Team Potency as a Driver of Higher and More Equal Task Contributions

Teams thrive when individuals converge around a shared goal. However, task contributions are not always evenly distributed among team members. Using the multilevel group process framework and consensus emergence modeling, we found that contribution patterns varied over time and across teams, suggesting team-specific rather than normative trajectories. Team potency beliefs positively predicted the initial team-level mean of task contributions, and this pattern was stable across time. Further, team potency beliefs positively predicted increasing similarity in contributions within teams across time. These findings highlight team potency as an internal driver of both higher-quality and more equal contributions within teams.