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Category: Project

Description: Recent trends indicate that organizations will continue their strategic pursuit of teamwork for the foreseeable future, which will create a need for accurate assessments of individuals’ performance in teams. Although individual behaviors can be assessed by fellow team members (i.e., peers), the extent to which the team shapes rater perceptions, versus the target’s behavior is unclear. We conducted two studies to understand how and why team context influences peer ratings of individual performance. In Study 1, we conducted cross-classified modeling on a sample of 7,160 performance observations of 568 targets made by 567 perceivers who were each members of four separate teams. Results indicated that team membership accounted for a substantially higher proportion of perceiver, relative to target, variance. In Study 2, we conducted social relations modeling with a sample of 679 performance observations collected from 217 individuals nested in 46 teams to test the effects of psychological safety on perceiver, target, and team variance components. Perceptions of psychological safety accounted for proportionally larger perceiver, relative to target, variance in OCB and task performance ratings. Altogether, team context appears to affect perceivers’ judgments of behavior more than the target behavior itself, implying that peer-ratings sourced from different teams are unlikely to be comparable. We consider the implications for the practice of peer performance ratings in team and the potential modifications to social cognitive theory, such that certain aspects of the team context, including psychological safety, appear to act as a cognitive heuristic by molding perceiver judgments of targets.