ABSTRACT

Teams are distinguished from groups and other collectives largely due to a requirement for interdependence. That is, no one person on the team can perform the team’s tasks alone. Rather, there is a need to exchange some type of resource among team members for the team to perform effectively. In many instances, the resource that must be shared is information. In other cases, a more tangible resource can be transferred among team members, such as a tool. In all cases, however, it is presumed that effective, efficient communications are required in order for teams to do their work. In fact, every existing theoretical model of team performance has included some aspect of communications as foundational to a team’s performance. From their review of the literature in the area of intrateam communications, Kanki and Palmer (1993) concluded that research needed to expand our horizons with respect to “identifying communication links among teams and disentangling both the functions and variations with speech act patterns.”