Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 33, 301–315 (2012)
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1775
Editorial
The changing ecology of teams: New directions for
teams research†
RUTH WAGEMAN1*, HEIDI GARDNER2 AND MARK MORTENSEN3
1
2
3
Summary
Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Organizational Behavior, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Organizational Behavior, INSEAD, Paris, France
The nature of collaboration has been changing at an accelerating pace, particularly in the last decade. Much of
the published work in teams research, however, is still focused on the archetypal team that has well-defined
membership, purposes, leadership, and standards of effectiveness—all characteristics that are being altered by
changes in the larger context of collaboration. Each of these features is worth attention as a dynamic construct
in its own right. This article explores what the teams research community has to gain by researching,
theorizing, and understanding the many new forms of contemporary collaboration. Copyright © 2012 John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords: team stability; interdependence; changing ecology; teams research
This should be a great time for trailblazing theory and research on collaboration and teamwork. The nature of
collaboration has been changing at an accelerating pace, particularly in the last decade. Some of the expansive
effects of digitalization and globalization have been obvious, but there have been other, less evident, forces at work,
transforming the nature of collaboration and teamwork and challenging the definitions of what a team is and what
should be expected of it. Many new forms of activity offer fruitful, exciting new ground for theorizing and research
about collaboration and teamwork.
Much of the published work in teams research, however, is still focused on the archetypal team that has well-defined
membership, purpose, leadership, and standards of effectiveness. There is still more to learn about that kind of team. But
the profound gap between what teams scholars are studying and what people are doing in the world—both within and
between organizations—inspired us to propose this special issue. Our goal is to provoke theory, research, approaches,
and methodologies that will help scholars recognize and understand the rapidly expanding universe of contemporary
collaboration and teamwork.
Indeed, as we argue in this article and as suggested in some of the articles offered in this issue, the very
notion of a traditionally defined “team” may become increasingly outmoded. Our domain in this special issue
is collaboration, which we define as “team-like behavior over time and across projects”—a definition that
includes but is not restricted to what has traditionally been studied as “teams.” Trends such as digitalization
and globalization are already well-established subjects in teams research and will be addressed by articles in
this issue. Other trends, such as value pluralism and climate change, are having surprising and critical effects on the
uses and methods of collaboration but have not yet been the subject of much teams research. We address these topics
in this article.
*Correspondence to: Ruth Wageman, Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, U.S.A. E-mail:
[email protected]
†
The authors contributed equally to the ideas in this paper.
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In any field, the most important questions need to keep being asked, especially if they seem to have been
definitively answered. We propose that contemporary forms of collaboration require us to re-ask, “How do we
define a team?” and “How do we define and measure a team’s effectiveness?” These old questions become new again
when we see that the nature of boundaries, stability, and interdependence are changing and that client satisfaction, team
viability, and individual well-being are not always—or not the only—outcomes of interest. We would also do well to
ask, “What is new about the new types of collaboration we see all around us? For example, are there new forms of team
leadership?”
Traditional corporate product-development teams are still at work, still important, and still very interesting, and so
are many other team (or team-like) activities that have received far less attention. Our focus is on stimulating new
thinking about the way we theorize about teams, where we find them, and how we study them to remain relevant
to the understanding of modern collaborations.
We open by offering some light-hearted examples of just how radically the possibilities for organizing a collaboration—
something that might be a team—have changed. Our purpose in offering these scenarios is to open up the subject of the
changing ecology of teams and to begin identifying some important questions about what may have to change in the field
of teams research if it is to capture the full range of exciting and important phenomena that we argue defines its new
domain.
Food for Thought: Teams Old and New
Imagine a familiar undertaking: Six friends gather for their bi-monthly cooking club. They have already worked out
the menu over the phone and done their ingredient shopping; now they will spend the evening at one friend’s home,
talking, laughing, and tasting as they work together in the kitchen and later at the table. Perhaps the host has the final
say on the menu and does a bit more of the shopping and preparation work, but everyone pitches in to chop, stir,
serve, and wash up.
This group is undoubtedly a “real team” as we are used to defining one. It has a bounded and stable membership—at
least for the evening—and it completes an interdependent task in close interaction, performing coordinated activities and
exchanging resources. People do their separate tasks, but they work together and accomplish what they set out to do. We
could assess this team’s effectiveness using the criteria we generally use in teams research (Hackman, 1987): (i) Does
the output satisfy the client, in this case the team members themselves? Yes, because they have fun and they cook and eat
a good meal. (ii) Does the team work together in a way that enhances its viability? Yes, because, over the years, cooking
together deepens friends’ relationships and perhaps their coordination in the kitchen. (iii) Does the experience provide
for the development and well-being of team members? Yes, because they can learn from each other new things about
cooking and increase their social satisfaction as well.
Now let us imagine a different way of accomplishing a similar task. A flashmob converges on a park to make
pizzas for themselves and whomever else happens along. Through Twitter, each has learned that he or she should
contribute dough, sauce, cheese, or toppings. Once they arrive, strangers spontaneously combine their ingredients
and set to work making a crust, adding the toppings, or cooking the pizza on the park grills. But if someone cannot
find anyone else to collaborate with or winds up with extra ingredients, he or she is at a loss to contribute.
Is this a team? It certainly shares some common features of teams, such as a common goal—creating pizzas in the
park. The intended outcome, however, is not specified precisely. There’s no telling in advance what sorts of pizza
will be made with what combinations of toppings and how good they will be. Membership is neither clearly
bounded nor stable, with collaborators self-assembling and reconfiguring into pairs and triads in real time. Is it
effective? That would be hard to determine, because neither the goal nor the standards of effectiveness are well
defined. The point may have been to have fun, but no one is keeping track of how many people do or do not have
fun. The pizzas will vary in quality, and food safety will go unmonitored. Passersby may be delighted or may be
aggravated to encounter this crowd.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Let us consider a third approach to the same fundamental task, but one that would appear to be the complete
opposite of a flashmob cookout—a professional kitchen. Here, we are likely to find individual cooks assigned to
prepare specific dishes, mastering a narrow set of techniques and dishes through repetition. Roles are clearly and
rigidly defined, with little opportunity for change. This makes cooks interchangeable within each station and results
in a “team” of sorts that varies from shift to shift and night to night. Collectively, the cooks can reliably produce the
dishes on the menu. Individually, however, they often have to leave for another restaurant to move ahead in their
profession.
Is this a team? The kitchen staff on any given evening has a clear goal, but can it be said to have a stable and
bounded membership? Is it effective? If the restaurant is successful, we can trust that the customers are being
satisfied—perhaps even delighted. Individual cooks may improve up to a point as they master the particular task
assigned to them, but collectively, the kitchen staff probably does not improve, nor is anyone expecting it to. The
clearly and consistently defined roles may, however, facilitate future recombination and collaboration; that is, the
restaurant operation will be largely immune to individual absences or departures.
Now imagine one final approach. Five celebrity chefs in different cities around the globe, relatively strangers to
each other, each video record themselves preparing a dish for a lavish dinner. They upload their videos onto a
website that plays their preparation activities simultaneously, then shows each chef seated at a virtual table, eating
the dish he or she has prepared. Is this a team? There is no question that the success of the end result—the virtual
banquet—depends on all of the dishes, but the collaborators work on their component parts independently and could
even be replaced along the way or at the end if their dish or video was not appealing or if a bigger name chef came
along. Is it effective? The intended outcomes of this collaboration are not really the dishes themselves—no one else
will eat them—but rather the education and entertainment of a very broad virtual audience and, perhaps, the
enhancement of each chef’s own brand.
These playful examples reveal how radically the possibilities for collaboration—for something that at least might
be considered a team—have expanded. But even if some of these examples are deemed not to be teams, they can
teach us something important about teams. The rest of this article explores what the teams research community
has to gain by researching, theorizing, and understanding the many new forms of contemporary collaboration.
We begin by identifying and exploring a handful of major changes in the modern world that are altering our
long-standing assumptions about teams and making some teams scholars ask again, “What is a team?” “How does
a team work?” and “What does it mean for a team to be effective?” We offer some reflections on how core constructs
we thought were well understood are once again lively avenues for theory and research. Throughout, we return to the
playful examples of modern collaborations we offered earlier, drawing on their distinctive features to illustrate our
observations.
The Changing Ecology of Teams
Many observers of macro systems, popular culture, technology, and social science name a short list of global
trends—including digitalization, globalization, value pluralism, and climate change, among other large social trends,
that are altering societies at an accelerating pace. These macro trends also are changing the nature of collaborative
efforts—at work or anywhere else—by altering the opportunities for collaboration, the need to build collaborations,
and the structure of collaborations when they arise. Teams research turned its attention to the impact of digitalization
over 20 years ago, with the advent of technologically mediated collaborations (see, for example, Daft & Lengel,
1986; Jarvenpaa & Leidner, 1999; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986; Straus & McGrath, 1994). With the continued march
of globalization, more people are collaborating across nationalities, cultures, and languages as well as across space
and time. In this issue, Cummings and Haas (2012) studied thousands of knowledge workers in a multi-national
organization and found that as many individuals were on teams with members in different countries as were on
teams with members in the same room. So far, teams research paradigms have absorbed such changes by labeling
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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EDITORIAL
them as special types of teams (e.g., “virtual,” “distributed,” “dispersed,” or “global”). As long as we can tell who is
on the team and what their collective purpose is, we define it as a real team and apply slightly modified methods to a
widened array of team phenomena such as temporal misalignment (Rutkowski, Saunders, Vogel, & van Genuchten,
2007), linguistic differences (Neeley, in press), and configurational differences (O’Leary & Mortensen, 2010).
But our old definitions are feeling the strain. Maynard, Mathieu, Rapp, and Gilson (2012) explore the drivers of
effectiveness for teams that exhibit multiple characteristics of contemporary collaboration—globally dispersed,
virtual (i.e., interacting via technological tools), and with members who split their time between multiple projects
simultaneously. The findings of Maynard et al. demonstrate that such teams can and do develop performance-enhancing
transactive memory systems, despite their lack of face-to-face interactions, and their results further highlight the
importance of considering how competing demands on members’ attention affect teams’ ability to do so. Modern
collaborations require more than special labels if teams research is to address them—and they are well worth addressing.
For example, there has been a frequently cited trend toward individualization of life paths, described as the result
of an increase in value pluralism around the globe (Arnett, 2002; Inglehart, 2006). That is, people are increasingly
determined to shape their own lives and careers—perhaps in defiance of traditional family structures, career paths,
and role models—in a quest for personal meaning and autonomy (Collin & Young, 2006). Simultaneously,
digitalization and globalization are exponentially increasing the chances that somewhere in the world a person
can find a handful of other people who share his or her ambitions or interests. What is more, they are often able
to act together—form companies or civic action groups, record music, or create websites—with complete authority
over their own purposes, structures, and processes. These sorts of collaboration are not far in the future: one Internetbased organization that supports the formation of teams has already seen the launch of more than 90, 000 self-governing
teams for a vast array of purposes, from playing music to mobilizing civic action, in 45, 000 cities just in the last few
years (meetup.com, 2011). People are also forming or joining many teams at once—whether inside or outside traditional
organizational boundaries—and remaining members only for part of the life of the team. Can researchers account for
this chronic porousness of team boundaries and fluidity of membership by adding a new type of team to their
lists—“porous teams”?—or, as Hackman (2012) suggests has been our recent habit as scholars, by adding a
new moderator (“porosity”) to our existing models? We believe that neither approach will adequately capture
the phenomena that these new forms of collaboration offer nor address the challenges they bring for our
traditional research paradigms.
It is easy to see that climate change poses a global challenge to large social systems (Adger, 2003; Agrawal & Lemos,
2007; Ivey, Smithers, de Loe, & Kreutzwiser, 2004), but how is it changing the nature of collaboration and teamwork?
Certainly, climate-related crises such as floods, wildfires, and epidemics are demanding collaborations between
government entities from civic to national, non-governmental organizations, the military, religious organizations, and the
private sector. Such cross-sector, cross-organizational, and often self-governing coalitions call for new kinds of leadership
(Agrawal & Lemos, 2007). And so new purposes, changing authority structures, and ambiguous interdependence
increasingly characterize vitally important collaborations. Many of these collaborations would, by the traditional definition,
not be teams at all, nor could we fully describe their degree of effectiveness using our traditional criteria.
Collectively, these changes in when and how and why collaborations form are challenging scholars to redirect
their attention. We must once again ask, Just what is a team? And will defining a team even help us focus on what
is important to study to understand effective contemporary collaboration? We next explore four key questions about
what a team is now and what it might be in the future: Who is on the team? How do contemporary teams experience
interdependence? What does it mean to be effective as a team? What is team leadership?
What is a Team in These Times?
Teams scholars have some long-standing agreements about what they study—agreements that are now worth
revisiting. The field’s long-held response to the deceptively simple question, “How do we define a team?” has
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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changed very little since Alderfer’s early work (1977, 1980, 1987). Scholars traditionally define a team as a bounded
and stable set of individuals interdependent for a common purpose (Alderfer, 1977; Cohen & Bailey, 1997;
Hackman, 1987; Offermann & Spiros, 2001; Sundstrom, De Meuse, & Futrell, 1990). Thus, teams have two
required elements: membership and a collaborative task. But is that still a helpful definition? Does it now leave
out something important? In this article, we first take up the requirement for stable and bounded membership. We
then look at how interdependence toward a common goal is constructed and how that characteristic is shifting before
our eyes. Next, we explore how changes in the definition of a team change the meaning of a team’s effectiveness and
team leadership, drawing on examples from the articles in this special issue.
Who is on the team?
As traditionally defined, a team’s membership is bounded and stable for some period (Hackman, 1987, 2002).
Clarity and stability of boundaries have played an important role in helping us differentiate between members
and non-members and delimit a team’s scope. But we may need to revisit that definition (Gibson & Cohen,
2003). Although a team’s boundaries could frequently be defined by its context and the characteristics of its
members, contemporary teams increasingly span multiple contexts with members in different physical locations,
time zones, cultures, configurations, and even organizations—not to mention speaking different languages (O’Leary
& Cummings, 2007). Studying teams used to be a matter of asking people, “Who’s on your team?” and handing out
a survey to that list of people or watching a bounded group interact in real time. Today, that approach might very
well give a seriously misleading impression of who the team was and what it did.
Team memberships in the past were often mutually exclusive, with members working on only one team at a time.
Contemporary teams tend to overlap, with members working simultaneously on more than one team (O’Leary,
Mortensen, & Woolley, 2011; O’Leary, Woolley, & Mortensen, 2011). Contemporary teams can therefore rarely
be sure what subset of the membership will convene at any given time. In short, it can be a puzzle—or even a matter
of contention—to say who is on the team (Mortensen, 2011).
If clearly and stably bounded membership is increasingly rare in teams, what—if anything—has replaced it
as a defining characteristic? Hackman (2012) draws our attention to a defining characteristic of teams as
social systems, underscoring that whether membership shifts or not, members and nonmembers alike perceive
the group as an entity, and members can engage with other entities in transactions that are legitimately attributable to the group.
One intriguing way their system properties play out can be seen in Higgins, Miles, and Young (2012), in which
role stability is enacted as a substitute for membership stability. In their study, Higgins et al. (2012) introduce us to
“implementation teams”—teams charged with implementing organization-wide change strategies. Membership in
these teams changes frequently for a variety of reasons, including instances of individuals leaving a particular job
or even leaving the organization. The membership stability of such teams was therefore low when assessed by
traditional measures, yet stability was also found to be an important driver of team effectiveness. How could this
be? As we saw in the professional kitchen example at the beginning of this article, individuals on a team may change
while the roles remain relatively constant; it is the roles, then, that are stable and bounded. Scholars using a
traditional definition of teams would conclude that neither the implementation team nor the kitchen crew is a real
team and perhaps exclude them from further study. They certainly would be disinclined to aggregate data from
members as a means of assessing any feature of the team, because those members were not the same over time.
Those researchers would miss both an important opportunity to explore contemporary team phenomena and
overlook a real finding about how teams might cope with an increasingly fluid and dynamic ecology. The piece
of Higgins et al. suggests that role stability—a shared understanding of what a role involves and the recruitment
of team members with specified capabilities to that role—is one way for a team to cope with changing membership
without sacrificing the benefits of its valuable transactive memory system.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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How do contemporary teams experience interdependence?
We maintain that interdependence is still essential to any definition of a team, but it, too, has become a more
dynamic construct than teams scholars have previously taken it to be. Not every undertaking that involves a group
of people is a team. We agree with Hackman (2012) that the contributors to a wiki, the programmers who
“crowdsource” open-source software, and the group of chefs in our professional kitchen example are not
teams. They are unquestionably collaborators, however, and therefore may still be considered for our domain
in this special issue. As will be seen in the succeeding texts, some of these non-team collaborations may even
have begun as more traditional teams and evolved into something else. This evolution between team-and-not
can also take place in the other direction.
Teams scholars have traditionally defined a team either as a group of people who are “interdependent for a
common purpose” or who “work interdependently towards shared goals.” Contemporary work teams bring to light
the important distinctions between these two constructs. “Interdependent for a common purpose” refers to structural
interdependence—that is, the degree to which the design of the work itself requires a group of people to interact and
exchange resources. In other words, a given collection of individuals is a team to the extent that the task inputs—
including how the task is defined to the group, the technologies the group uses, the distribution of task resources
among individuals, and the instructions about how to carry out the work—require them to collaborate (Wageman,
1999). The members of our cooking club, for example, were asked by their host to do specific tasks, were instructed
to bring different items, and worked in the same kitchen in close interaction. They were structurally interdependent—
a classic team.
Past research has shown that structural interdependence is an important construct in understanding team
effectiveness because it is among the most powerful known drivers of collaborative behavior, more so than
personal values, team-based rewards, perceived need to cooperate, or the quality of member relationships
(Bachrach, Powell, Bendoly, & Richey, 2006; Cleavenger, Gardner, & Mhatre, 2007; Wageman & Baker,
1996; Wageman, 1995). As we noted earlier on the subject of climate change, there are global problems
calling for ever-more-complex collaborations. The tasks call for structural interdependence, but the necessary
skills, knowledge, and resources are distributed not only among many people but also among people from
many organizations in many places, even among entities that might typically be in opposition to each other,
such as business groups and environmental activist organizations collaborating on sustainability issues. People
can be structurally interdependent now who neither would nor could have been before—and whether or not a
teams scholar would call them a team.
At the same time, today’s structural interdependence is more likely to be ambiguous—because it is increasingly in
the hands of team members themselves. That is, rather than receiving a defined task or being assigned a process by
someone with authority and then operating in ways that are dependent on being in a particular location or using a
particular technology, it is often up to the team members themselves to decide how subtasks are to be allocated
and performed (Ramamoorthy & Flood, 2004; Wageman & Gordon, 2005). Like our group of celebrity chefs
creating separate videos of their contributions, team members can—and often do—choose to disaggregate activities
into individual tasks, rather than choosing to work closely together to perform their work.
For teams researchers then, structural interdependence—one of the most common moderators in the field—is now
often a dynamic phenomenon shaped by team members’ choices. Hackman (2012) underscores this point in his
treatment of new ways of theorizing about groups as social systems, showing the limitations we have come up
against in continuing to pursue moderated causality models of group behavior, instead of acknowledging groups
as social systems dynamically engaged with their contexts. Kim, McFee, Olguin, Waber, and Pentland’s (2012) research demonstrates the point. Their application of sociometer technology to capture the actual interactions among
team members over time illustrates how misleading a one-time assessment or single structural observation of interdependence can be in understanding contemporary collaborations. Interdependence is a fundamental element of
teams, but scholarly treatment of interdependence as a construct must take into account the fact that it can unfold
in non-obvious ways and may well change over a team’s life.
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The phrase “work interdependently toward shared goals” refers to behavioral interdependence—the degree to
which group members actually work together. The distinction between structural and behavioral interdependence
is important because structures designed to foster collaborative behavior do not guarantee that team members will
actually work together. Conversely, people may choose to work interdependently even when there are no structural
imperatives to do so; for example, team members with individual responsibilities and rewards may nevertheless help
each other out. We assert, therefore, that behavioral interdependence is a variable, not a condition, and should not be
used to define whether a particular collaboration is a team.
The contemporary ecology of teams may be lowering the intensity of behavioral interdependence under some
conditions. For example, increasing value pluralism means that the motives and behavioral choices of individual
team members are having a greater impact on the dynamics of complex collaborations, as Cheng, Chua, Morris,
and Lee (2012) found in self-governing multicultural teams. The teams they studied lack two common design
features that are typically relied upon to promote coordinated work practices among members: shared cultural norms
about collaboration and managerial control over work processes. Typically, teams lacking one of these features can
rely on the other, as in the case of a multicultural team whose manager skillfully coordinates action among members
with different expectations or as in the case of a leaderless but monocultural team whose members effectively
coordinate themselves by relying on their shared understanding of how to work together. Cheng et al. (2012) provide
a powerful illustration of the effects of value pluralism—particularly when it interacts with changing approaches to
leadership—that require both scholars and practitioners to reconsider the drivers of team dynamics and effectiveness
and the place of behavioral interdependence in our models.
Further, the rise of value pluralism means that the values and motives of team members are becoming more
varied, and there is often less personal commitment to a particular team or project (Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale,
1999). In other words, whereas structural interdependence may be increasing, behavioral interdependence among
a given set of actors may be declining.
Whereas a team’s or collaboration’s degree of structural interdependence can vary from none (individual workers
are given tasks designed to be conducted without help, input, or cooperation from coworkers) to very high (team
members are given a task that requires them to work together from start to finish), behavioral interdependence tends
to fall into discrete patterns. Team members (i) do their work alone, (ii) do the work as a group, or (iii) work largely
alone, with loose coordination provided at periodic team meetings (Wageman, 1999). For better or worse, members’
own individualistic or collective values can drive task choices and work processes (Ramamoorthy & Flood, 2004;
Wageman & Gordon, 2005). A team member’s choices of what to do and how closely to work with others
on the team may therefore reflect a personal reluctance to work toward a collective goal that is not in line
with his or her own priorities. In our professional kitchen, for example, a cook might devote himself or herself
only to learning and mastering what he or she needs to know to open his or her own restaurant. Given the chance
to contribute a “signature” dish to the menu, he or she might not feel constrained to choose one that fit well into the
restaurant’s overall menu.
Behavior interdependence could thus be undermined to the point that some teams are team in name only. But
under other circumstances, digitalization and globalization trends may enhance behavioral interdependence. Ready
access to a world of people increases an individual’s chances of finding collaborators and teammates with whom to
undertake some shared purpose. Thus, our “team” of far-flung celebrity chefs could—if they wanted—collaborate
on an exquisite fusion feast by using communication technology to pool their knowledge, experience, and different
approaches as they worked out a menu and even as they prepared their dishes; that is, to truly work together,
however geographically separated. In fact, the very same tasks may sometimes be accomplished either by nominal
teammates who value independence and their own individual outcomes and who therefore each do their part in near
isolation or by a real team composed of people who have not only a shared goal but also value collective
processes (Wageman & Gordon, 2005). When we ask the question, “Is this a real team?” or “What is the level of
interdependence in this team?” we might be missing out on the reality of contemporary collaborations. It may be
more fruitful to ask, “Was this effort launched as a real team?” or “How is interdependence evolving in this
collaboration over time—and why?”
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What does it mean to be effective as a team?
In each of our four collaborative cooking scenarios, we might ask, How will these “teams” know that they did well?
Satisfied customers are one obvious measure. Yet, team effectiveness is a complex, multi-dimensional construct—
and more so now than ever. To explore changes in the meaning of team effectiveness, we start with Hackman’s
(1987) classic definition, which includes three components: client satisfaction, or the degree to which the group’s
product or service meets the standards of quality, quantity, and timeliness of the people who receive its output; team
viability, or the degree to which the process of carrying out the work enhances the capability of group members to
work together interdependently in the future; and member growth and fulfillment, or the degree to which the team
experience contributes to the growth and personal well-being of team members.
As he underscores in this issue, Hackman conceptualized these dimensions with respect to the performance
outcomes of a bounded group with stable membership and a single performance objective that all members worked
interdependently to accomplish. Now, however, researchers investigating team effectiveness must often consider
how characteristics of today’s teams implicate different aspects of organizational, individual, and team effectiveness
and how these characteristics affect each level over time.
Unstable memberships
Stable team membership has traditionally been seen as a benefit. The members of stable teams can develop and
refine routines and processes to produce higher quality output more efficiently and can develop greater interpersonal
trust and cohesion that, in turn, enhance team viability. These very benefits, however, may become liabilities for a
team with dynamic membership.
For example, stable membership allows a team, as traditionally defined, to establish transactive memory (Lewis,
2004; Moreland, Argote, & Krishnan, 1996). Effective transactive memory systems make it possible for individual
members to specialize their expertise on discrete parts of the task, allowing the team to process information
efficiently and perform its tasks more effectively. In our professional kitchen, for example, having some expert
pastry chefs, some experts at grilling, and so on can make for an efficient restaurant kitchen. Knowing who does
what best helps the team avoid the negative process effects—coordination losses, replication of efforts, and
misalignment of individuals with tasks—that can arise from ambiguous role definitions. In a group with more
dynamic membership, however, a new member may not have exactly the same knowledge and abilities as the person
he or she is replacing, so the team will encounter problems if it assumes that it does not have to adjust its own
processes for the newcomer. In this way, transactive memory may undermine the team’s performance.
Stability also increases cohesion and positive affect among team members, both of which tend to increase a team’s
viability over time. In teams with shifting membership, however, the stronger the bonds between members, the
harder it will be for new members to become high-functioning members. What makes the team strong today may
keep it from being strong down the road when it has to replace a member. Cheng et al. (2012) find, for example,
that the interaction between level and variance in relationship orientation and uncertainty avoidance drive
performance in self-managed multicultural teams, but they do so differentially at different stages of a team’s history.
Teams whose members are, on average, more comfortable with uncertainty do better in their early stages, when there
is likely to be greater uncertainty amongst members who have neither a common culture nor a skillful leader to help
them feel comfortable with each other. Once a team is more established, its members’ focus on their relationships
with each other becomes a stronger driver of success. More broadly, Cheng et al. provide an illustration of how
the factors contributing to performance at one time may impede performance at a later time. It follows that teams
scholars must carefully conceptualize and define effectiveness for a specified time-frame and make a greater
collective effort to study and measure performance longitudinally.
Multiple simultaneous collaborations
Recent surveys suggest that 65 to 90 per cent of knowledge workers are concurrently members of multiple
teams. This structural arrangement affects both individual and team learning and productivity curvilinearly
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(O’Leary, Mortensen, et al., 2011) while at the same time creating and shaping relationships among teams and
within the larger system of teams in which it occurs (O’Leary, Woolley, et al., 2011). This interdependence among
teams, in turn, has significant consequences for how teams scholars need to think about team effectiveness, especially in terms of attending to different levels of analysis. Teams theory and research may need to heed Hackman’s
(2003) call to bracket the phenomenon under study by exploring influences one level up and one level down from
the focal level, in this case, by assessing team effectiveness one level up—at the organizational level—and one level
down—at the individual member level. Many teams scholars already have incorporated assessments of impact on
individuals (such as individual satisfaction or commitment to the team) and have typically found high positive correlations among Hackman’s (1987) three criteria of team effectiveness. Multiple team memberships, among other
contemporary phenomena, are now drawing attention to the ways in which team effectiveness at one level can detract from team effectiveness at another.
For example, if workers’ efforts are stretched over several teams serving several clients, one client’s satisfaction may
come at the expense of another’s. The team with the satisfied client may appear to be effective, but its “poaching” of
people’s time and effort from other teams is likely to be counterproductive for the organization. Imagine, on the other
hand, individuals taking part in multiple teams and working excessive hours to meet the needs of multiple teams’ clients.
All the teams may appear to be effective—and therefore the organization may appear to be effective—but at the
individual level, the high-level stress could hardly be called effective.
A multiple-team-membership structure also complicates assessment of a given team’s future viability. With so
many teams being formed whose members will never work together again in that precise configuration—however
successful it might have been—does a particular team even have a future? Yet, even if it does not, the experience
of working on that particular team may help the individual members work more effectively in other teams.
Relatedly, a group of people’s prior experience working together in various permutations in other teams likely
affects their future viability as a team. But particular team experience—however good—may also cause members
to work less effectively in subsequent teams. For example, two people whose particular strengths made them leaders
in two different teams may later find themselves on the same team, where one may now have to accept the other’s
leadership. And, finally, the same design features of a multi-team system can have surprising effects when we examine outcomes at different levels of analysis. Cummings and Haas (2012) examine the consequences for teams
and their members of individual members’ time allocation to other teams in the organization. While they find that,
as we might expect, the more time that team members spend on a given team the better that team’s performance,
membership in more teams actually helped the performance of the focal team, although less so for geographically
dispersed teams. Their findings suggest that knowledge acquisition by individuals as they work with other teams
can contribute both to the development of individuals and to the effectiveness of teams they support, a pattern contrary to our logical expectation that many team memberships necessarily reduces the effectiveness of a given individual on a team.
Multiple stakeholders and “clients”
We have already noted the increase in cross-organizational collaboration, for example, to address the aftermath of a
natural disaster. Such collaborations are not only multi-faceted within but also serve—or are at least answerable to—
multiple stakeholders, challenging the traditional teams research criterion of effectiveness as client satisfaction. If a
team’s multiple clients and stakeholders have competing, or even incompatible, objectives for the team, how should
scholars conceptualize and measure team performance? Would it make sense, for example, to weight each
stakeholder’s satisfaction?
Multiple stakeholders or clients, such as multiple simultaneous collaborations, raises questions about how
scholars can (or should) think about a team’s future viability. Although specific collaborators might never need
to collaborate again, should scholars nevertheless consider whether their team experience enhanced (or
detracted from) the capability of their organization’s workforce to work productively together in the future?
Whose views do we need to solicit for that measure? Surely team members’ self-reports will miss the
institutional perspective. Maynard et al. (2012) provide a thought-provoking discussion of the complexities they
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encountered in defining and measuring effectiveness across a sample of teams, each of which had multiple goals and
was accountable to multiple clients, including internal team leaders, technical and functional managers, and additional
internal and external customers.
In sum, focusing teams theorizing and research on the traditional three-part definition of a team risks
mischaracterizing—or missing altogether—how the design and leadership of contemporary collaborations is
affecting the effectiveness of social systems seen as a whole.
What is team leadership?
One final aspect of our long-standing assumptions about teams is worth revisiting in this changing ecology: team
leadership. Research about team leadership has focused throughout its history on one core question: What is
involved in effective team leadership? (see, for example, Hackman, 2002, Chapter 7; Hackman, 2012; and Hackman
& Walton, 1986, for a functional analysis of the team-leader role.) Considerable work has been performed to specify
the role of team leaders, whether external (Komaki, Deselles, & Bowman, 1989; Kozlowski, Gully, Salas, &
Cannon-Bowers, 1996; Manz & Sims, 1987; Wageman, Fisher, & Hackman, 2009) or internal and emergent. Most
of these approaches to team leadership have focused on a particular structure: a team with a task assigned by an
external authority and with a designated leader who may or may not be involved in the task but is responsible for
influencing team effectiveness.
Two contemporary team phenomena—teams providing leadership to organizations and team members being
responsible for leading their own work—challenge teams theorists and researchers to ask and answer a new question:
How can teams themselves exercise effective leadership?
Teams leading institutions
Teams now provide organizational leadership of a kind that previously has been the province of individual managers
(Wageman & Hackman, 2010). Although “top teams” have certainly been given research attention, these typically
have been teams in name only, more aptly described as the upper echelons of their organizations. Scholarly work on
team leadership in general has largely focused on individuals who occupy leadership roles. Little attention has been
given to leadership teams; that is, groups of leaders who are collectively responsible for leading a social system and
each of whom is himself or herself a significant organizational leader.
Yet, leadership teams rather than heroic individuals increasingly carry out executive functions in organizations
(Ancona & Nadler, 1989; Hambrick, 2007; Wageman, Nunes, Burruss, & Hackman, 2008). Popular-press writings
such as those of Lencioni (2002) and management writer Katzenbach (1997a, 1997b) underscore the poor processes
that characterize most leadership teams and even suggest that the term “team” is something of a misnomer for many
of them. Scholarly findings reinforce these pessimistic views of the forces acting on teams of leaders—including
unclear purpose, underdeveloped norms, unstable membership, and tensions between their organizational roles
and team responsibilities (e.g., Berg, 2005; Hambrick, 2000, 1997; Li & Hambrick, 2005; Wageman & Hackman,
2010). These forces can cause teams to fragment.
Teams also are more commonly being used as agents of change (Hackman & Edmondson, 2008), their tasks
combining interdependence with independence and blending knowledge work with action. Such leadership tasks
fall outside traditional typologies of team tasks (McGrath, 1984; Steiner, 1972) and are not readily characterized
or explained by existing theory and constructs. In this special issue, Higgins et al. (2012) provide a rare empirical example: implementation teams that are being asked to lead system-level change within educational
and political institutions. The authors’ work draws our attention to a fruitful avenue for research on contemporary teams phenomena: What are the antecedents driving collaborations whose core purpose is leadership? And
what are their unique challenges?
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Teams leading themselves
More organizations are encouraging self-forming, self-governing teams who define their own purposes, choose their
own members, and design their own work (Nonaka & Toyama, 2005). Outside organizational boundaries, the
formation of such teams is also increasing exponentially. Although existing research has focused attention on
emergent leadership in the context of traditionally designed self-managing teams, relatively little is known about
how leadership functions are fulfilled in the absence of existing work and authority structures. Presumably, those
who joined our pizza flashmob came with a variety of strengths—for cooking, organizing, socializing, and so on.
How were those strengths coordinated and exploited? What were the acts of leadership that resulted in a (more or
less) coordinated process? How does a flashmob’s emergent leadership structure influence its effectiveness?
The self-governing team remains a relatively understudied form of group leadership structure. True self-governing
teams—those with complete authority over their own purposes, membership, and resources—are rare in business.
They are, however, increasingly common in political and civic activity, a domain that teams research has generally
ignored, leaving it to sociology and political science (fields in which egalitarian and democratic societies, social
movements, and citizen voice are of great interest). Self-governing teams arise when complex problems require
the resources and capabilities of multiple, independent entities—just the sort of problem the world is increasingly
facing (Sayles & Chandler, 2009). Crises such as floods, droughts, severe wildfires, oil spills, and epidemics call for
cross-entity and cross-sector teams, with people working together from municipalities, non-government organizations,
and the private sector. These teams, in turn, require a collection of leaders from each of those sectors with shared
authority to govern the action (Mendonca, Giampiero, & Berroggi, 2001; Sayles & Chandler, 2009). Ostrom’s
(1990; Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994) research shows the necessity of self-convened, community-authorized,
representative leadership teams for effectively using and preserving publicly held goods such as forests, fisheries, and
grazing land and avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
The research on self-governing entities emphasizes that they offer both extensive participation in making
critical decisions that affect members’ own lives and work (Pearce, Rubenfeld, & Morgan, 1987; Whyte, 1991)
and membership on the basis of deeply shared values (Campbell, Keen, Norman, & Oakshott, 1977). Although
the great potential of self-governing teams is compelling, such teams also have significant problems in comparison
with teams led by individual leaders. It is very difficult for a self-governing team to articulate a clear purpose
collaboratively; the result is often an unsatisfactory compromise of individual preferences (Hackman, 2002,
pp. 224–225; Wageman & Hackman, 2010). When self-governing teams find themselves struggling for clarity
and consensus, they are at risk of devolving into a leader-led team or else disbanding (Hart, Rosenthal, &
Kouzmin, 1993; Lagadec, 1990). One fruitful avenue for future research, then, is the kinds of collective processes
that enable self-governing teams to maintain an egalitarian leadership structure and make rapid and well-coordinated
shifts in action when the environment demands responsiveness, as well as the kinds of interventions that might develop
those collective processes.
Conclusion
Scholars studying teams must adapt our theories and methods—and perhaps even our interests—so that our
research remains relevant to the phenomena we seek to understand. In this introduction, we have explored how
the well-established definition of a team as a bounded, stable set of individuals interdependent for a common goal
offers an organizing framework for a series of questions about contemporary teams. “Who is the team?” Bounded
and stable membership is less and less the norm as teams become more dynamic and are frequently overlapping.
“How do teams experience interdependence?” Both behavioral and structural interdependence are changing as the
interconnections among team members become increasingly dynamic and self-determined. “What does it mean to
be effective?” The tried-and-true metrics of team effectiveness—client satisfaction, team viability, and member
growth and fulfillment—play out quite differently in contemporary teams with their increasingly unstable and
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overlapping membership. “What is team leadership?” Teams are increasingly replacing individuals in leading
themselves and their organizations. For this special issue, we have selected papers that both illustrate and
examine these new phenomena and methodologies, papers that we believe will help elevate our field’s thinking
on the many kinds of team and collaboration that are all around us as well as the other kinds that have not yet
appeared.
Through the process of creating this special issue, we identified three key insights that suggest the following
recommendations to scholars studying teams:
Recommendation 1: Relax the definitional elements of what makes a real team and explore what is interesting
in contemporary collaboration. Some of the habitual routines in teams research make it
hard to focus attention on interesting and important new phenomena that do not happen
to meet the traditional definition of teams. Yet, many of the constructs and approaches
developed in teams research offer real insight—when attentively used—about these new
kinds of collaboration. As we have argued, attentiveness to boundaries, stability, and interdependence as constructs in our research can better be used to draw our attention to intriguing
phenomena than to rule certain things “out” of our domain of interest.
Recommendation 2: Explore issues of scope—especially time and level of analysis. The trends toward (i)
increasing fluidity of team membership and (ii) interconnection with other teams and the
broader environment make it more important than ever for teams researchers to carefully
consider the scope conditions they place on the phenomena they study. Contexts that are
fluidly and rapidly changing reinforce the importance of explicitly temporally bounding the
antecedents and processes to be examined, to ensure that comparisons and conclusions
are sensitive to such changes over time. Researchers must also carefully delineate the
collaborations they study, while suggesting a potentially rich and still understudied domain:
the relationship of teams or collaborations with each other and their surrounding context.
Recommendation 3: Consider novel contexts and embrace description. Our experiences in editing the special issue
“The Changing Ecology of Teams,” and in studying new forms of collaboration ourselves
have further emphasized the importance of paying attention to the larger context in which a
collaboration emerges. As researchers turn our attention to radically new phenomena and move
away from the well-established types of teams that we have been accustomed to consider, we
are moving into an uncharted territory. It will become more and more difficult to accurately
relate de-contextualized studies of teams to the increasingly varied pool of teams that researchers see in the real world. To offer more context, researchers will need to conduct more descriptive research and pay greater attention to key contextual factors even in research that is not
descriptive in nature. Rich descriptions of new phenomena will, in turn, invite new theory by
bringing to light areas in which current theory falls short.
Collaboration and teamwork are inherent features of human life and evolving continuously. As human society
keeps changing, the reasons and ways people find to work together will keep changing. Each article in this special
issue was chosen to being offering a range of pathways to expanding our approach to understanding modern
collaborations and respond in creative ways to the changing ecology of teams.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to the members of Groups Group for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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Author biographies
Ruth Wageman received her PhD from Harvard in 1993 and returned there as an associate in 2006; she has also
been a professor at Columbia and Dartmouth. Her research and teaching interests focus on the design of effective
leadership teams, especially ones with civic and social change purposes.
Heidi K. Gardner is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School. She holds a PhD
from London Business School. Her research examines the design and effectiveness of knowledge-intensive work,
focusing on collaboration and leadership particularly in the context of professional service firms.
Mark Mortensen is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. He received his PhD from the
Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on the changing
nature of collaboration, global and cross-cultural work, and the interaction between teams and technology.
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