Part 1: Networking and Social Capital Question: Read the 2 articles. Define Team Networking. Define Team Social Capital. How does your team utilize networking to accomplish the team’s assignments? Ana

A multilevel model of emotional skills,

communication performance, and task

performance in teams

ASHLEA C. TROTH*

, PETER J. JORDAN, SANDRA A. LAWRENCE AND

HERMAN H. M. TSE

Grifﬁth Business School, Grifﬁth University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

SummaryThere is increasing research regarding the inﬂuence of emotions on teamwork. In this study, we use a

multilevel approach to examine how team members’use of emotion-related skills affects team task performance

and communication performance within the team. We measured individual self-reported emotional skills prior to

team formation and then collected peer-rated individual communication performance and independently rated

team task performance eight weeks later. Although there was no inﬂuence at the individual level between

emotional skills and performance, team-level emotional skills positively predicted team task performance scores.

At the cross level, team-level emotional skills predicted individual-level communication performance. These

ﬁndings emphasize the importance of distinct team emotional skills in shaping both team performance and

Keywords:emotional skills; teams; communication performance; multilevel

Increased team-based structures in organizations have led to growing research aimed at improving team processes

and performance (Allen & Hecht, 2004). Scholars examining speciﬁc links between team members’individual

characteristics and team performance generally focus on overt demographic characteristics such as age, education, or

tenure (e.g., Bunderson & Sutcliffe, 2002; Pelled, Eisenhardt, & Xin, 1999) or on individual difference variables such

as attitudes, personality, values, and skills (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998; Stewart, Fulmer, & Barrick,

2005). Research also identiﬁes how team members’individual characteristics inﬂuence their own performance in a team

context (e.g., Randel & Jaussi, 2003). Recent work shows the value in conceptualizing how individual characteristics

combine at the team level to have a direct inﬂuence on team performance outcomes (e.g., Bell, 2007; Peeters, Van Tuijl,

Rutte, & Reymen, 2006) and a cross-level inﬂuence on individual team member performance (e.g., Joshi, Liao, &

Jackson, 2006).

The search for better team performance has lately focused on the role of emotions in teams (Elfenbein, 2006).

Several researchers suggest that emotional intelligence (EI; Mayer & Salovey, 1997), an individual’s capacity to

be aware of and manage emotions, plays an important role in team performance (Druskat & Wolff, 2001; Elfenbein,

2006; Elfenbein, Polzer, & Ambady, 2007; Jordan & Troth, 2004). While drawing on the EI literature to consider

the utility of emotional skills in predicting performance in teams, we focus on the role of enacted behaviors

(operationalized as self-reported skills rather than potential abilities) in achieving better team outcomes.

Evidence demonstrates the relationship between individual emotional skills and individual team

member performance (e.g., Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) and between team emotional skills and team performance

*Correspondence to: Ashlea Clare Troth, Grifﬁth Business School, Grifﬁth University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia. E-mail: a.troth@grifﬁth.

edu.au

Revised 31 August 2011, Accepted 21 September 2011

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav.33, 700–722 (2012)

Published online 21 November 2011 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com)DOI: 10.1002/job.785 (e.g., Bell, 2007). To the best of our knowledge, no research considers how emotional skills inﬂuence individual-

level and team-level performances simultaneously or the cross-level relationship that team emotional skills might

have on individual team member performance. Thus, we develop and test a model to explain the following:

(i) how the emotional skills ofindividualteam members inﬂuence their performance in a team; (ii) how a collective

of individual team members’emotional skills can be conceptualized as ateam-levelemotional skill construct that

has independent direct effects on team performance; and (iii) how team-level emotional skills havecross-level

inﬂuences on individual performance in teams (Figure 1). Our aim is to enable researchers to better understand the link

between emotional skills and team effectiveness and respond to calls for multilevel research (e.g., Ashkanasy, 2003;

Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Stewart et al., 2005) that considers the top-down effects of team factors on individual

functioning in teams (Chen, Kirkman, Kanfer, Allen, & Rosen, 2007; Hitt, Beamish, Jackson, & Mathieu, 2007) and

the impact of emotions in teams (Jordan & Ashkanasy, 2006).

We also examine the impact of emotional skills on both team task performance and communication performance in

teams. Whereas past research focuses on task aspects of team performance (Tannenbaum, Beard, & Salas, 1992), we

adopt a relational communications approach (Millar & Rogers, 1976) to argue that emotional skills will affect commu-

nication effectiveness and appropriateness (a process-focused performance indicator) within teams (Scullen, Mount, &

Judge, 2003). An important element of good communication involves the management and recognition of one’sown

and others’emotional expressions (Bales, 1970; Briner, 1999). Elfenbein et al. (2007) suggest that the beneﬁts of

team-level emotional skills in the workplace arise largely from coordinating interactions. Communication performance

is central to how teams work together and, we argue, is directly affected by the emotional skills team members possess.

Emotional Skills

Originally conceptualized at the individual level, Mayer and Salovey (1997) developed the most broadly accepted EI

model that comprises four branches: awareness of emotions, acquiring emotional knowledge, using emotions in

decision making, and managing emotions. Debate still surrounds the EI construct in respect to deﬁnition and

Emotional Skills

DimensionsPerformance

H2H1 H4

Team level

Individual level

Individual

Communication

Performance

within the Team

Own Emotional Aw areness (Own Aware)

Other Emotional Awareness

(Other Aware)

Team TaskPerformance

Own Emotional Management

(Own Manage)

Other Emotional Management

(Other Manage)

Own Emotional Awareness

(Own Aware)

Other Emotional Awareness

(Other Aware)

Own Emotional Management

(Own Manage)

Other Emotional Management

(Other Manage)

Figure 1. Multilevel model of the emotional skills-performance relationship in a team context

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS701

DOI: 10.1002/job measurement (Cherniss, 2010). While informing our work, we acknowledge this critique of EI and instead focus our

research on the relationship between team members’self-reported emotional skills and performance in teams.

Jordan, Ashkanasy, Härtel, and Hooper (2002) and Jordan and Lawrence (2009) showed that team members need

two broad emotional skills to enhance their capability to deal with emotions in team contexts: (i) emotional

awareness and (ii) emotional management. These skills further distinguish between the following: (i) skills related

to dealing with your own emotions and (ii) skills related to dealing with other peoples’emotions. Theoretical

(George, 2000; Mayer & Salovey, 1997) and empirical research (Jordan & Troth, 2004) supports this delineation.

We differentiate between these four skills and their potential to impact on individual behavior in teams as follows.

Awareness of own emotions

This skill involves being attuned to one’s momentary feelings and discussing and disclosing the emotions one

experiences (Pennebaker & Francis, 1996). A team member who recognizes his or her escalating emotions during

a difﬁcult team encounter is taking an importantﬁrst step toward managing those emotions. For example, the

emotional escalation of frustration to anger is more difﬁcult to resolve if the team member does not recognize the

correct precipitate emotion. Silvia (2002) also found that emotional self-awareness lessens the experience of intense

emotions. Being able to identify the emotion one experiences makes it easier to decide if it is reasonable and to act

accordingly. Team members higher in emotional self-awareness are more likely to recognize the appropriate

emotional intensity levels required during team exchanges and be better positioned to promote team relationships.

Awareness of others’emotions

Recognizing others’emotional displays and detecting false emotional expressions promote successful interactions with

others (Jordan & Lawrence, 2009). An individual needs to accurately identify the emotion a fellow team member is

experiencing to effectively respond to emotions in a team. For example, team interactions will be different when team

members are enthusiastic as opposed to stressed. An awareness of others’emotions is also important for effective

communication interchanges and team conﬂict resolution (Druskat & Wolff, 2001). Detecting a team member’snega-

tive emotion might signal the need for reﬂective listening to better understand the source of emotion for that person.

Managing own emotions

This skill requires connecting or disconnecting from an emotion depending on its usefulness and is linked to

bounded emotionality (Mumby & Putnam, 1992). It often results in holding back on immediate reactions. In teams,

situations such as conﬂict over values or goals, short time frames, or the entry of new team members can evoke

intense emotions that may require self-control if the situations are to be resolved (Mischel & DeSmet, 2000; Weiss

& Cropanzano, 1996). Skill in managing one’s own emotions may be the key to better resolve team conﬂicts

productively and without emotional escalation (Amason, 1996).

Managing others’emotions

This skill entails the promotion of more positive and productive emotions in teams (Mayer & Salovey, 1997).

Sometimes, the emotional reactions of other team members need to be managed to ensure working relationships

are maintained. Managing others’emotions enables a team member to regulate the emotional tone of interpersonal

exchanges within the team so they can be productive.

Team Emotional Skills

With few exceptions (e.g., Bell, 2007; Côté, 2007; Elfenbein, 2006; Jordan & Troth, 2004), empirical researchers

consider emotional skills in the workplace at the individual level. Our broad theoretical justiﬁcation of team-level

emotional skills is based on a work by Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro (2001) who argue that teams move toward goal

702A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job achievement via a series of episodic interactions. The success of teams in these episodic interactions depends on the

resources available to the team, the processes they engage in, and the level of skills within the team. Marks et al.

(2001) argue that the essence of effective teamwork is interdependent behavior. Research shows that teams who

are able to draw on each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses perform at a higher level

(Côté, 2007; Jordan & Troth, 2004). These performance advantages are a result of the ways in which teams interact

and compensate for each other. Similarly, we believe more successful teams will comprise members with greater

emotional skills. Being aware of one’s own felt and displayed emotions, and recognizing the emotions of

others, is essential for team members to work together effectively (Ashkanasy, 2003). Once emotions are raised

to a level of awareness, there is a need to appropriately and effectively regulate or manage (e.g., cognitively

reappraise, express) those emotions to provide for an effective interaction with other team members (Mumby &

Putnam, 1992).

At the more speciﬁc level of conceptualization, team emotional skills are considered in two main ways. On the

one hand, team emotional skills are viewed as team norms inﬂuencing team members’awareness of emotional

information and notions of appropriate emotional response behaviors (Druskat & Wolff, 2001; Elfenbein, 2006;

Wolff, Druskat, Koman, & Messer, 2006). This normﬁlters team members’perceptions and reactions to

emotion-related issues in the team. Team emotional skills are an emergent process or team style that contributes

to effective intra-team processes and performance outcomes. On the other hand, other researchers (e.g., Bell,

2007; Jordan et al., 2002) regard team emotional skills as the pooled resources individual team members bring to

the team, an input factor that contributes to effective intra-team processes and performance outcomes and takes a

“sum of parts approach.”Elfenbein (2006) notes each perspective asks different questions about teams. The norma-

tive framework considers the development of emotions-based norms within the team over time. The pooled

resources framework provides insights about whether the team has the emotional resources to be productive and

offers predictions about team performance before a team is formed.

We do not intend to evaluate the relative merits of each approach to team emotional skills in this study. The teams

in our sample were required to meet over eight weeks to plan, develop, and then deliver a persuasive performance

task. Input was required by all team members in a compensatory manner to achieve the performance task goals

(Steiner, 1972). In other words, team members used a variety of skills in their team interactions about the

performance task (e.g., emotional, decision-making, oral, and written communication skills) and compensated for

team members with lower levels of such skills. Day et al. (2004, p. 1525) note that

although for this type of task, the group is frequently permitted to combine member contributions in any manner

the group seesﬁt, the typical case is one in which each individual’s contribution is likely to inﬂuence the group’s

ﬁnal decision.

In this way, we argue that a performance task requiring compensatory effort contextualizes the role of team skills to

align conceptually with a pooled resources framework. Therefore, given that our performance task is compensatory

in nature and that team membership is short-term and comprises members with no relationship history (which limits

the development of team norms; cf. Elfenbein et al., 2007), we adopt a pooled resources framework to conceptualize

team emotional skills. This is reﬂected in our study’s research design assessing emotional skills at one time prior to

team formation.

In conjunction with conceptualizing team emotional skills as a pooled resource, the composition measurement

approach is important. There are many ways (e.g., minimum, maximum, diversity, and average) to measure a team’s

collective level of emotional skills. The average of individual team members’emotional skills is the most common

(Côté, 2007; Druskat & Wolff, 2001; George, 2002; Yang & Mossholder, 2004). Steiner (1972) argues that group-

level skills are best assessed using the mean score if team tasks require compensatory or additive effort (as opposed

to disjunctive or conjunctive effort). Bell’s (2007) meta-analysis examining the relationship between deep-level

construct variables (e.g., personality factors and EI) and team performance also concluded that teams carrying out

additive or compensatory tasks are more aligned theoretically and empirically to team mean assessments. Likewise,

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS703

DOI: 10.1002/job Kozlowski and Klein (2000) contend that team input variables measured using the mean are suitable for tasks that

involve information exchange, reaching a single optimal solution and pooling of team performance.

We adopt a summative composition approach by similarly operationalizing team emotional skills as an average.

Such an approach views team emotional skills as a collective resource team members share to assist each other

(Elfenbein, 2006). Theoretically, the team-level construct represents a linear aggregation of individual emotional

skills that collectively emerge as a construct at the team level. The extent of emotional skills may vary among

individuals, but individuals have equalopportunities(during interactions as a team) to inﬂuence (e.g., modeling)

and compensate for each other (Côté, 2007). This contributes to team-level emotional skills constructs that are both

similar to and different from individual-level emotional skills constructs (Bliese, 2000; Chen, Thomas, & Wallace,

2005). The summative composition approach also suggests that there is no requirement for high agreement among

individual emotional skills scores to operationalize the team-level construct (Chan, 1998; Elfenbein, 2006).

To summarize, we argue that conceptualizing and operationalizing team emotional skills utilizing a summative

composition approach within a pooled resources framework are most suitable for our study. Teams met over a short

time frame to plan, develop, and complete a compensatory performance task. The task required team members to

adjust their emotions to match the cognitive and interpersonal demands of the work over this period (Côté, 2007).

We also expect emotional skills to reﬂect consistent patterns of behavior at the individual level over this relatively

short period that will collectively combine across team members to form stable patterns of behavior at the team level

(i.e., team-level emotional skills; Bell, 2007; Stewart et al., 2005).

Alternative approaches to team composition

We acknowledge the alternative operationalizations of team emotional skills that adopt a pooled resources

framework (Elfenbein, 2006). As Kozlowski and Klein (2000, p. 58) explain,“collective phenomena may emerge in

different ways under different contextual constraints and patterns of interaction.”Conceivably, an individual in a team

with the highest (or lowest) level of emotional skills might enhance (or weaken) the performance of other members in

the team or team performance overall (Elfenbein, 2006). Côté (2007) considered dispersion (i.e., variance) as a team

representation of emotional skills. He discusses how teams of individuals with different levels of emotional skills might

be forced to reconcile varying approaches to group tasks. In essence, individual team members might experience

different emotional states associated with different cognitive approaches for dealing with task information, and

discussing and reconciling these differences may enhance performance. We test these alternative compilation typologies

(Kozlowski & Klein, 2000) in our subsequent analyses. Ultimately, we argue that Kozlowski and Klein’s (2000) pooled

constrained emergence typology is most closely aligned to our conceptualization of team emotional skills. A minimum

contribution is required by each team member in the emergence of the team construct, even though individual

contributions can vary to some extent.

Emotional Skills and Communication Performance at the Individual Level

In many instances, an individual’s communication performance within teams corresponds with the quality of team

outcomes (Light, 2007). Scullen et al. (2003) demonstrated the core role of communication in work performance at

the individual level. They also included a human skills component in their conceptualization of managerial job

performance in which the ability to communicate with others was strongly highlighted. Communication

performance incorporates two fundamental outcome properties—effectiveness and appropriateness (Spitzberg &

Cupach, 1984). Effective communication accomplishes the goals, the objectives, or the intended functions of the

team member, whereas appropriate communication avoids the violation of situational or relational rules governing

the communicative context (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984). The implicit assumption is that the most competent

communication behaviors are appropriate and effective.

704A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job We adopt the relational communications theory (Millar & Rogers, 1976), whereby relationships are redeﬁned

through communication, to explain the mechanism linking individual emotional skills to communication

performance. Within this theory, it is not a single communication episode, or the process of communication that is

the focus, but a series of exchanges as a whole that result in a single product (Parks, 1977). In line with this, we argue

that appropriate and effective communication (communication performance) is dependent on the emotional skills used

by an individual, and this performance emerges in a succession of exchanges. Other skills that involve the elements of

detecting, understanding, and regulating emotional displays, such as encoding and decoding skills (Berger, 2005),

nonverbal communication skills (Burgoon & Bacue, 2003), and persuading skills (Dillard & Marshall, 2003), have been

found to directly contribute to successful communication performance. Similar to Berger (2005), we assert that

emotional skills contribute to better communication outcomes for individuals within teams.

Signiﬁcant relationships have been found between individual global emotional skills and performance in

communication-dependent activities such as decision making (e.g., Lam & Kirby, 2002) and leadership behavior

(e.g., Wong & Law, 2002). We outlined earlier that scholars (e.g., Jordan & Lawrence, 2009; Mischel & DeSmet,

2000) suggest that distinct emotional skills have particular ways of inﬂuencing the escalation of negative emotion

(Silvia, 2002), productive emotion generation, (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993) and conﬂict behavior (Jordan & Troth,

2004). Research examining the performance of individualswithinteams generally suggests that team members more

capable of recognizing and managing their own and others’emotions during interactions are likely to make better

decisions and resolve task conﬂict (i.e., communication performance outcomes) than individuals with lower levels

of emotional skills (e.g., Pelled et al., 1999; Yang & Mossholder, 2004). Our rationale is that felt or expressed

emotions, particularly negative ones, are less likely to distract or restrict individuals with stronger emotional skills from

the communication performance task at hand. They are more likely to detect counterproductive emotions within the

team (via awareness skills) and have a greater capacity to deescalate and deal with these emotions (via management

skills). Emotional skills are also more likely to have an impact on individual performance within a team when the

objective, or performance goal, involves communicating interdependently with others (Jordan & Troth, 2004).

Determining if differences exist in the strength of the relationship between distinct emotional skills and

communication outcomes might have practical implications for organizations in terms of training programs. There

is some research that considers the possibility of either a null or negative inﬂuence of emotional awareness on

outcome variables (e.g., Elfenbein et al., 2007; Feyerherm & Rice, 2002; Foo, Elfenbein, Tan, & Aik, 2004). This

is most likely due to the refocusing of individuals high in emotional awareness on their relationships with others,

instead of the task at hand. We maintain that both emotional awareness and management skills will positively relate

to communication performance in our sample. However, given the mixed researchﬁndings surrounding emotional

awareness and Jordan and Lawrence’s (2009) argument for the delineation of emotional skills (awareness versus

management), we investigate these skills separately. The following hypotheses are proposed:

Hypothesis 1

An individual team member’s emotional awareness (own and others) skills will be positively related to the individ-

ual member’s communication performance within the team.

Hypothesis 2

An individual team member’s emotional management (own and others) skills will be positively related to the

individual member’s communication performance within the team.

Emotional Skills and Task Performance at the Team Level

Most research examining team performance uses quantity or output performance measures such as goal achievement

(DeShon, Kozlowski, Schmidt, Milner, & Wiechmann, 2004), task speed and accuracy (Bachrach, Powell, Collins,

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS705

DOI: 10.1002/job & Richey, 2006), ratings of teamﬁnal project reports (Jehn & Mannix, 2001), and team problem-solving outcomes

(Jordan & Troth, 2004). We also consider the relationship between team-level emotional skills and a team task per-

formance variable to gain a more comprehensive view of the inﬂuences of emotional skills on performance in teams.

Our performance task, requiring team members to design and deliver a persuasive presentation, is similar to work

teams required to work together to develop a pitch for a tender or to gain a contract.

We earlier argued that the persuasive presentation task in our study is compensatory in nature, is aligned with a

pooled resource view of team emotional skills, and is best operationalized using a summative composition approach,

the mean score. Presentation scores were given to our teams by an external assessor after the presentation delivery.

We propose that a team’s pooled emotional skills will positively impact on the presentation scores received. The

team’s skills in regulating any negative emotions commonly associated with public speaking, such as fear and

anxiety (Putnis & Petelin, 1999), will affect the extent a team is able to deliver a clear argument in a suitable format.

It is also expected that teams with greater skills in recognizing and regulating others’emotions will be better able to

“read”their audience and thus manipulate the emotions of others in a positive direction if required (e.g., audience

engagement, use of humor). A team’s emotional skills will also impact on presentation scores, via their inﬂuence

during team preparation. For instance, team members with higher level skills are more likely to set a productive

emotional tone that enables a greater exchange of ideas and clearer, problem-focused thinking. On the basis of this,

and evidence that team emotional skills are positively related to team task performance (e.g., Bell, 2007; Elfenbein

et al., 2007), we propose the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 3

Team emotional awareness (own and others) skills will be positively related to team task performance.

Hypothesis 4

Team emotional management (own and others) skills will be positively related to team task performance.

Emotional Skills and Performance Cross-Level Relationships

The episodic interaction model of team behaviors (i.e., Marks et al., 2001) and the relational communications theory

(i.e., Millar & Rogers, 1976), both outlined earlier, lead us to assert that teams with greater collective skills for

recognizing and managing their emotions over a series of interactions will promote a communication environment

in which individual members are more inclined to listen to alternative viewpoints and follow the appropriate

relational rules of communication exchange (Canary & Spitzberg, 1987). Team goal-setting and problem-solving dur-

ing task performance preparation typically involves some degree of individual compromise (Pelled et al., 1999), and this

can be an emotional issue (Jordan & Troth, 2004). We suggest that a team’s ability to use a high level of emotional skills

during goal-setting and problem-solving will facilitate (or not) an effective interaction by individual team members.

Team members can focus more on knowledge and idea exchange if they belong to a team able to resolve, in a timely

and acceptable manner, emotional issues associated with group disharmony. Thus, there is a greater likelihood an

individual will engage in effective communication (Canary & Spitzberg, 1987). The complexities and interdependent

actions required to achieve team goals also require individuals to develop an awareness of, and sensitivity to, their

own and others’goals (Lakey & Canary, 2002). This sensitivity to conversational partners helps team members estab-

lish the rapport necessary to achieve their goals (Berger & Kellermann, 1994). We suggest that the more responsive a

team is to team members’emotions, the more likely individuals are to adopt appropriate communication behaviors (e.g.,

active listening) that promote relational sensitivity (Canary & Spitzberg, 1987).

It is important to emphasize that team emotional skills are different from individual emotional skills and can

differentially impact on individual and team performances. The essence of our argument (supported by Côté, 2007)

706A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job is that individuals within a team pool their emotional skills as resources to facilitate communication. Individuals with

varying levels of emotional skills (e.g., a member with higher emotional skill) within a team compensate for and

facilitate the emotional skills of other team members (e.g., a member with lower emotional skill). This is reﬂected in

both team and individual behaviors and performances. A team with a reasonable level of pooled emotional skills might

compensate for an individual team member with lower emotional skills in terms of active listening and reﬂection

behaviors. This, in turn, will promote that particular team member’s effective and appropriate behavior and/or perfor-

mance (despite their initial low emotional skills). We expect all four team emotional skills to be related to individual

team member’s communication performance. The following cross-level hypotheses are proposed:

Hypothesis 5

Team emotional awareness (own and others) skills will be positively related to individual members’communication

performance within the team.

Hypothesis 6

Team emotional management (own and others) skills will be positively related to individual members’

communication performance within the team.

Method

Sample and procedure

The sampling frame for this study consisted of 567 undergraduate students enrolled in a business communication

course. We asked the respondents to work in teams to develop and deliver a persuasive presentation on one ofﬁve

predetermined topics. We required the respondents to form self-selected teams with no prior history of working together

(no friendship groups). We also required team members to meet every week (in class) to work on their presentation for

approximately eight weeks. Some teams also met outside class of their own volition. At Time 1, 376 respondents

(response rate = 66 per cent) completed theﬁrst survey with a self-report measure of emotional skills during the second

lecture of the course. Eight weeks later at Time 2, 540 respondents (response rate = 95 per cent) in 114 teams completed

a second survey immediately following the delivery of their particular team presentation as an in-class reﬂective tool

(held during course tutorials). Each respondent provided peer ratings of each of their fellow team members in terms

of their communication performance in the team over the previous eight weeks. Although the entire sample undertook

this peer-rating exercise as a course reﬂection about team performance, the 95 per cent response rate reﬂects those

respondents who voluntarily returned the survey. Having peers rate other team members’communication is a common

practice (e.g., Wayne & Kacmar, 1991); and Scullen et al. (2003), who suggested that performance is best rated by

others when examining how an individual’s personality or dispositional constructs inﬂuences his or her human skills

performance, advocated it.

An anonymous code, entered by the respondents on the surveys, allowed both surveys to be matched. The

matched sample consisted of 244 respondents belonging to 57 teams (consisting of three or more team members

who had completed both Time 1 and Time 2 surveys; response rate = 43 per cent). This sample size is comparable

with that in other multilevel research conducted with student teams (e.g., Gevers & Peeters, 2009). The average size

of the teams wasﬁve members (Mean = 5.36,SD= 2.1), ranging from three to eight members. Of the respondents,

109 (45 per cent) were men; 128 (53 per cent) were born in Australia, and 116 (47 per cent) were born overseas. The

mean age of respondents was 22 years (SD= 4.3), ranging from 17 to 45 years. The respondents had, on average,

4.4 years of work experience.

In addition to the surveys, one of four independent subject matter experts (SMEs) provided team task performance

scores (an assessment that encapsulated the quality and persuasiveness of the presentations). As there were multiple

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS707

DOI: 10.1002/job independent assessors, a moderation meeting established a common standard to evaluate the quality of the

presentations. Each of the SMEs had a minimum of two years experience assessing such tasks as well as university

qualiﬁcations in theﬁeld. We discussed the inter-rater reliability results for this measure in the succeeding paragraphs.

Individual-level measures

Emotional skills

We administered the participants the validated self-report Workplace Emotional Intelligence Proﬁle—Short Version

(WEIP-S; Jordan & Lawrence, 2009). A reﬁnement of WEIP (Jordan et al., 2002), the WEIP-S assesses a team

member’s self-assessment of their emotional awareness and emotional management skills within a team context

and has an own and other focus. The scale captures four dimensions (four items each): awareness of own emotions

(e.g.,I can explain the emotions I feel to team members), management of own emotions (e.g.,When I am frustrated

with fellow team members, I can overcome my frustration), awareness of others’emotions (e.g.,I can read fellow

team members“true”feelings, even if they try to hide them), and management of other’s emotions (e.g.,I am able

to cheer team members up when they are feeling down). The respondents indicated their level of agreement with

each item by using a 7-point format (1 =strongly disagreeto 7 =strongly agree). We averaged items for each sub-

scale to provide four emotional skills scores for each respondent.

Communication performance

We assessed this by using Canary and Spitzberg’s (1987) 13-item communication performance scale. We asked the

participants to indicate the effectiveness and the appropriateness of the communication performance of each of his or

her fellow team members during the life of the presentation project, using a 5-point response format (1 =strongly

disagreeto 5 =strongly agree). We modiﬁed the scales to assess the communication performance of speciﬁcteam

members within a team context. Sample items includeHe/she achieved what he/she apparently wanted to achieve in

our conversationsfor communication effectiveness andHe/she was a smooth conversationalistfor appropriateness.

As peer observer ratings are sometimes idiosyncratic, we conducted within-team inter-rater reliability (r

wg) tests

for individual-level communication performance. This established the level of consistency across peer raters for each

individual team member with respect to their ratings for communication performance (James, Demaree, & Wolf,

1984, 1993). We calculated inter-rater reliabilities using all available peer ratings (N= 1170) for the 244 ratees in

the 57 teams. The results ofr

wg for each team member revealed a meanr wg of .95 for communication performance

(medianr

wg = .96). As these values were satisfactory, each team member received an averaged aggregated score

across his or her peers for each of the communication performance items. We averaged together the aggregated

peer-rated items for each subscale to provide one communication performance score for each individual respondent.

See the section on the measurement model analyses for individual-level construct for more information regarding

construct validity and Cronbach’s alpha reliabilities.

Team-level measures

Team emotional skills

According to Chan (1998), specifying the appropriate composition model is essential for multilevel research. We

deﬁned team-level emotional skills as a summative composition model and operationalized it on the basis of the mean

of individual members’collective emotional skills scores (in each of the four subscales) within each team (Chen,

Mathieu, & Bliese, 2004). In other words, we aggregated individuals’ratings of the four dimensions of emotional skills

within each team to assess their teams’emotional skills, for the cross-level and team-level analyses in this study. It is

important to note that Chen et al. (2004) argue that the evidence of intra-class correlation (ICC 1 and 2) and of inter-rater

708A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job agreement (r wg) is not necessary to justify the validity of team-level measures on the basis of summative composition

models because the agreement or the sharedness regarding the construct is not assumed.

Although we argue for a summative composition approach in this study, earlier we acknowledged possible instances

in which team emotional skills might be represented by non-linear combinations if the amount of contribution by each

team member is qualitatively distinct (e.g., Côté, 2007; Elfenbein, 2006). To eliminate alternative explanations, we also

analyzed team emotional skills and their expected impact on performance in teams by using minimum, maximum, and

variance representations following guidelines outlined by Kozlowski and Klein (2000).

Team task performance

We assessed team task performance via the assessment scores given for workshop presentations by one of four

independent and experienced SMEs. The SMEs evaluated team presentations and allocated up to 10 marks. We al-

located up toﬁve marks to presentation delivery (e.g., audience engagement, team coordination) and up toﬁve

marks to presentation argument (e.g., expression of ideas supported in the literature, quality of the argument the team

developed). To ensure consistency of ratings prior to presentations, the SMEs met to discuss the expected standards and

associated marks regarding the performance task. We also compared the means of team presentation marks across

SMEs, and the analysis showed that the SMEs had similar means and score distributions. Furthermore, each SME

was paired with another of the remaining three assessors to independently rate 20 per cent of each others’presentations.

Cohen’s kappa coefﬁcients for each of the SME’s ratings were 0.71, 0.73, 0.79, and 0.80, respectively. Cohen’skappa

coefﬁcient is commonly used to measure the level of agreement between nominal variables. We gave the category of

“yes”for raters whoseﬁnal mark corresponded to within one mark of the second raters’ﬁnal mark. We gave the cate-

gory of“no”for a rater who had mark discrepancies greater than one mark with the second rater. We chose this analysis

over simple percentage agreement because it takes into account agreement occurring by chance. Our kappa coefﬁcients

indicate a good level of inter-rater agreement according to Landis and Koch (1977).

Control variables

As demographic variables such as sex, age, and nationality inﬂuence individuals’attitudes toward other team

members (e.g., Chattopadhyay, George, & Lawrence, 2004), we used the information collected from the participants

regarding their sex (1 = male, 2 = female), age (actual age), and national origin (1 = born in Australia, 2 = born

outside Australia) as individual-level control variables. We used team size as a team-level control variable.

Results

Measurement model analyses for individual-level constructs

Before conducting the hypothesis tests, we established the construct validity of the individual-level variables in the

context of the obtained sample. Because of sample size constraints (team leveln= 57), we did not perform a separate

measurement model analysis for the team-level emotional skills constructs. This was also unnecessary given the

guidelines of Chen et al. (2004) for team-level analyses and to ensure theoretical consistency with our summative

composition approach that argues for a non-linear aggregation of individual emotional skills that collectively emerge

as a construct at the team level.

We conducted all model estimations on covariance matrices, using the maximum likelihood procedure in EQS 6.1

(Bentler & Wu, 2005). We used Hu and Bentler’s (1999) approach as a guide to assess modelﬁt. We reported corrected

test statistics (the Satorra–Bentler rescaled chi-square statistic and the comparativeﬁt index [CFI] robust) to take

account of the skewness in the data (Kline, 1998). Theapriorimeasurement model for individual-level emotional skills

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS709

DOI: 10.1002/job consisted of four correlated factors, where each factor represented a distinct emotional skill. An analysis of this model,

w2(98) = 135.92,p= .007, demonstrated a goodﬁt. Fit index values were good,CFI= 0.96, incrementalﬁtindex(IFI)=

0.96, non-normedﬁtindex(NNFI)= 0.95, root mean square error of approximation(RMSEA)= 0.04, standardized root

mean square residual(SRMR)= 0.06, factor loadings were moderate, and Cronbach’s alphas for the constructs were

satisfactory (Table 1). To test discriminant validity within the emotional skills measurement model, weﬁxed the

correlation parameters between the constructs at 1.0 and used a chi-square difference test to compare the constrained

and unconstrained models (Bagozzi & Phillips, 1982). The test revealed that the modiﬁed measurement model,

2(104) = 244.79,p<.001,ﬁtted the data signiﬁcantly better than the constrained model,Δw 2(6) = 108.87,p<.001.

The results of this test show that the participants did distinguish between the four emotional skills constructs.

Thea priorimeasurement model for communication performance at the individual level consisted of one factor

that represented effective and appropriate communication performances for an individual, as rated by their team

peers. An analysis of this model,w

2(65) = 618.00,p<.001, revealed a poorﬁt, given the combination of supportive

ﬁt indices,CFI= 0.76,IFI= 0.76,NNFI= 0.70,RMSEA= 0.19,SRMR= 0.13 (Anderson & Gerbing, 1988; Hu &

Bentler, 1999). Deleting problem indicators is the preferred solution for poorﬁtting models (Anderson & Gerbing,

1988). The deletion and the respeciﬁcation of the model to obtain a betterﬁt were based on face validity and

statistical considerations (residual correlations, factor loadings, Cronbach’s alphas). On this basis, we removed four

item indicators from the analysis and they included the following:He/she said several things that seemed out of

place in our group conversations;He/she got what he/she wanted out of our group conversations. The respeciﬁed

model revealed a substantially improvedﬁt as compared with thea priorimeasurement model,Δw

2(38) = 461.38,

p<.001. We deemed the modiﬁed model,w 2(27) = 156.62,p<.001, an acceptableﬁt, given that theCFI(0.92),IFI

(0.92),NNFI(0.90), andSRMR(0.05) all reached good cutoff values, theRMSEA(0.11) was marginal, the factor

Table 1. Means, standard deviations, reliabilities, and correlations among hierarchical linear modeling variables a.

Variables MeanSD123456789

1. Individual

own aware4.28 1.14 (.79)

2. Individual

own manage5.45 0.82 .28*** (.68)

3. Individual

other aware4.74 0.90 .48*** .24*** (.73)

4. Individual

other manage4.73 0.89 .49*** .22*** .36*** (.76)

5. Individual

peer-rated

communication

performance3.94 0.40 .05 .10 .06 .25*** (.93)

6. Team own

aware4.28 0.61 .53*** .03 .35*** .29*** .10—

7. Team own

manage5.47 0.42 .03 .48*** .12* .09 .20*** .07—

8. Team other

aware4.73 0.51 .33*** .10 .55*** .27*** .08 .63*** .22***—

9. Team other

manage4.75 0.51 .27*** .07 .26*** .58*** .40*** .51*** .15* .47***—

Note: We assigned Variables 6 to 9 of group-level emotional skills scores for individual groups to individuals within those groups. Thus, the ef-

fective sample size for group emotional skills isn= 57 project teams.

aInternal consistency reliabilities appear in parentheses along diagonal. We computed correlations between Variables 1 to 6 of individual-level

emotional skills and communication performance usingn= 244.

***p<.001; **p<.01; *p<.05 710A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job loadings were moderate to high, and the communication performance variable had a high Cronbach’s alpha

reliability (communication performancea= .93). The reliabilityﬁnding corresponds to those found by Canary and

Spitzberg (1987;a= .93) and Oetzel (2001;a= .71 toa= .92) for their communication performance measures.

Table 1 presents the means, the standard deviations, the Cronbach’s alphas, and the correlations between the

variables of interest.

Hypothesis tests

The discussion of results is by order of analytical method. We used hierarchical linear modeling (Raudenbush, Bryk,

Cheong, & Congdon, 2004) to test our individual-level and cross-level hypotheses. We used partial bivariate corre-

lational analysis, using SPSS, to test our team-level hypotheses. HLM allowed for the simultaneous estimation of (i)

theindividual-leveleffects of emotional skills on the within-team portion of individual communication performance

and (ii) thecross-leveleffect of team emotional skills on the between-team portion of individual communication per-

formance (Chen et al., 2007).

Following the procedure outlined by Mathieu and Taylor (2006, 2007), weﬁrst calculated (i) a series of null

models (no individual-level or team-level predictors) to examine the presence of within-team variance in individ-

ual-level communication performance and (ii) ICCs to examine the total systematic variance and the reliability of

individual-level communication performance due to between-team differences and distributions. ICC (1) represents

the proportion of variance in individual-level communication performance due to team variation, and ICC (2) reﬂects

the extent to which the reliability of individual-level communication performance can be explained by team means

for each of the scale items (Bliese, 2000). Note that the calculation of ICCs for individual-level communication

performance is intended to justify whether the amount of between-group variance in individual-level communication

performance is statistically sufﬁcient to be detected by group-level predictors (i.e., the four dimensions of group-

level emotional skills). It is not intended to provide statistical support for the group aggregation of communication

performance.

Results for the null model in Table 2 reveal signiﬁcant within-team variation in individual communication

performance (t

00= .08,w 2(56) = 288.03,p<.001). An ICC (1) of .56 and ICC (2) of .81 indicated that 56 per cent

of the variance in communication performance was due to between-team variance, and reliability based on the team

means was .81. The amount of between-team variance and the team mean reliability found for communication

performance are comparable with the median ICC 1 and ICC 2 values of dependent variable constructs analyzed using

HLM in the organizational literature (Bliese, 2000). Collectively, these results show that there is enough variance both

within groups and between groups in the individual communication performance data to provide justiﬁcation for

conducting multilevel analyses to test the individual-level and cross-level hypotheses (Snijders & Bosker, 1999).

Results of control variables

We conducted analyses to test whether each of the control variables had a signiﬁcant relationship with individual-

level communication performance. Results in Table 2 reveal that none of the control variables were signiﬁcantly

associated with individual-level communication performance, with the exception of national origin. Becker (2005) sug-

gests that non-signiﬁcant control variables use up degrees of freedom, resulting in biased parameter estimates. Thus, we

decided not to include the control variables of age and sex in the subsequent analyses.

Individual-level relationships

Hypotheses 1 and 2 predicted that an individual team member’s level of emotional awareness (own and others) and

emotional management (own and others) skills will be positively related to the individual team member’s

communication performance. Table 2 shows that none of the dimensions of individual-level emotional skills were

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS711

DOI: 10.1002/job associated with peer ratings of individuals’communication performance. Thus, Hypotheses 1 and 2 were not

supported.

Cross-level relationships

Hypotheses 5 and 6 predicted that team-level emotional awareness (own and others) and emotional management

(own and others) skills will be positively related to individual team members’communication performance. We

tested the cross-level effects of each of the team emotional skills dimensions on the between-team portion of

individual communication performance by using the“intercepts-as-outcomes”model (Hofmann & Gavin, 1998).

Table 2 shows the analysis using the mean score approach to operationalize team emotional skills constructs.

Table 2. Hierarchical linear modeling results for individual and team (average) emotional skills and individual communication

performance a.

VariablesNull model Individual communication performance

t Variancew

2 Coefﬁcient Standard error

Initial analysis

Individual communication performancet

00 0.08*** 288.03

Control variable analysis

Individual level

Age .00 0.01 0.41

Sex .04 0.04 1.00

National origin .25*** 0.06 4.48

Team level

Team size .02 0.02 0.72

bR²0.06

Individual-level analysis

Control variables

National origin .25*** 0.06 4.41

Emotional skills

Individual own awareg

10 .00 0.02 0.09

Individual own manageg

10 .01 0.02 0.56

Individual other awareg

10 .02 0.02 0.73

Individual other manageg

10 .03 0.02 1.11 bR²0.09

Cross-level analysis

Control variables

National origin .25*** 0.06 4.35

Emotional skills

Individual own awareg

10 .00 0.02 0.35

Individual own manageg

10 .00 0.03 0.26

Individual other awareg

10 .01 0.02 0.41

Individual other manageg

10 .00 0.03 0.03

Emotional skills

Team own awareg

10 .03 0.07 0.43

Team own manageg

10 .14* 0.07 1.89

Team other awareg

10 .15* 0.07 2.06

Team other manageg

10 .36*** 0.07 5.22 cR²0.33

aLevel 1,n= 244 students; and Level 2,n= 57 project teams. Entries are estimations ofﬁxed effects with robust standard errors.bR² = Proportion of within-branch variance explained by individual-level predictors.cR² = Proportion of between-group variance explained by group-level predictors.

***p<.001; **p<.01; *p<.05 712A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job Team-level own and other emotional management skills positively predicted individual-level communication

performance, whereas team-level other emotional awareness skills negatively predicted individual-level

communication performance. These results demonstrate that three out of four team-level emotional skills dimensions

had direct effects on individual-level communication performance after controlling for team size at the team level

and the four dimensions of emotional skills and national origin at the individual level. An examination of Table 1

indicates that there is no signiﬁcant correlation between team-level other awareness skills and individual-level

communication performance at the bivariate level. Such conﬂicting results between the correlation and the HLM

ﬁndings might suggest that a suppressor variable is present. For HLM cross-level analyses, however, it is important

to note that we are analyzing the relationship between team-level emotional skills and the between-group portion of

variance in individual communication performance. In contrast, Table 1 correlates team-level emotional skills with

both the within-group and between-group variances of individual communication performance. Conﬂicting results

such as these can legitimately occur without invalidating theﬁndings. It is concluded that there is support for

Hypothesis 6 and not for Hypothesis 5.

Alternative cross-level analysis

We also conducted a cross-level analysis operationalizing team emotional skills as standard deviation scores,

maximum scores, and minimum scores. We found no signiﬁcant cross-level inﬂuences of team emotional skills

for a dispersion model of team emotional skills (i.e., standard deviation scores). A maximum score composition

model showed individuals received more favorable ratings of communication performance the greater the emotional

management (other) score of the strongest member in the team. Furthermore, individual communication performance

was judged less favorably the greater the emotional awareness (own) score of the strongest member of the team. A

minimum score composition model showed individual communication performance within the team was assessed more

favorably the higher the emotional management (other) score of the weakest member in the team.

Team-level relationships

Hypotheses 3 and 4 tested whether team-level emotional skills would impact on team task performance scores. An

examination of partial bivariate correlation results (controlling for team size; see Table 3) revealed that team-level

own and other emotional awareness skills were positively related to task performance scores. Of the two team

emotional management skills, only team other emotional management had a positive relationship with team task

performance scores. These results provide full support for Hypothesis 3 and partial support for Hypothesis 4.

Discussion

In support of calls by Ashkanasy (2003), ourﬁndings show the value of a multilevel approach to more fully

understand the links between emotional skills and performance in teams. An examination of cross-level effects in

Table 3. Means, standard deviations, and partial correlations among team-level variables a.

Variables MeanSD123 45

1. Team own aware 4.28 0.61—

2. Team own manage 5.47 0.42 .01—

3. Team other aware 4.73 0.51 .58*** .23—

4. Team other manage 4.75 0.51 .47*** .12 .42***—

5. Team task performance 7.92 0.98 .25* .15 .31* .42***—

aWe computed partial correlations between variables usingn= 57 project teams, controlling for team size (effectiven= 54).

***p<.001; **p<.01; *p<.05EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS713

DOI: 10.1002/job particular provided unique information about the connections between important constructs that might not appear if

analyses are merely conducted at the individual or team level. Our study also highlighted the importance of the com-

position model chosen when conceptualizing and assessing team emotional skills in line with Bell’s (2007) and

Elfenbein’s (2006) discussions. The type of team, as well as the nature of the performance task being undertaken,

needs to be considered. The value of emotional skills in predicting communication performance in teams was also

established. Previous studies have investigated the relationship between emotional skills and task performance at a

single point in time (e.g., Jordan & Troth, 2004; Offerman, Bailey, Vasilopoulos, Seal, & Sass, 2004). We employed

a longitudinal design whereby the respondents reﬂected on teammates’communication performance over two

months when making their peer ratings. Independent raters also assessed teams’task performance at the end of this

period. Overall, for teams with no history and completing a compensatory task, our results suggest that the pooled

emotional skills of teams (assessed at the time of team formation) have an impact on individual communication per-

formance and on team task performance over a two-month period. Ourﬁndings also support the major premise of the

episodic interaction model of team behaviors (i.e., Marks et al., 2001) and the relational communications theory (i.e.,

Millar & Rogers, 1976) that focuses on communication as an important and enduring aspect of teams.

At the individual level, empirical evidence failed to support Hypotheses 1 and 2, which proposed a relationship

between individual team member emotional skills and communication performance. In our introduction, it was noted

that empirical results are mixed regarding the nature of the relationship between emotional skills and individual

performance (Côté & Miners, 2006). Some studies suggest that individual-level emotional skills and work performance

are positively related (Wong & Law, 2002; Wong, Law, & Wong, 2004), whereas other studies suggest that there is no

relation or an inconsistent relation between individual-level emotional skills and performance (Elfenbein et al., 2007;

Feyerherm & Rice, 2002). We argued that individual emotional skills would positively predict individual performance

within a team if the objective required communicating interdependently with other teammates. Although our results

showed that the individual skill of managing others’emotions is signiﬁcantly correlated with communication

performance at the individual level (Table 1), HLM revealed that this relationship disappeared once individual variance

effects were separated from team variance effects.

One possible explanation is that some of the previous studies reporting individual emotional skills and performance

links are actually capturing team-level effects (if data were collected in a team context). Another explanation is the

nature of the measures utilized in our study (i.e., self, peer, and SMEs). The measure of emotional skills was self-

assessed (within a team context), and the measure of communication performance was peer-assessed (within a team

context). Research has generally found low correlations between self-assessed and peer-assessed measures, with an

average correlation ofr= .14,p<.05 (Ready, Clark, Watson, & Westerhouse, 2000). Jordan and Ashkanasy’s

(2006) examination of emotion-speciﬁc research revealed a correlation ofr= .17,p<.05 between self-assessed and

peer-assessed emotional skills. Wong and Law’s (2002) study investigating a hypothesized positive relationship be-

tween EI and job performance further demonstrates the effect of same versus other source data on results. Although they

found that emotional labor signiﬁcantly moderated the EI and job performance relationship when incumbent self-assess-

ments of emotional labor were used, this relationship did not hold when employing supervisor assessments of emotional

labor. Wong and Law (2002) also found no effect of leader EI on follower job performance. They concluded that the EI

and performance outcome relationship is more complicated than initially thought and is dependent on the performance

measure, source of measurement, and the job requirements of the incumbent being assessed.

Several relationships were found between team-level emotional skills and team performance. In support of

Hypothesis 3, team own and other emotional awareness had a positive relationship with scores given by an

independent assessor for a team performance task developed over eight weeks. In partial support of Hypothesis 4, team

other emotional management was also positively related to team task performance scores. Similar to Elfenbein et al.

(2007), we believe that the beneﬁts of team emotional skills on team task performance arise largely in coordinating

the emotional aspects of relationships and interactions. A team’s ability to compensate for team members with

lower emotional skills enables the development of a more positive emotional environment within the team. This

allows members to more effectively focus on synchronizing their cognitive and interpersonal skills to achieve

performance goals.

714A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job Theﬁnding that team own emotional management was not related to team task was unexpected. Prior to data collec-

tion, we suggested that the management of own emotions would be conveyed in a team’s skills to regulate any negative

emotions commonly associated with public speaking, such as fear and anxiety, and that this would affect the extent a

team is able to deliver a clear argument in a suitable format. One explanation is that teams did not feel fearful or anxious

about the task. This might be due to either a context of presenting to supportive/empathetic peers or the low stakes

perceived by teams in terms of loss of marks if performance was not good enough. It is also feasible that the SMEs

allocating the performance mark did not consider the fear or the anxiety exhibited by the team when rating the delivery

aspects of the presentations but focused more upon teams’skills to establish rapport and engagement with the audience

(via other emotional management). What this nullﬁnding highlights is the importance of considering the type of team

task when thinking about the salience of particular team emotional skills.

At the cross level of analysis, and using a summative composition model, full support for Hypothesis 6 was found.

Teams with a greater skill in managing their own and others’emotions positively inﬂuenced the communication

performance of individual team members, as rated by other team members. These cross-level results are unique in

the literature and strongly indicate the utility of examining top-down team effects on individual performance (Chen

et al., 2007; Hitt et al., 2007). We believe it is likely that teams with greater collective skills for managing their own

and others’emotions will promote a communication environment in which members are more inclined to listen to

alternative viewpoints and follow the appropriate relational rules of effective and appropriate communication exchanges

(Canary & Spitzberg, 1987). That is, team emotional skills encourage a positive emotional tone within the team that

promotes a constructive communication environment for individuals to operate within. Theseﬁndings support previous

research that establishes a general link between EI and the maintenance of relationships (Foo et al., 2004).

Contrary to the expectations outlined in Hypothesis 5, our results showed that a team’s level of skill in recogniz-

ing others’emotions negatively inﬂuenced the communication performance of individuals within the team.

Although this was unexpected, a further examination of the communication effectiveness items show they largely

tap an individual’s capacity to have their views accepted within the team. Although clearly requiring further

research, it is possible that a team higher in emotional other awareness is more likely to optimize and promote a

focus on the“team view,”possibly due to greater team cohesion needs, and be less tolerant of individual team mem-

bers expressing discrepant views on how a task should be completed. Indeed, thisﬁnding might reveal a trade-off

between task and relationship aspects of team work across levels. A team focusing on relationship maintenance

or development within the group via team emotional other awareness skills might reduce an individual team

member’s capacity to focus on communication that is task related. If a team focuses too much on resolving divergent

ways of working, emotional skills resources are taken up (as aﬁnite pooled resource) to resolve relationship issues,

and this prevents individual communication and exchange of ideas (in an acceptable manner).

There are other instances in the literature where negative outcomes are linked to higher emotional skills. For instance,

Foo et al. (2004) found that individuals high on emotional skills did worse on a negotiation task because they focused

too heavily on their relationships with others involved in the negotiation, at the expense of the task. Although this

explanation does not explain the positive relationships found between team emotional awareness abilities and task

performance in our study, perhaps as Foo et al. (2004) suggested, the nature of the performance task is critical. Our

communication measure captured relationship aspects of performance over eight weeks, whereas the team performance

measure was a once-off task performance measure. It is possible that high levels of team emotional awareness detract

from (and thus, negatively inﬂuence) a team member’s communication in the long run.

Overall, ourﬁndings point to the importance of team emotional management abilities for both individual

communication performance (at cross level; Hypothesis 6) and team task performance (team level; Hypothesis 4).

This is especially the case for team-level management of others’emotions that was positively related to all

performance outcomes measured at the individual level (Table 1) and the team level. Clearly, the team and the collective

ways in which teams agree to work (including managing emotions) has an impact on both individual and

team outcomes.

We also considered alternative compilation typologies in this study at the cross level of analyses (i.e., minimum,

maximum, and standard deviation scores) and believed these results complement, as well as expand, our

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS715

DOI: 10.1002/job understanding of how team-level emotional skills impact on individual communication performance. Given the na-

ture of our newly formed teams, and the assigned type of task, we were not surprised that dispersion (i.e., standard

deviation) as a team representation of emotional skills did not emerge as an adequate predictor of performance.

Côté (2007) suggested that teams of members with varying levels of emotional skills might integrate divergent

approaches to group tasks and that this might result in an increased performance. For our teams, it appears that

any critical and diverse discussion that occurred about the team task because of the variance in emotional skills

of team members was not translated to performance presentation scores. On the other hand, capturing team-level

emotional skills by the score of the strongest member (i.e., maximum score) was consistent with our summative

approach in that a team member with the highest score on management of others’emotions positively impacted

on the communication performance of individual team members. These are probably the individuals who

compensate for the weaker team members captured in our summative approach.

Our results also revealed that the score of the weakest or strongest (i.e., minimum or maximum score) member on

team-level own awareness predicted lower levels of individual communication performance. It is possible that team

members with higher levels of this skill become distracted by emotions within the team (e.g., fear or anger), and this

inhibits the communication performance of individual team members. Similarly, an individual with the lowest level

of emotional awareness within the team, (e.g., who is unaware of and unable to resolve anger or sadness within the

team), is likely to impact negatively on the individual communication performance of team members. We also

believe these results complement ourﬁnding that any compensation by other members (captured by the average)

for team-level own awareness has no impact on communication performance. It also highlights to researchers the

importance of considering the composition of team emotional skills and the impacts on performance.

Overall, we believe that the results for the summative approach support our initial argument that, in some work

contexts, emotional skills might be viewed as resources team members combine to share and draw upon when

needed. Different teams accumulate different amounts of emotional skills, and teams with large amounts of

emotional skills appear to outperform teams with smaller amounts. Team emotional skills require a minimum

contribution by each team member in the emergence of the team construct, and individual contributions can vary

to some extent with differing emotional skills having a minimal role in the performance of the team (Kozlowski

& Klein, 2000).

The differential effects of team emotional skills dimensions on communication performance within teams and

team task performance also highlight the value of investigating more complex constructions of emotional skills.

Many researchers have restricted their analyses to a global measure of emotions to illustrate a generally positive

relationship between workplace outcomes and emotional skills (Bell, 2007). However, the relationship appears to

be more complicated than initially thought, and it is important to examine distinct emotional skills. The importance

of separating emotional skills relating to own and others’emotions was also demonstrated. Our study suggests that

the skill of being emotionally self-aware is not the same as being aware of the emotions of others in the context of

performance in teams. Similarly, the magnitude of the effect of the skill to manage other peoples’emotions does not

necessarily translate to the skill to manage one’s own emotions.

Limitations and future research directions

Foremost, the generalizability of ourﬁndings is limited given that the sample comprised undergraduate students with

an average age of 22 years. It is worth noting, however, that the sample had worked 4.4 years on average. A student

sample was initially chosen to increase control of team work experiences during the project and to ensure the type of

work completed was consistent across teams (i.e., compensatory). We also attempted to focus student performance

around a meaningful task (compared withad hoctasks typically used in the student sample context). Nevertheless,

there are clear beneﬁts to transferring this research to a work setting within situteams. For example, it might be

worthwhile considering the inﬂuence of team emotional skills on decision-making and problem-solving tasks made

716A. C. TROTHET AL.

DOI: 10.1002/job by work teams with signiﬁcant organizational andﬁnancial consequences (Barsade, 2002). It would also be useful to

collect continuing assessments of communication performance leading up to the task to ensure that retrospective

memory biases do not affect the data.

The use of a self-report measure of emotional skills is another limitation. This method, chosen for its relatively

quick and simple administration, preserved sufﬁcient validity and reliability requirements (e.g., Wong et al.,

2004) and enabled us to examine emotional skills within a speciﬁc context (i.e., the participant’s team). Although

our results showed the predictive capacity of the self-report measure of emotional skills when assessing teams, it

would be worthwhile pursuing research using alternative measures of emotional capabilities such as the situational

test of emotional management (McCann & Roberts, 2008) or to consider peer ratings of emotional skills. We also

acknowledge that the variable“management of own emotions”had a relatively low Cronbach’s alpha of .68,

although this is only below the recommended cutoff of .70 (Tabachnick & Fidell, 1989).

The model presented in Figure 1 suggests several other areas for future research. Although we focused on self-

managing teams with no appointed leader, it would be worthwhile examining how team-level emotional skills are

associated with team and individual performances in teams with a formally appointed leader, given that the leadership

process is often highly emotional (Côté, 2007). Investigating whether team emotional skills or leader emotional skills

have a greater effect on performance might be another fruitful area. We believe it would also be useful to identify

and investigate the mechanisms through which team emotional skills impact on performance in teams. Possible

mediating constructs include task interdependence (Bachrach et al., 2006), group cohesion, and team conﬂict (Yang

& Mossholder, 2004). Finally, given the performance task, we conceptualized and operationalized team emotional skills

using a summative composition approach to predict performance around a task that was compensatory in nature and for

which all team members were equally important (Steiner, 1972). However, it might be valuable to investigate other

types of performance tasks that are disjunctive or conjunctive in nature and to use the multilevel top-down approach

to examine other composition models of team emotional skills to predict performance. Finally, we believe an interesting

direction for future research would be to adopt a normative approach for examining emotional skills in highly

interdependent long-term teams and examine how such norms are shaped over time. Such a design would necessitate

measuring team members’emotional skills at various stages of the team’s lifecycle.

Implications for theory and practice

This article extends past research by theoretically and empirically relating emotional skills to performance in teams

from a multilevel perspective. We responded to calls by researchers including Ashkanasy (2003), Côté and Miners

(2006), and Elfenbein et al. (2007), to develop a model that simultaneously examines the multilevel impact of

emotional skills on performance. This study also promotes new ways of thinking about team performance in terms

of communication.

This is theﬁrst empirical study we are aware of to examine the cross-level inﬂuence of team-level emotional skills

on individual performance. Speciﬁcally, our results show that the two dimensions of team emotional skills were

signiﬁcantly and positively related to individual team members’communication performance (in terms of

effectiveness and appropriateness) within a team, whereas a negative relationship was found between team other

awareness and individual communication. Our results also provide some support for our team-level hypotheses in

the model. The overallﬁndings have implications for advancing research on emotional skills in teams and its unique

effects on communication performance outcomes.

A particular strength of this study is that both independent and dependent variables were collected at two

different times. Moreover, both dependent variables were independently rated. This strengthens the validity and

the reliability of theﬁndings. We argue that the combination of peer ratings of team communication performance

variables and independent assessment of team task performance provides a unique perspective on the performance

of teams and team members that have not been used as measures of performance outcomes in the existing

emotions research.

EMOTIONAL SKILLS IN TEAMS717

DOI: 10.1002/job In terms of practice, it seems emotional skills contribute to more productive interactions between team members.

It might be useful, therefore, to consider the development of team emotional skills as an important part of team-

building processes. The conceptualization of emotional skills within this study suggests that these are skills that

can be attained and utilized by team members. This may be via modeling behavior or it might be through formal

training processes such as team building and training (Jordan et al., 2002). The recognition that emotional skills

experienced and drawn upon as team resources appear to inﬂuence individual team members’behavior, and team

performance is important. Having the capability to address emotional issues within the team ensures it has maximum

opportunities for optimizing performance. In essence, our results suggest that team-level emotional skills generally

contribute to better communication performance for team members and better task performance for teams and

should be viewed as important skills for promoting performance in teams.

Finally, the pooled resources approach provides greater insight about whether a team has the emotional resources

to be productive and offers predictions about team performancebeforethe team is formed. Ourﬁndings suggest that

a team with a reasonable level of pooled emotional skills is able to compensate for an individual team member with

lower emotional skills in terms of active listening and reﬂection behaviors. Indeed, in terms of team allocation and se-

lection (comprising members with limited prior contact), Côté (2007) suggests the value of identifying some individuals

with higher emotional skills before team formation to compensate for those with lower skills, in terms of the impact on

performance. We further propose the particular importance of selecting team leaders with strong emotional skills who

are likely to have the greatest impact on the team at both the team and cross levels of performance.

Acknowledgement

This study was funded from an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. Thank you to the reviewers and

action editor for helpful suggestions to improve this paper.

Author biographies

Ashlea C. Trothis a senior lecturer in the Grifﬁth Business School, Grifﬁth University, Australia. She gained her

PhD in psychology at the University of Queensland. Her current research interests include team performance and

emotions, communication, and employee adjustment during organizational change.

Peter J. Jordanis a professor of organizational behavior in the Grifﬁth Business School, Grifﬁth University, Aus-

tralia. He gained his PhD in management at the University of Queensland. His current research interests include

emotional intelligence, emotions in organizations, team performance, and leadership.

Sandra A. Lawrenceis a research fellow in the Centre for Work Organization and Well being in the Grifﬁth Busi-

ness School, Grifﬁth University. She gained her PhD in management at the University of Queensland. Her current

research interests are in emotion regulation during organizational change, team interpersonal dynamics and perfor-

mance, workplace social support, stress and coping, and workplace productivity.

Herman H. M. Tseis a senior lecturer in the Grifﬁth Business School, Grifﬁth University, Australia. He received

his PhD in management from the University of Queensland. His research interests include LMX, transformational

leadership, emotions in teams, and multilevel issues in organizations.

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