This article seeks to promote the advancement of empirical research on team mental models by (a) highlighting the conceptual work that must precede the selection of any measurement tool, (b) delineating measurement standards for group-level cognitions, and (c) evaluating a set of techniques for measuring team mental models. Pathfinder, multidimensional scaling, interactively elicited cognitive mapping, and text-based cognitive mapping are critiqued and compared according to their treatment of content and structure, as well as their psychometric properties. We conclude that these four techniques hold promise for measuring team mental models and illustrate the variability in measurement options. However, careful attention to the research question and research context must precede the selection of any measurement tool.

The relationship between people's membership in social-interaction groups and the meanings they attach to organizational events was investigated. It was hypothesized that people who interacted together would interpret organizational events similarly and that different interaction groups would interpret organizational events differently. Interview and questionnaire data were collected from 64 members of an accounting firm. The data were analyzed with network analysis and multidimensional scaling. The results provide evidence that people who interacted with each other had similar interpretations of organizational events and that members of different interaction groups attached qualitatively different meanings to similar organizational events. Methodological, theoretical, and practical implications of the results are discussed.

SummaryThe primary contribution of the present study, as implied by the title of this paper, was to delineate and to test antecedents of team member schema agreement and their indirect effects on team effectiveness. The study was conducted in a naturalistic setting involving 315 individuals who comprised 41 teams. Team member teamwork schema agreement was assessed using multidimensional scaling to analyse paired comparison ratings. Demography, team experience, team member recruitment, and team size were signi®cantly related to team member schema agreement, which in turn was signi®cantly related to team effectiveness. Several antecedents were related to team effectiveness indirectly through team member teamwork schema agreement. The results have implications for research on cognition in teams.

The present study examined the process of shared leadership in 45 ad hoc decision-making teams. Each team member's leadership behavior (n = 180) was assessed by behaviorally coding videotapes of the teams' discussions. The within-team patterns of leadership behavior were examined using cluster analysis. Results indicated that the likelihood of a team experiencing a full range of leadership behavior increased to the extent that multiple team members shared leadership, and that teams with shared leadership experienced less conflict, greater consensus, and higher intragroup trust and cohesion than teams without shared leadership. This study supports previous findings that shared leadership contributes to overall team functioning, and begins to delineate the extent to which team members may naturally share leadership.

Frame-of-reference training has been shown to be an effective intervention for improving the accuracy of performance ratings (e.g., Woehr & Huffcutt, 1994). Despite evidence in support of the effectiveness of frame-of-reference training, few studies have empirically addressed the ultimate goal of such training, which is to teach raters to share a common conceptualization of performance (Athey & McIntyre, 1987; Woehr, 1994). The present study tested the hypothesis that, following training, frame-of-reference-trained raters would possess schemas of performance that are more similar to a referent schema, as compared with control-trained raters. Schema accuracy was also hypothesized to be positively related to rating accuracy. Results supported these hypotheses. Implications for frame-of-reference training research and practice are discussed.