes, team adaptation measurement is of critical importance to managers focused on continuous improvement through systematic performance measurement. We hope this article encourages dialog about specific measurement metrics and tools aimed at capturing the dynamic process of team adaptation, and provides guidance for practitioners and academics seeking to capture the critical aspects of team adaptation to improve overall performance of both the teams, as well as the organizations as a whole.