Helping Hierarchical Teams Cope With Complexity: Team Reflexivity as a Tool for Improved Team Judgments

• In Event: How Do Groups Learn to Function as Teams? Issues of Teamwork and Collaboration Among Learners and Educators in the Professions

Abstract

Professional teams often face complex tasks in which information is ambiguous or unreliable. Extant literature found that task complexity can lead teams to share less information, especially across hierarchical ranks - hierarchical teams thus require support in coping with task complexity. Research on team learning has revealed that teams who completed a guided reflexivity intervention actually shared more information and had better task representation. However, what is not currently known is whether reflexivity is effective at stimulating information sharing in hierarchical teams at all ranks. This study reports on an experiment in which task complexity is varied to explore whether reflexivity is an effective tool for stimulating information sharing at all ranks.

Authors

• Therese Grohnert, Maastricht University

• Roger Meuwissen, Maastricht University

• Wim H. Gijselaers, Maastricht University