JOURNAL OF HOSPITALITY & TOURISM RESEARCH Bartlett et al. / TEAM PROCESS AND PERFORMANCE RESEARCH NOTE This section of the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research features research notes and short review articles. Individuals interested in submitting research notes or review articles should write to the executive editor. The editor reserves the right to evaluate materials for their suitability for publication in this section. THE EFFECT OF TEAM-BUILDING ON TEAM PROCESS AND PERFORMANCE A. L. “Bart” Bartlett Jonathan Probber Susan Mohammed The Pennsylvania State University This article reports the effects of a team-building intervention on team process and team performance of hospitality student teams, compared to a control group. Effects on process were positive and significant on all criteria. Effects on performance were all positive, though not all differences were significant. Implications for hospitality teams and team- building are discussed. KEYWORDS: groups; teams; team-building; group process; group performance. Teams are increasingly ubiquitous in hospitality organizations. In today’s competitive environment, the need for effective teams has led to expanded interest in team-building to improve team functioning and better achieve team goals. Because of the performance possibilities that teamwork and team-building offer, they have taken on increased importance for practitioners and researchers. A tax- onomy of teams provided by Cohen and Bailey (1997) describes four types of teams, examples of which may be found in hotels or restaurants: work teams (hotel front office or housekeeping staffs, food service kitchen, and dining room staffs), parallel teams (quality circles, a hotel safety committee), project teams (e.g., a team assembled to open a new hotel or restaurant property), and manage- ment teams (the typical hotel executive committee). Although we are aware that group and team are not always held synonymous by researchers, we choose to use the terms interchangeably. This article describes a research project in which a team-building intervention was used to help student groups work together more effectively. The purpose of the research was to measure the effect of the team-building intervention on team Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research, Vol. 23, No. 3, August 1999, 299-311 © 1999 Council on Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education 299 at Universitas Gadjah Mada on March 15, 2015 jht.sagepub.com Downloaded from