Abundant research supports a cognitive foundation to teamwork. Team cognition describes the mental states that enable team members to anticipate and to coordinate. Having been examined in hundreds of studies conducted in board rooms, cockpits, nuclear power plants, and locker rooms, to name a few, we turn to the question of moderators: Under which conditions is team cognition more and less strongly related to team performance? Random effects meta-analytic moderator analysis of 107 independent studies (N = 7,778) reveals meaningful variation in effect sizes conditioned on team composition and boundary factors. The overall effect of team cognition on performance is ρ = .35, though examining this effect by these moderators finds the effect can meaningfully vary between ρ = .22 and ρ = .42. This meta-analysis advances team effectiveness theory by moving past the question of “what is important?” to explore the question of “when and why is it important?” Results indicate team cognition is most strongly related to performance for teams with social category heterogeneity (ρ = .42), high external interdependence (ρ = .41), as well as low authority differentiation (ρ = .35), temporal dispersion (ρ = .36), and geographic dispersion (ρ = .35). Functional homogeneity and temporal stability (compositional factors) were not meaningful moderators of this relationship. The key takeaway of these findings is that team cognition matters most for team performance when—either by virtue of composition, leadership, structure, or technology—there are few substitute enabling conditions to otherwise promote performance.

大量的研究为团队合作奠定了认知基础。团队认知描述了使团队成员能够进行预期和协调的精神状态。在董事会会议室，座舱，核电站和更衣室进行的数百项研究中，仅举几例，我们转向主持人的问题：在哪种情况下，团队认知与团队绩效越来越不相关？对107项独立研究的随机效应荟萃分析主持人分析（N = 7,778）显示，效应大小的有意义变化取决于团队组成和边界因素。团队认知对绩效的总体影响为ρ = 0.35，尽管通过这些主持人检查该影响发现，该影响可能在ρ之间有意义地变化= 0.22和ρ = 0.42。这项荟萃分析克服了“什么重要？”这一问题，从而提高了团队效率理论。探索“何时何地如此重要？”这一问题。结果表明，团队认知与社交类别异质性（ρ = .42），外部相互依存性较高（ρ = .41）以及较低的权限差异（ρ = .35）和时间分散（ρ）的团队的绩效密切相关。= 0.36）和地理分散度（ρ= 0.35）。功能同质性和时间稳定性（组成因素）不是这种关系的有意义的调节者。这些发现的主要结论是，当团队组成，领导力，结构或技术方面的因素很少时，团队认知对团队绩效最为重要。