Relationships Among Team Trust, Team Cohesion, Team Satisfaction, Team Effectiveness and Project Performance as Perceived by Project Managers in Malaysia

Today, more and more project teams are formed to achieve organisational objectives as organisations generally recognized the importance and benefits of project teams. Rationales for this study include: (a) it is unclear from literature what kind of relationships among performance outcomes, team attitudinal outcomes and team behavioural outcomes in a project setting, (b) it is unclear from literature what are the team outcome factors that can predict project performance, and (c) what kind of result team outcome factors can produce in a project setting whereby there is resource and time constraints compare to normal work teams which are ongoing and operational in nature. This study developed a research model underpinned on Cohen & Bailey's (1997) Team Effectiveness Framework to empirically analyze some team outcome factors. Result showed that when project team trust is high, this will improve project performance, team satisfaction, team effectiveness and team cohesion. At the same time, strong team cohesion also increases team satisfaction. However, strong team cohesion is not predicting project performance and team effectiveness positively. On the contrary, strong team cohesion is actually deteriorating the project performance. The intervention of team satisfaction can improve project performance and team effectiveness. Insignificant relationship between team effectiveness and project performance suggests that team effectiveness alone cannot predict project performance directly. Discussion, conclusion and limitations are also included in this article