Bret H. Bradley

The Moderating Role of Top Management Team Interdependence: Implications for Real Teams and Working Groups

Prior research evidence shows that within-team interdependence moderates the process-performance relationship in small groups. Data collected from 94 top management teams (TMTs) replicated and exte...

New Venture Teams A Review of the Literature and Roadmap for Future Research

As entrepreneurship research has matured, scholars have increasingly recognized that the formation of new ventures is commonly accomplished by teams as opposed to lone entrepreneurs. Over the past two decades, the upper echelons perspective has served as the primary lens for investigating new venture team functioning and performance. However, researchers have begun to move beyond the relationship between team characteristics and team outcomes, to explore intermediary mechanisms that more precisely explain how team inputs lead to team effectiveness. In this article we apply an inputs-mediators-outcomes framework, which has served as a foundation for teams research in organizational behavior over the past 50 years, to first organize and review prior work on new venture teams, and then to provide a roadmap for future research. By integrating the upper echelons approach from strategic management with the inputs-mediators-outcomes framework from organizational behavior, we clarify what is known about new venture teams and shed light on important issues that could help the field of entrepreneurship to develop a more comprehensive understanding of why some new venture teams, but not others, achieve successful outcomes.

Reaping the benefits of task conflict in teams: the critical role of team psychological safety climate.

Past research suggests that task conflict may improve team performance under certain conditions; however, we know little about these specific conditions. On the basis of prior theory and research on conflict in teams, we argue that a climate of psychological safety is one specific context under which task conflict will improve team performance. Using evidence from 117 project teams, the present research found that psychological safety climate moderates the relationship between task conflict and performance. Specifically, task conflict and team performance were positively associated under conditions of high psychological safety. The results support the conclusion that psychological safety facilitates the performance benefits of task conflict in teams. Theoretical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Team Players and Collective Performance How Agreeableness Affects Team Performance Over Time

Previous research on teams has found that agreeableness is one of the strongest personality predictors of team performance, yet one of the weakest personality predictors of individual-level job performance. In this study, we examined why teams with more agreeable members perform better. Data were collected across 4 months at 5 points in time from 107 project teams. We found that agreeableness affects performance through communication and cohesion and that communication precedes cohesion in time. Furthermore, we found that virtualness moderated the relationships between agreeableness and communication, as well as between agreeableness and team performance, such that teams only benefitted from high levels of agreeableness when interacting face-to-face.

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: How Teams Rebound From Early-Stage Relationship Conflict:

Past research overwhelmingly suggests that relationship conflict (RC) has negative effects on team processes and performance. However, little research has investigated the effects of RC through a temporal lens with an eye toward overcoming the short-term deleterious consequences of RC. Integrating threat rigidity and threat regulation theories, we first argue that RC disrupts team processes over time because members feel threatened and, second, that cognitive reappraisal, as an emotion regulation strategy, is a threat regulation mechanism by which teams can overcome RC. Specifically, we examine the influence of early-stage RC on team process trajectories, the moderating effect of team-level cognitive reappraisal on these trajectories, and the team performance implications of team processes. Testing our predictions in both field and laboratory studies with conditional linear growth modeling, we show that while teams with high early-stage RC are lower initially on critical team processes (coordination and interpersonal processes), they incrementally “rebound” from these lower levels of team processes if team members have a tendency to cognitively reappraise past affective events. Further, we find that changes in perceived threat stemming from early-stage RC drives these effects. Finally, we find that as a result of managing early-stage RC through cognitive reappraisal, team performance does not suffer. Overall, these results suggest that teams can overcome the negative effects of early-stage RC by addressing underlying appraisals of threat, and that they may benefit in the long run from the struggle of doing so. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.