There have been thousands of studies on teams and their performance, but there are still many unanswered questions. An important one is how an organization's reward structure supports the growing trend of using teams. Many organizations implement teams without changing the organizational systems to align with and support the use of teams, i.e., training, feedback, information and reward systems. As predicted by many authorities in the field of team effectiveness research, these teams often fail. One organizational subsystem that has been determined to be important is the reward structure. If the reward structure is not changed to support a team-based structure, the misalignment could negatively impact team effectiveness. This research investigated the relationship between reward structure and team effectiveness using a laboratory experiment. This experiment involved groups of students working as a team on a design problem. The independent variable is the type of reward structure, manipulated over three levels: interdependent (group), independent (individual) and mixed rewards (both group and individual). The experiment used a design task, intended to be more representative of project team work where team members were assigned a functional discipline and worked together to solve a design problem. The primary dependent variable in this study was team effectiveness: team performance as measured by the quality of the team's design, satisfaction of team members, and the ability and desire of team members to work together in the future. Other control variables investigated for their effect on these dependent variables included: cooperative behaviors, reward valence, effort, and autonomy preferences. Few significant effects of reward structure were found. The reward treatment had a significant main effect on both cooperation and effort, but little difference existed between reward treatments. Some unusual results were found in the relationship between effort and cooperation with performance. Both effort and cooperation were negatively related to team performance. Cooperation, satisfaction and ability to exist were all found to be correlated. No one reward structure was found to be significantly better than any of the others in terms of team effectiveness or team process. / Master of Science

The thesis deals with the problem of group tasks in assessment centers. The theoretical part provides an overview to the basic characteristics of the method of assessment center, describes the process of designing and realization, and discusses in detail the issue of simulation exercises and group tasks. The empirical part focuses on relations among activity of participants during group tasks, their personal characteristics and experience with the method of assessment center. Key words: assessment center group tasks simulation excercise

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life, and learning is an activity particularly likely to be fraught with uncertainty. Previous research suggests that students and teachers struggle in their attempts to manage the psychological experience of uncertainty and that students often fail to experience uncertainty when uncertainty may be warranted. Yet, few educational researchers have explicitly and systematically observed what students do, their behaviors and strategies, as they attempt to manage the uncertainty they experience during academic tasks. In this study I investigated how students in one fifth grade class managed uncertainty they experienced while engaged in collaborative robotics engineering projects, focusing particularly on how uncertainty management was influenced by task structure and students’ interactions with their peer collaborators. The study was initiated at the beginning of instruction related to robotics engineering and preceded through the completion of several long-term collaborative robotics projects, one of which was a design project. I relied primarily on naturalistic observation of group sessions, semi-structured interviews, and collection of artifacts. My data analysis was inductive and interpretive, using qualitative discourse analysis techniques and methods of grounded theory. Three theoretical frameworks influenced the conception and design of this study: community of practice, distributed cognition, and complex adaptive systems theory. Uncertainty was a pervasive experience for the students collaborating in this instructional context. Students experienced uncertainty related to the project activity and uncertainty related to the social system as they collaborated to fulfill the requirements of their robotics engineering projects. They managed their uncertainty through a diverse set of tactics for reducing, ignoring, maintaining, and increasing uncertainty. Students experienced uncertainty from more different sources and used more and different types of uncertainty management strategies in the less structured task setting than in the more structured task setting. Peer interaction was influential because students relied on supportive social response to enact most of their uncertainty management strategies. When students could not garner socially supportive response from their peers, their options for managing uncertainty were greatly reduced. / text