TeamResearch News

Leadership and Support Increase Team Citizenship

"Team citizenship behaviors" include helping others, courtesy, teamwork, and being conscientious. Two management professors collected 197 member surveys and 40 leader surveys from 71 automotive industry teams "responsible for identifying and implementing organizational changes to increase organizational effectiveness." Based on responses from team members and their leaders, a team was more likely to display citizenship if:

the leader stressed teamwork, by, for example, emphasizing "the importance of working together for a common goal";
team members cared about the team, agreeing with statements like, "I am committed to this team's purpose"; and
the team felt management supported them—for example, "Management provides our team with all the resources we need to accomplish our goals."

Although the literature indicates teams can get too large for good performance, in this study team size had no direct effect on citizenship. The authors point out that optimal team sizes can vary with the situation, so "it is possible that the teams' sizes may have been well suited to the teams' tasks…" Or maybe team size hurts team performance in ways other than through citizenship behavior. The average team size in the study was seven members. Note that fewer than three people per team responded.

Source: Pearce, C., and P. Herbik (04), "Citizenship Behavior at the Team Level of Analysis: The Effects of Team Leadership, Team Commitment, Perceived Team Support, and Team Size," Journal of Social Psychology 144(3):293.

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