Not so siloed: The role of affective, cognitive, and motivational factors on team performance

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.11210abstract

Previous literature extensively studies the affective, motivational, and cognitive factors that explain team performance in isolation. However, research combining the role of all these factors is rare. In this paper, we propose a model integrating these distinct elements, focusing on the input role of team commitment, a team affective factor, and predict that it impacts team performance by enhancing team cognition, specifically transactive memory systems. Further, team’s motivational factors, specifically team composition on both learning and performance goal orientations, provide an important contingency to this indirect effect. Empirically, given the importance of replications toward building reliable science, we test the predictions in two studies and find robust support with a total of 170 longitudinal teams. Broadly, this research adds to an integrative model of teamwork by considering affective, cognitive and motivational factors simultaneously, and specifically demonstrates that team commitment has an indirect influence on team performance through teams’ transactive memory systems, with this positive relationship amplified by members’ learning (but not necessarily performance) goal orientations.