Using a meta-analytical procedure, the relationship between team composition in terms of the Big-Five personality traits (trait elevation and variability) and team performance were researched. The number of teams upon which analyses were performed ranged from 106 to 527. For the total sample, significant effects were found for elevation in agreeableness (r ¼ 0.24) and conscientiousness (r ¼ 0.20), and for variability in agreeableness (r ¼ À0.12) and conscientiousness (r ¼ À0.24). Moderation by type of team was tested for professional teams versus student teams. Moderation results for agreeableness and conscientiousness were in line with the total sample results. However, student and professional teams differed in effects for emotional stability and openness to experience. Based on these results, suggestions for future team composition research are presented.

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Group-level constructs are often derived from individual-level data. This procedure requires a composition model, specifying how the lower level data can be combined to compose the higher level construct. Two common composition methods are direct consensus composition, where items refer to the individual, and referent-shift consensus composition, where items refer to the group. The use and selection of composition methods is subject to a number of problems, calling for more systematic work on the empirical properties of and distinction between constructs composed by different methods. To facilitate and encourage such work, the authors present a methodological framework for addressing the distinction between and the baseline psychometric quality of composed group constructs, illustrated by an empirical example in the group job-design domain. The framework primarily represents a developmental tool with applications in multilevel theory building and scale construction, but also in meta-analysis or secondary analysis, and more general, the validation of group constructs.

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Groups of six subjects, in the United States and Holland, were given a resource management task in which they were to harvest points from a regenerating resource pool. Their objective was to maximize individual harvests while maintaining the resource pool. The factorial design crossed three levels of resource use (overuse, underuse, and optimal use) with two levels of variance of others' purported harvests (low and high). Both variables were manipulated through false feedback to subjects regarding the pool size and the other subjects' harvests. The primary dependent measures were subjects' individual harvests and whether subjects voted for or against elimination of free access to the resource in favor of electing a leader who would make harvest decisions for the group. The results indicated that harvest size increased over time only in the underuse and optimal-use conditions. As predicted, overuse subjects voted to give up free access to the resource and to elect a leader more frequently than subjects in the other conditions. Differences between American and Dutch subjects were found only for the variance manipulation.