The Origin of Team Confidence: Developing Theory of Collective Efficacy Formation from the Ground Up

Research has shown that collective efficacy, defined as a group’s shared perception of its ability to successfully perform a task, positively influences team outcomes. And yet, we know relatively little about the factors and conditions that shape this important emergent state. Our goal was to build a comprehensive model of the factors that influence collective efficacy. And because it is team members who must process, accumulate, and make sense of information that can influence collective efficacy perceptions, we used a qualitative approach in which we asked informants to provide examples of situations where they felt more or less confident about their team’s capability and to elaborate on the surrounding cues. This process resulted in a concept map containing 91 cues, from which we generated 5 higher-order clusters of antecedents. We labeled these clusters as follows: 1) team dynamics, 2) leadership, 3) work process, 4) team members, and 5) team performance. In the discussion section we focus on the uniq...