Coordination in Teams: Evidence from a Simulated Management Game

this paper, we examine the strategies managerial teams use to achieve coordination and the effects of coordination on team performance. We hypothesized that four coordination strategies---frequent communication, evenly distributed communication, shared cognitions about members' expertise, and team history---would lead to greater team coordination. We also hypothesized that there would be tradeoffs between several of these strategies. Greater coordination was expected to lead to better performance outcomes, regardless of the strategies a team used to achieve it. We examined our hypotheses within the context of a 14-week realistic management simulation. Coordination was influenced by evenness of communication, shared cognitions about the distribution of expertise within the team, and time working together. Coordination was also influenced by interactions between shared cognitions and frequency of communication, and between shared cognitions and team history. Contrary to our predictions, however, there was neither a main effect of communication frequency on coordination, nor an interaction of communication frequency with history working together. The level of coordination within a team was directly related to three of four outcome measures. Coordination in Teams: Evidence from Simulated Management Teams Groups are inherently different from individuals performing the same task because of a need to coordinate. Whenever the work of individuals is interdependent, they must coordinate to achieve success (Van de Ven, 1976). Malone and Crowston (1994) defined coordination as the extra work organizations and individuals must complete when individuals are working in concert to accomplish some goal, over and above what they would need to do to accomplish the goal individually. To w..