Group Potency and Its Implications for Team Effectiveness

Stemming from these results, an important practical implication is that early team interactions need to be managed effectively to enable a strong starting point for teams' group potency. With an emphasis on early group potency, rather than the change in potency over time, teams may be able to leverage initial potency as a critical team resource and more effectively navigate hurdles encountered during project completion. Nevertheless, future research may want to also consider how the potentially negative effects of overconfidence can be mitigated with early team experiences such as developing a team charter, engaging in informal socialization, and other activities that may assist in developing a healthy level of early group potency.

A second practical implication is that interteam differences in personality composition play an important role in developing early group potency. We found that teams that had members with higher conscientiousness were more likely to develop group potency early on, leading to increased team effectiveness. Drawing from an integration of COR theory and the IPO framework, conscientiousness is an important resource that sets the stage for teams' early potency, which reflects another critical team resource that, in turn, influences effectiveness. Therefore, teams can utilize the resources made available by their aggregated level of conscientiousness to establish and develop group potency allowing them to be more effective. Thus, it is important to consider personality traits, like conscientiousness, when selecting members for a team.