Team Dynamics and Performance

How groups of people coordinate, share knowledge, and perform together under real-world conditions is a central concern of social psychology, drawing on decades of research into communication patterns, cognitive alignment, and leadership influence. Scholars in this area examine mechanisms like shared mental models—the degree to which teammates hold compatible beliefs about goals, roles, and procedures—and transactive memory systems, which describe how groups distribute knowledge and remember who knows what. As work increasingly moves into virtual and globally distributed settings, researchers are pressing on questions about how physical separation and cultural difference reshape these cognitive and social processes. Active debates concern whether the tools and norms that support effective co-located teams translate to remote and asynchronous environments, and how teams can build the trust and coordination needed to perform well before shared experience has had time to accumulate.

Works

48,043

Total citations

921,364

Keywords

Team ProcessesShared Mental ModelsVirtual TeamsTransactive Memory SystemsGroup CommunicationTeam Effectiveness