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Peer monitoring, which occurs when individuals notice and respond to their peers' behavior or performance results, is an informal organizational control that has not been extensively studied. Agency theory suggests that peer monitoring should be associated with higher performance because it allows workers whose interests are aligned with those of the organization to encourage their peers to perform well and deters inappropriate behavior by increasing the chances that it would be detected.This paper considers two research questions. The first is, "What is peer monitoring?" We found two types of peer monitoring. Direct peer monitoring occurs when workers notice their peers' behavior or results and respond in a forthright way, such as correcting coworkers who make mistakes. Indirect peer monitoring occurs when workers gossip about or avoid poorly performing peers. The second research question is, "Is peer monitoring associated with higher work-unit performance?" We examined the effects of both types of peer monitoring on the performance of 67 theme park work units. We considered supervisory monitoring, task interdependence, and cohesiveness as moderators.We measured performance as the degree to which the work unit is free of employee behavior problems and found a positive main effect of direct peer monitoring. The effect was stronger when supervisory monitoring was low or task interdependence was high. Indirect peer monitoring did not have a main effect on work-unit performance, but when supervisory monitoring or cohesiveness was high, indirect peer monitoring was associated with lower performance. We discuss these results and suggest areas for future research.

This study focuses on team members' perceptions of organizational support as antecedents of team processes and potency. Potency is team members' collective belief that the team can be effective. In a field study of 39 work teams in six organizations, the authors find a positive relationship between organizational support and potency that is mediated by effective team processes. The authors also find a positive relationship between team processes and managers' ratings of team performance that is mediated by potency. Understanding how organizational support affects potency is important because research has consistently found that potency is strongly associated with team performance, yet little is known about how organizational context affects potency. Therefore, this research has practical as well as theoretical implications.

Emergent states are team-level attributes that reflect team members' collective attitudes, values, cognitions, and motivations and influence team effectiveness. When measuring emergent states (e.g., cohesion, conflict, satisfaction), researchers frequently collect ratings from individual group members and aggregate them to the team level. After aggregating to the team level, researchers typically focus on mean differences across teams and ignore variability within teams. Rather than focusing on the mean level of emergent states, this study draws on recent advances in multilevel theory and describes an approach for examining the specific patterns of dispersion (i.e., disagreement) across five emergent states. Our findings suggest that teams reliably demonstrate different patterns of rating dispersion that are consistent with existing theoretical frameworks and typologies of dispersion, yet have not previously been empirically demonstrated. We also present evidence that the different patterns of dispersion in emergent states are significantly related to key team outcomes, even after controlling for the mean levels of those emergent states. These findings underscore the importance of exploring additional forms of team-level constructs and highlight ways of extending our understanding of group-level phenomena.