Effects of Team Composition On Ranked Team Effectiveness

Abstract

The composition of 3-man military teams was varied experimentally by assigning members according to team composition in terms of all possible combinations of levels of ability and motivation. The teams (64 in all) performed real military tasks in a military field setting and unit commanders ranked the effectiveness of their performance at the end of 2 months of military activity. It was found that both ability and motivation had an additive effect on crew performance, thus leading to the conclusion that when teams perform highly interdependent tasks, performance is apparently unlikely to be affected in a nonadditive manner by team composition. The data were analyzed with a new statistical procedure developed to substitute for the Friedman two-way analysis of variance, argued to be inappropriate for testing the significance of main effects and interactions in a blocked fractional factorial design.

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