Date of Graduation
8-2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Management
Advisor/Mentor
Adam Stoverink
Committee Member
Lauren Simon
Second Committee Member
Anastasia Makhanova
Keywords
Organizational behavior;Relationships;Work teams
Abstract
Given that work teams are defined partly in terms of relationships (e.g., members interact socially, maintain and manage boundaries, exhibit interdependencies; Kozlowski & Bell, 2013), it is not surprising that many work team constructs (e.g., team trust, team cohesion, team satisfaction, and team commitment) focus, to some extent, on capturing the “health” or “quality” of relationships among team members. While these relational team constructs reliably correlate with important outcomes such as team performance (e.g., Breuer et al., 2016; Castaño et al., 2013; Thatcher & Patel, 2011), they tend to be studied in isolation, as if they are entirely separate variables. Drawing from research in relationship science (Finkel et al., 2017; Fletcher et al., 2000a), I suggest that these constructs are highly related facets of a higher-order construct—team overall relationship quality. While evidence for a higher-order construct has important implications for synthesizing past research and paving the way for more simple and harmonious teams research in the future, I contend that the lower-order facets remain important. Specifically, I integrate foundational theories in relationship science with research on teams to theorize about the relative importance of the individual facets on specific outcome variables. I test my hypotheses using a field sample of 62 work teams and 200 team members. Findings from this study contribute to a more precise theoretical understanding of the nature and role of relationship quality among interdependent work team members.
Citation
Bradley, C. (2023). Team Overall Relationship Quality: Examining Factor Structure and Predictive Precision Among Relationship-based Team Emergent States. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/4896