Emergent customer team performance and effectiveness: An ex post facto study on cognition and behavior in enterprise systems implementation

Abstract

Implementing enterprise systems usually involves a partnership between the customer organization’s internal team and an external team with professionals from the technology supplier and the business consultants. On both sides, team performance (a process) and team effectiveness (an outcome) emerge partly due to the unpredictable effects of the interaction between human factors at the individual level. Thus, a team’s dynamics and achievements may not fully correspond to its members’ individual characteristics—for instance, a modest team may be formed by outstanding individuals, and an outstanding team may be formed by modest individuals. With an ex post facto approach and a case study on a successful ERP customization project, we studied the interaction effects between human factors (here represented by cognition and behavior) that lead to team performance and effectiveness. Moreover, we focused on the customer side of teamwork due to gaps identified in the literature. Individual team members in our study did not score the highest in several cognitive and behavioral measures; thus, we conclude that a high-performance, effective team does not necessarily possess a theoretically ideal cognitive and behavioral archetype. This study further contributes to the ambiguous debate on performance and effectiveness, their emergent nature, and the role of team management.