Team Focus in Focus: Its Implications for Real Teams and Their Members

Abstract

We develop and test a cross-level model of team focus on positive and negative discretionary team member behaviors. Using data collected from 405 team members across 76 teams and 15 organizations, we find that team focus is positively associated with interpersonal and organizational citizenship behaviors, and negatively associated with interpersonal deviance. We also find that team focus is positively associated with team members’ level of action identification. Exploratory analyses suggest that team members’ level of action identification might mediate the relationships between team focus, organizational citizenship, interpersonal deviance, and organizational deviance, respectively. We also find that real teams do not distinguish between outcome and process focus like lab and student teams do. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.