Keywords: work groups, team organizations, global competition, steve kovloski, bradford bell
Our objective is to provide an integrative perspective on work groups and teams in organizations, one that addresses primary foci of theory and research, highlights applied implications, and identifies key issues in need of research attention and resolution. Given the volume of existing reviews, our review is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, it uses representative work to characterize key topics, and focuses on recent work that breaks new ground to help move theory and research forward. Although our approach risks trading breadth for depth, we believe that there is much value in taking a more integrative view of the important areas of team research, identifying key research themes, and linking the themes and disparate topics closer together. To the extent that we identify new and necessary areas of theory development and research, the value of this approach will be evident.
The last decade and a half has witnessed a remarkable transformation of organizational structures worldwide. Although there are economic, strategic, and technological imperatives driving this transformation, one of its more compelling aspects has been an ongoing shift from work organized around individual jobs to team-based work structures (Lawler, Mohrman, & Ledford, 1995). Increasing global competition, consolidation, and innovation create pressures that are influencing the emergence of teams as basic building blocks of organizations. These pressures drive a need for diverse skills, expertise, and experience. They necessitate more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses. Teams enable these characteristics. In addition, organizations have globalized operations through expansion, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures placing increased importance on cross-cultural and mixed culture teams. Advanced computer and communication technologies provide new tools to better link individuals with their team in real-time, and even enable teams to be virtual—distributed in time and space.
This ongoing transformation in the basic organization of work has captured the attention of researchers and is reflected by new theories of team functioning, a rapidly growing number of empirical studies, and numerous literature reviews written on the burgeoning research on teams. It is also reflected in a shift in the locus of team research. For most of its history, small group research has been centered in social psychology (McGrath, 1997). Over the last 15 years, however, group and team research has become increasingly centered in the fields of organizational psychology and organizational behavior. Indeed, Levine and Moreland (1990) in their extensive review of small group research concluded that, “Groups are alive and well, but living elsewhere.…The torch has been passed to (or, more accurately, picked up by) colleagues in other disciplines, particularly organizational psychology” (p. 620). Several literature reviews published over the last 15 years help to document this shift in locus, characterize differences brought to group and team research by an organizational perspective, and..........Download the article
