Antecedents of group performance in the context of congruence

The increase of competition has forced businesses to look beyond individual performances and pay greater attention to group performance, which is the synergistic sum of individual performances. In this context, identification of the premises of group performance and of group dynamics have emerged as valuable topics of research and implementation. The well-adopted lean organizational structures, the eradication of intermediate hierarchical structures and the proliferation of project-oriented jobs have boosted the importance of teamwork. The effort towards improving group performance, which can be regarded as the end-goal of teamwork, has further motivated the research on identifying the independent variables and intermediate variables affecting this context. Group engagement can be identified as one of the variables that facilitates the relationship between group-level dynamics and group performance. Higher engagement between working group members can positively influence group performance. The increasing variety in business groups necessitates the coexistence of group members with different properties in a team. One such difference is between the prevalent values of the working group vs. values of individuals. The positive influence of successful engagement of individuals on group dynamics is affected by the conformity of the individuals' values and the values of the working group (i.e., individual-group congruence). Therefore, evaluating the individual-group congruence is important for the identification of dynamics that positively influence both the group engagement and overall group performance. Within this relationship, the working culture of the department/working group/functional subsystem will take on either a positively or negatively influencing role on realizing successful group engagement. The increase of team/group works are expected to pull businesses out of the formal framework and cause informal components and structures to gain higher functional importance. Within this context, the internal communications of a business will also evolve towards an informal characteristic. The contribution of individual-group congruence to the engagement of individuals in the group and to improving group performance will therefore also be affected by the informal communication characteristics. This work investigates the relationships between the mentioned variables. The quantitative research method has been adopted and 200 white-collared employees from 20 businesses in the manufacturing and service sectors have been sampled with the convenient sampling method and scales are applied. The resulting data has been processed with the SPSS.22 program and the proposed relationships have been analyzed with correlation, multi linear regression and hierarchical regression methods. According to the research findings, innovation based and social value based initiative aspects of the individual-group congruence has a positive influence on group performance. Group engagement affects the relationship between individual-group congruence and group performance as an intermediate variable. The group (sub) culture and informal communication characteristics have not been observed to have a significant moderating variable effect. Keywords: Group performance, group engagement, individual-group congruence, informal communication, group (sub) culture