Project Goals, Team Performance, and Shared Understanding

The need to provide teams with clear, concise goals is prevalent in the team literature. Advancing this idea one step further involves the need for team members and the organization to have a shared understanding of what is required. Data collected from team leaders and members are explored to assess the direct relationship between team goals and team performance, the level of agreement between team leaders and members, and the consequences of divergent opinions.Team goals are positively related to team performance on business goal achievement, schedule performance, and internal team processes. Team leaders and members were found to disagree on the level of internal team processes used; however, this divergence had no impact on team performance. Further, team members were found to disagree only when team goals were reported to be at lower levels.