Team Microdynamics: Toward an Organizing Approach to Teamwork

ABSTRACT

Team researchers in the field of organizational behavior (OB) seem to be increasingly aware of the need to embrace the organizing nature of teams. In this article, we outline the limitations of the prevailing static collectivist explanations in team research and suggest how an increased emphasis on a microdynamics-oriented approach that takes into account the essentially relational and organizing nature of teams can provide new insights to our understanding of teamwork. We argue that a multilevel, multi-theoretical, and multi-period framework may help enhance our understanding of teams. To show the advancements of the field in this sense, we review the OB literature on teams and highlight exemplars of research that have started to emphasize the microdynamic nature of teams consistent with this general framework, and their contributions to our understanding of team phenomena. We conclude by outlining the opportunities and needs for a microdynamic insight into team and teamwork, providing guidance for scholars who are interested in adding a microdynamic perspective into their models of teamwork.

Notes

1. Note that because we were focused specifically on publications in OB and OP, we did not include Strategic Management Journal (a publication that focuses exclusively on macro phenomena) in our list, and instead included Organization Science, a journal that is now considered an upper-echelon OB/OP journal (Conlon, Morgeson, McNamara, Wiseman, & Skilton, 2006).

2. Although we differentiate between teams, groups, and the combination of teams and groups as keywords in our figure, for the simplicity of discussion, we consider the teams and “teams and groups” combination as a singular representation of the emergence of the “teams” language.

3. We recognize that some scholars still use the terms “group” and “team” interchangeably. For example, Arrow et al.’s (2000) book on Groups as Complex Systems—perhaps the most forward-thinking work on multi-period/multi-level research on teamwork—used the “group” label as an overarching term for work collectives, and had a sub-category labeled “team” (which they differentiated from “task forces” and “crews”). Given the importance of teams to addressing the primary focus of OB research (Heath & Sitkin, 2001) and the challenges associated with typological organizing systems (Hollenbeck et al., 2012), we believe that the management literature would be better served using “team” as the overarching terminology. Moreover, differentiating between groups and teams aids the literature, given that the term “group” evokes images—such as individuals standing in an elevator—different than the term “team” —which suggests an image of people playing together. Standardizing language can help develop a critical paradigm within the OB literature (Pfeffer, 1993), making the teams’ literature more relevant (Pfeffer, 2007).