Small Group Research, Ahead of Print.
We investigated how team composition, in terms of members’ emotions about the team tasks ahead, predicts performance on these team tasks. In 45 student teams, a higher average level of anxiety and happiness, but not anger, about the team assignments predicted higher team grades 6 weeks later. We explored potential mediating team processes. These findings contribute to the literature on team affect, which has so far struggled to identify benefits of negative affect in teams: task-related anxiety is linked to better performance of real-world teams. This highlights the importance of studying compositional effects of individual affective states in teams.