The Effect of Task Knowledge Similarity and Distribution on Asynchronous Team Coordination and Performance: Empirical Evidence from Decision Teams

There is agreement in the literature, but little empirical evidence, that team mental models positively influence team coordination and performance. However, most of the empirical evidence on the effects of team mental models are from teams working on real-time (i.e., synchronous) tasks and, to the best of our knowledge, none of the prior studies have taken into account task knowledge distribution within teams. However, most organizational teams work asynchronously (i.e., not always at the same time) and task knowledge distribution varies within teams. Consequently, this study proposes a framework for the study of the effect of team mental models on coordination, and uses this framework to more specifically investigate how two aspects aspect of the team mental model construct—i.e., task knowledge similarity and distribution of task knowledge—influence team coordination and performance. Using data from decision teams, our results suggest that task knowledge similarity has a positive effect on activity coordination and strategy coordination, and that the leader’s task knowledge centrality has a positive effect on strategy coordination. Strategy coordination, in turn, is associated with superior team performance, both in terms of objective financial performance and external board evaluations. This research was partially financed by National Science Foundation Grant No. 9812123