Composing Effective Teams through Team Dating

Abstract

Previous research showed that short initial interaction in dyads accurately predicts future relation development. The paper extends these results from dyads to teams and demonstrates that data collected from short initial contacts (reciprocal relational preferences) are a sound basis for designing effective teams. In the approach we propose, potential team members have short initial contacts (popularly known as 'speed dating') and we use the information on interpersonal evaluations to create teams by maximizing the number of reciprocal relational preferences within a team. In a sample of 76 teams (N = 378, 36 attribute-based teams and 40 team-dating teams), we show that teams formed based on relational data are more effective than teams formed by maximizing within team diversity (gender and nationality). Team-dating teams show a better teamwork quality and develop more complex collective knowledge structures compared with attribute-based teams.

The Influence of Stubborn Agents in a Multi-Agent Network for Inter-Team Cooperation/Negotiation

“…Micro properties considered important are planning, which is subdividing tasks among agents, coordination, which is the synchronization of agent actions and its continuous monitoring for assessment, and communication, which is information exchange among agents [5]. These qualities are micro properties since they are defined for and executed by the agents that form a team.…”

Intra-Group Conflict and Teamwork Quality: The Moderating Role of Leadership Styles

“…Communication is an important process both for task related processes as well as interpersonal interaction processes in that a good quality of communication is associated with better task-related processes (better planning activities and a better coordination), and more effective interpersonal interactions. In order to develop more parsimonious models of teamwork quality, the following dimensions were considered: planning (the process of dividing the general group task in sub-tasks and distributing them among the group members), coordination (the synchronization of the group members' actions and the progressive evaluation of the way in which these specific integrative activities are being done) and communication (the exchange of information between group members) as the most studied variables in relation to group composition [16].…”

“…Teamwork quality is a multidimensional construct [13,16] comprising coordination, planning and quality of communication. Coordination was evaluated with five items adapted from Curşeu et al [16] (e.g., "The group members have synchronized their actions in order to reach the group goals"), planning was also evaluated with five items adapted from Curşeu et al [16] (e.g., "The group has developed its own strategy in approaching this project") and the quality of communication was evaluated using four items adapted from Eby et al [14] (e.g., "During the debates, each team member has been carefully listened to by the others").…”

“…Previous research on teamwork quality and group processes showed that scales evaluating these constructs often have a unitary factor structure [13,14,16], therefore a principal component analysis with the three teamwork processes was performed. The results showed a unitary factor structure, the main factor accounting for 81% of the scores variance with the following factor loadings: coordination = 0.86, planning = 0.80 and communication = 0.87.…”

From romance to rocket science: speed dating in higher education

“…Time-poor Jewish singles used a round robin brief face-to-face format to meet potential in-group partners. The same efficiency that attracted singles to the speed dating scene attracted psychologists working on everything from attraction (Finkel, Eastwick, & Matthews, 2007) to group formation (Curseu, Kenis, Raab, & Brandes, 2010). The appeal of speed dating protocols to social scientists is that speed dating can be conducted with high levels of external validity despite a high degree of operational control (Finkel et al, 2007).…”