How Team Building Influences Team Outcomes

Team building activities can be found everywhere. Sometimes, people would question that such simple or even silly games are not effective at all. In order to justify the effectiveness of team building activities, the present study tried to find out the real impact of team building on team outcomes. Several theories were discussed in the present study, but only the input-mediator-outcome (IMO) model was selected as the major framework. Within the framework of emergent stages, the present study focused on investigating in the impact of team building on social preferences which would finally influence personal decision makings and individuals’ affect. By specifying team outcomes as team performance and members’ affect, the present study conducted two sets of experiments. First experiment recruited 108 participants via Mturk and asked participants to finish several questionnaires and investigated in the relationship between team building experiences and either team production behaviors or job satisfaction. Second experiment recruited 64 participants from the College of Wooster and the Capital University of Economics and Business in China. Participants were asked to play three rounds of public goods games or two rounds of public goods games plus one team building game. The results from two experiments showed no significant relationship between team building and team outcomes. However, the results suggested that team building activities reinforced team learning behaviors