Impact of Metacognitive Ability on the Performance of Employees Working in Teams and the Moderating Role of Team Characteristics

Employee performance is affected by both individual- and team-level factors. The current work investigates the impact of an individual’s metacognitive ability on their performance at the workplace while accounting for the impact of team characteristics on employee performance. The responses for the study were collected from 180 work teams consisting of 1,216 employees. The respondent teams were classified as one of the 36 distinct types of teams conceptualized in the study. Multi-level modelling was used to explore employee performance, both in conjunction with and independent of team characteristics. The analysis was done on only accurately calibrated responses ( n = 852). The results demonstrated a 33.8% variance in employee performance that can be explained by metacognitive ability alone. The findings also suggest that metacognitive ability positively impacts the performance of employees across a wide variety of work teams, such that most team characteristics fail to significantly impact employee performance once the impact of metacognitive ability is accounted for. Though team tasks and team size continue to impact employee performance, their incremental contribution to explaining the variance in employee performance becomes quite small. The results strongly support the influence of metacognitive ability on employee performance. The implications of the study are discussed.