Heed, a missing link between trust, monitoring and performance in knowledge intensive teams

Abstract

This longitudinal study aimed to explain performance differences of knowledge intensive project teams. Team level data gathered at three measurement moments were used. Antecedents of performance studied were: trust in team members, trust in supervisors, monitoring by team members and monitoring by supervisors. Heedful interrelating, a concept developed by Weick and Roberts (1993) was expected to mediate between trust in team members, monitoring by team members and team performance. Correlation analysis and structural equation modelling were employed to analyse the data. The results show that heedful interrelating of team members, built on a combination of trust and monitoring by team members and trust in supervisors is an important factor in promoting team performance.

Keywords:

• trust
• monitoring
• hierarchical relations
• lateral relations
• heedful interrelating
• team performance

Notes

1 Since the structural equation model only contains direct relationships between trust and monitoring at time 2 and time 3, the model parameters equal the correlation coefficients (see Table 1).