Revising Teamwork Quality Construct and Team Interaction Measurement Instrument: A Conceptual and Empirical Analysis

Criticizing and revising constructs, especially prevalent constructs, is necessary for the development of the organizational field of research. One of the constructs which is frequently used in organizational research is teamwork quality. Hoegl and Gemuenden defined teamwork quality as a comprehensive construct which embraces all team interaction concepts. However, this construct has some important shortcomings which are theoretically and empirically discussed in this paper. Here, it is shown that this construct could not be used as an underlying concept of team interactions. Moreover, its conceptualization and operationalization encounter serious difficulties. This paper proposes that it is needed to unify “effort” and “balance of contributions” to alleviate these shortcomings. Besides, it is needed to add “conflict”, “goal setting”, and “decision making” concepts to team interaction framework. Accordingly, new combination of items, in a questionnaire instrument is suggested. Using a sample of 152 Iranian students and structural equation modeling it is shown that the new model for team interaction fits better to the data than the previous teamwork quality model. Finally, the research implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.