Chapter 7: Cooperation and Competition: The Effects of Team Entrainment and Reward Structure

In the last several years, there has been a great deal of interest in the use of teams within organizations (Alper, Tjosvold, & Law, 1998; Johnson, Hollenbeck, Humphrey, Ilgen, & Jundt, 2004; Wageman & Baker, 1997). Just as culture and values differ across organizations, so does the design of work teams. Often, organizations will create cross-functional teams comprised of individuals from a variety of departments, locations, or functions in order to tackle complex problems requiring a multidisciplinary approach. Another common scenario is for organizations to partner with other companies to fill gaps in expertise and enhance their market capabilities. When organizations create teams, the individual members bring not only their unique expertise to the table, but they also carry with them their individual past experiences and expectations with respect to reward structures. The current study seeks to examine the effects of these past experiences and expectations through an empirical investigation. The study focuses on the impact of reward structure on task performance and how the prior exposure of individual team members affects a team’s ability to complete a simple task.