Causal Explanation of Team Cohesion Based on Job-adequate Skills, Role Ambiguity, and Participative Leadership: The Mediating Role of Team Trust

In today's world, when doing work requires multiple skills, judgments, and experiences, the use of teams and workgroups has become increasingly common to achieve performance beyond the individuals’ performance. Many executive managers believe that hiring teams and workgroups allows them to achieve higher levels of performance by producing better products or providing better services at lower levels of cost and time. Therefore, collective work has become more important day by day and organizations have become more interested in creating teams and workgroups.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

Job-adequate skills: Teamwork is one of the most important facilitators in achieving positive and cost-effective results in the field of current organizations. A team is a group of people with different and complementary abilities and skills who strive to achieve a common goal.Role ambiguity: Role ambiguity is an aspect of job stressors that refers to a person's level of uncertainty about what his or her job functions and responsibilities are.Participative leadership: Participative leadership occurs when, instead of being assigned by a single leader, leadership plans, responsibilities, or actions are shared or distributed among group members.Team trust: Team trust is a 4-dimensional concept: 1) propensity to trust, 2) perceived trustworthiness, 3) cooperative behaviors, 4) monitoring behaviors.Team cohesion: Team cohesion is a dynamic process in which members tend to maintain intimacy, loyalty to each other, and integrity in pursuing team goals.

The research design was correlation and its strategy was structural equation modeling. The statistical population of the study included all employees of the South East Khuzestan Water Exploitation, Production, and Transmission Company in 2017, whose total number was nearly 600 people. 350 people were selected as a sample by simple random sampling method, of which 321 questionnaires were well-qualified and determined the final sample size.

 The results showed that the final model goodly fitted the data. The results also showed that job-adequate skills and participative leadership had positive effects and role ambiguity had a negative effect on team trust. Job-adequate skills and team trust also had a positive and significant direct effect on team cohesion. In addition, the results showed that job-adequate skills, role ambiguity, and participative leadership affected team cohesion through the mediating role of team trust.

 CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS:

According to the research results, managers of organizations are advised to pay attention to concepts such as role ambiguity, skills of team members, type of team leadership, and trust between team members when forming teams and working groups.