Team Accountability Under Outsourcing:the Mechanisms Of Cognitive Behavior And Neur

Outsourcing, as a strategy of organizational change to focus on core competition, is highly valued by researchers and practitioners. Outsourcing refers to contracting business needs to professional service providers to focus on core business, improve core competence, and achieve objectives better. Outsourcing provides wide opportunities for organizational profitability, and new chances for global industrial restructuring and optimization of resource allocation in the age of information and knowledge. Outsourcing changes the nature of work and organization, in that vendor project team, wandering between vendor and client, is accountable to both of them. Accountability model between organizations is different from the one within organization. Besides, boundary management among vendor TMT, vendor project team, and client is becoming obscure. Team accountability is one solution to deal with the relationship and regulate administrative behavior. Thus, study on team accountability under outsourcing has strong problem-driven theoretical direction.Accountability refers to being answerable to audiences for performing up to certain prescribed standards, thereby fulfilling obligations, duties, expectations, and other charges. The two classical theories on accountability are social contingency model and meso-level theory. Social contingency model explains how accountability affects decision making, and individual coping strategies to accountability. From the view of interaction between individual and organization, meso-level theory introduces effects of organizational accountability system on individual and organization, and the mechanism. However, those theories can not answer the following questions well under the change of environment:(1) the characteristics and dimensions of team accountability;(2) the effect of team accountability on team performance, and the mechanism;(3) decision making of accountable team under inter-organization. In order to answer the aforementioned questions, based on social contingency model and meso-level theory of accountability, and vendor project team as subject, three studies explored team accountability and its mechanism under outsourcing.In study one, three sub-studies explored the structure of team accountability. In sub-study one, semi-structured interview with leader and member from five teams were conducted, and three dimensions emerged by adopting content analysis, including responsibility, transparency, and response. Based on sub-study one, sub-study two compiled team accountability scale to157participants from31vendor teams, and14items were finally formed after exploratory factor analysis. In sub-study three, confirmatory factor analysis was applied to212participants from36vendor teams, and the results supported the three dimensions of team accountability. Furthermore, the relationship among individual accountability, team responsibility, and team accountability was elaborated.Study two explored multi-level effect of team accountability on team performance and turnover intention and its mechanism.489leaders and members from120vendor teams as participants; five scales as tools, including team accountability scale, team cohension scale, job tension scale, turnover intension scale, and team performance scale; multilevel structural equation modeling as analytical method; the results showed that team accountability affected turnover intention, and the relationship was mediated by job tension and team cohension separately. The study two also compared the results between vendor project team and general team, indicating the context specificity of team accountability effect mode under outsourcing.Team leader accountability, referring to team leader takes full accountability and subordinates are accountable to leader, is common among team accountability modes. Assuming team leader accountability as team accountability model, study three explored the neural decision mechanism of team accountability to both vendor and client. Sub-study one employed undergraduates as subjects and coin toss game as experimental scenario. The results showed that when accountable to single audience, no matter who was vendor or client, individual adopted conformity to please the audience. When accountable to dual audience with conflict of interests, individual engaged in preemptive self-criticism, that is, she/he considered dual interests to achieve satisfactory results for both of them. Need for cognition moderated the coping tactics when accountable to dual audience, such that people with low need for cognition relied on evasion more than the ones with high need for cognition. With the same research paradigm and college students as subjects, event-related potentials revealed N1elicited by stimuli during vendor accountability was significantly larger than the ones elicited by stimuli during non-accountability, client accountability and dual accountability separately, reflecting the discrimination process of decision and the different intentions of discrimination efforts under accountability. Compared with the random discrimination efforts under non-accountability, individual discriminated to balance the dual interests under dual accountability.In conclusion, heuristic integration model of team accountability was proposed, research paradigm of accountability was integrated, and implication was excavated under Chinese context. Finally, the practical implication, research limitations, and future development were discussed.