Measuring teamwork and team performance in collaborative work environments

Purpose Tasks in today’s global marketplace are becoming increasingly reliant on the work of teams. As creativity and innovation are frequently required for organizational success, work teams are becoming more and more prominent within all types of organizations. With the rise of organizational teams, the purpose of this paper is to develop appropriate tools to measure how well these teams work together and how well they perform required tasks. Design/methodology/approach This paper outlines a measure of teamwork, a transactive memory system (TMS), and proposes new methods for using TMSs to measure team structures, processes, and performance. These new methods include dispersion models and social network analysis. Findings Dispersion models and social network analysis hold promise for the future evaluation of TMS and other team constructs. Originality/value This paper provides a summary of two novel approaches to the measurement of TMS and other team constructs.