Despite the potential contribution of team viability to understanding the effectiveness of organizational teams, construct confusion and inconsistencies between researchers' conceptualizations and operationalizations limit the usefulness of team viability. We sought to clarify team viability as a construct and (re)define it in terms that provide a unique and meaningful contribution to understanding the effectiveness of long-term and ongoing organizational teams. Team viability is defined as a team’s capacity for the sustainability and growth required for success in future performance episodes. We discuss how team viability differs from and relates to constructs such as team satisfaction, team performance, and team cohesion, and outline boundary conditions within which team viability may be relevant and important.

Situational judgment tests (SJTs) pose unique cognitive demands on test takers in that, when presented in written form, they require a great deal of reading and cognitive effort. Because of this cognitive demand, responses to test items toward the end of the test may be influenced by an order effect produced by responding to a large quantity of previous test items. This construct‐irrelevant order effect may increase measurement error and threaten the validity of SJT scores. To test this phenomenon, data were obtained from 1,089 applicants who had completed a lengthy SJT as part of a selection process for an hourly safety and surveillance job at a large international corporation. Results showed that local item dependence, item difficulty, and the rate of omitted responses all increased when items were placed toward the end. The order effect alone was not strong enough to influence subgroup mean score differences in the second half of the test. However, this effect did vary by race: African‐Americans were most strongly affected by the order effect, followed by Caucasians, in their number of omitted responses. Implications and future research of this effect for SJTs and similar types of assessments are discussed.

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