ABSTRACT
Teams are a way of life in modern organizations. It is easy to take this for granted, but the safety and well-being of people in many industries and those they serve rely on effective communication, collaboration, and coordination. Good teamwork in the cockpit has helped to make commercial flights safer than the highways. Poor teamwork contributes heavily to the estimated 98, 000 deaths a year caused by preventable medical errors in the US. For these reasons, we (along with many others) have dedicated our professional careers to understanding and improving team performance where it counts – in high-stakes industries. We have found that team performance measurement is central to understanding and building high-performance teams. It is critical for building and testing new theory and for systematically applying the science of teams to improve productivity, safety, and quality through better teamwork. However, measuring team performance in the field can be very challenging. Organizations have many moving parts, and practical constraints such as time, access, and control over confounding variables frequently threaten to undermine the meaning of any measurements.
