By Ethan Schweissing and Josh Perez

Shannon Marlow, a fifth year Industrial and Organizational Psychology PhD student at CORE, recently published an article examining the effects of type of communication on overall team effectiveness. She is also involved with projects that aim to: identify team roles on NASA missions; create a measure of team performance to use in training scenarios with patient causalities; and improve overall team success.

Her meta-analysis drew from 150 studies involving 9,702 teams and looked at the relationship between frequency and quality of communication on team outcomes. The study concluded that, when it comes to staying in contact with your team, less may actually be more; the volume of exchange between teammates is less important than the quality of the exchange. Overall, the studies included in the meta-analysis found that there was a much stronger relationship between quality of information and performance than between amount of information and performance. One explanation is that meaningful information can easily be lost with information-overload, leading to a less cohesive and productive team.

Further, Marlow found that certain types of quality driven communication yielded better results than others. For example, information elaboration was the tactic found to be most strongly related to team performance and knowledge sharing was also particularly effective. In contrast, objective frequency, i.e. how many emails were exchanged, had a relatively weak relationship with performance. These effects were found in teams that work face-to-face and already knew each other but were not found in virtual teams or teams that were unfamiliar with each other. The relationship between communication type and productivity for virtual teams may be attributed to the difficulty of maintaining an entirely virtual relationship, due to common problems such as misinterpretation of tones or the difficulty of maintaining contact without face-to-face interaction. The results for unfamiliar teams might be attributed to the fact they do not yet have a set pattern of communication and require more time to determine team dynamics.

The results of this study challenge previous assumptions that constant ongoing communication is the essential key to team success. Eduardo Salas, chair of the Psychology Department at Rice and co-author of this paper, stated in an interview with the Association for Psychological Science, “Effective teams are quiet… [and] share unique information. Effective teams engage in a pattern of information exchange that is accurate, precise, timely.” Given these results, the idea of qualify team communication should be further explored in any setting which involves teamwork.

Stress is often placed on having teams constantly communicate. However, with this newfound information, we hope to see a movement towards stressing effective and quality communication. This shift would be most important in settings where there is a large volume of information being communicated; ranging fields from medicine to law to education. Furthermore, this study suggests that there are specific aspects of effective communication, like information elaboration, which should be further investigated when striving for improved performance in a team setting.

 

 

Marlow, S. L., Lacerenza, C. N., Paoletti, J., Burke, C. S., & Salas, E. (2017). Does team communication represent a one-size-fits-all approach?: A meta-analysis of team communication and performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2017.08.001

Association for Psychological Science. (2017). Quality Beats Quantity in Team Communications. Retrieved November 16, 2017, from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/quality-beats-quantity-in-team-communications.html