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Journal of Applied Psychology 2013

Voluntary survey completion among team members: Implications of noncompliance and missing data for multilevel research.

Robert R. Hirschfeld1; Michael S. Cole2; Jeremy B. Bernerth3; Tracey E. Rizzuto3

1 University of Colorado Colorado Springs · 2 Texas Christian University · 3 Louisiana State University

Abstract

We explored whether voluntary survey completion by team members (in aggregate) is predictable from team members' collective evaluations of team-emergent states. In doing so, we reanalyze less-than-complete survey data on 110 teams from a published field study, using so-called traditional and modern missing data techniques to probe the sensitivity of these team-level relationships to data missingness. The multivariate findings revealed that a greater within-team participation rate was indeed related to a higher team-level (mean) score on team mental efficacy (across all four missing-data techniques) and less dispersion among team member judgments about internal cohesion (when the 2 modern methods were used). In addition, results show that a commonly used approach of retaining only those teams with high participation rates produces inflated standardized effect size (i.e., R²) estimates and decreased statistical power. Suggestions include research design considerations and a comprehensive methodology to account for team member data missingness.

DOI
10.1037/a0031909
Sources
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