This thesis examined the role of "soft skills", namely team political skill, in predicting team effectiveness. My primary goal was to extend the current paradigm of individual political skill (a work context understanding of others applied to influencing their actions to advance one's own or organizational agenda) by developing a model of political skill composition at the team level.  Based on the results obtained from 189 student project teams and 28 business work teams I found team political skill operationalized as a group mean to be a strong predictor of team emergent states. The results also supported the need for additional methods of operationalizing team political skill, specifically dispersion and minimum score. To explain how and when the effects of team political skill on team effectiveness hold, I hypothesized and demonstrated the mediation effect of team emergent states, including group cohesiveness, team trust, and team conflict. I also identified perception of organizational politics and team task interdependence as important moderators of the team political skill and team emergent states relationship. Finally, I explored the impact of team political skill in comparison to the impact of the leader political skill and found that team political skill was an important predictor of team effectiveness beyond leader political skill.  The findings provide important practical guidelines for organizations on employees’ political skill composition in effective teams. The organizational implications extend to recruitment, training, development and team building.