Team Cohesiveness

Humans are able to accomplish great projects by forming heterogeneous and complementary teams in terms of skills, knowledge and behavioural competencies. Studies agree cohesiveness is an important characteristic of high-performing teams and underline the existing positive correlation between cohesion and performance, especially when it comes to project management teams.

Cohesiveness is the strength and extent of bonds between members of a same team. It determines the motivation of team-mates to remain in the team and achieve the common goal. Due to its worthiness, it is of great relevance for leaders and project managers to understand how to create and promote cohesion in their teams. Cohesiveness is multidimensional, therefore needs time to be developed and it is more likely to occur in small size teams.

Although team cohesiveness is a crucial aspect in teams that reach high performances, it would be a mistake for team leaders to focus only on a single aspect. A number of other factors equally important contribute to the performance of a team.

Meaning and Importance of Cohesion

Nowadays project teams are largely employed in many different industries, in change management projects within organisations and in education as well. The major advantages of teams are the diversity in knowledge and ideas and, if the team is in good sync, the ability to be more effective and efficient than a single person. Psychological aspects have been identified as key elements of project success and efficacy, in particular, it exists a positive correlation between team cohesion and team performance. Cohesion fosters motivation among team-mates and allows coordination.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, cohesion is “the act or state of sticking together tightly”.

At first, team cohesion researchers presented cohesion as a unidimensional characteristic of high-performing teams referring to it as “a field of forces making group members stay together”. The unidimensional description was too vague to convert it in a measurable characteristic, therefore a new multidimensional description was adopted. The most common one is tridimensional and includes:

• “Social cohesion” that refers to interpersonal attraction between team-mates, interest in other’s company, time spent together and friendship or closeness;

• “Task cohesion” that reflects the shared commitment of a team to a certain task or goal and the motivation to coordinate team efforts to achieve goals;

• “Group pride”, a dimension studied mostly in sport teams.

Since it takes time to create meaningful bonds, one of the most relevant factors that influences cohesion is the time spent together.