Abstract
Intragroup trust plays an important role in group performance. Using samples of Chinese military service members, three studies were conducted to examine the effect of intragroup trust on military group performance, as well as the mediating effect of self-uncertainty. Employed a double randomization design, Study 1 first operated participants’ intragroup trust into high or low levels, and then measured their self-uncertainty and group performance. The results showed that intragroup trust decreased self-uncertainty and increased group performance, and self-uncertainty mediated the effect of intragroup trust on group performance. Study 2 first operated participants’ self-uncertainty into high or low levels, and then measured their group performance. The results showed that self-uncertainty negatively affected group performance. To improve the validities of Studies 1 and 2, Study 3 first measured participants’ intragroup trust (both by a military intragroup trust (both by a military intragroup trust survey and by a revised trust game) and self-uncertainty, and then evaluated their group performance in a paper-tower-building task three days later. The bootstrap analyses supported the results of Studies 1 and 2. To conclude, this research demonstrated that intragroup trust improves military group performance by decreasing self-uncertainty.
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Notes
According to our previous experiences, the performance in this task was heavily influenced by luck. Therefore, this study used the perception of group performance instead of the objective performance such as the height of the paper tower.
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Funding
The present study was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Foundation of China (16CSH013).
The data of this study can be found in Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HQH2LM).
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GL and JW developed the experimental design, RH, TZ and JW collected data, GL and RH made data analysis, GL and TZ prepared the manuscript.
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Liu, G., Zhang, T., Huang, R. et al. Intragroup trust improves the perceived military group performance by decreasing self-uncertainty. Curr Psychol 41, 3318–3327 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02361-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02361-8