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Team members' interaction anxiety and team-training effectiveness: a catastrophic relationship?
Human Factors
|March 21, 2015
Summary
High interaction anxiety among team members negatively impacts team training effectiveness. Teams with multiple anxious members experience reduced cohesion and training outcomes, highlighting anxiety as a key team composition factor.
Area of Science:
- Organizational Psychology
- Team Dynamics
- Training and Development
Background:
- Team training effectiveness can be influenced by individual differences among members.
- Interaction anxiety, an understudied factor, negatively affects individual training but its team context impact is unknown.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between team members' interaction anxiety and overall team-training effectiveness.
- To determine if interaction anxiety influences team cohesion and subsequent training outcomes.
Main Methods:
- A study involving 492 students organized into 123 four-person teams.
- Teams were trained on a complex, computer-based team task to assess performance and dynamics.
Main Results:
- A significant negative correlation was found between interaction anxiety and both team cohesion and team-training effectiveness.
- A cusp catastrophe model indicated that teams with more than one member experiencing high interaction anxiety showed diminished effectiveness.
Conclusions:
- Interaction anxiety can impede essential social interactions within team training, thereby reducing effectiveness.
- The composition of a training team regarding interaction anxiety is a critical boundary condition for the success of team-training interventions.
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