Special Issue Call for Papers

Team Dynamics in New Work and Organizational Contexts

Guest Editors:

Jia Li, Steve W. J. Kozlowski*, Mo Wang, Gerben S. Van der Vegt

* Editor-in-Chief for the Special Issue

Background of the Special Issue 

The rapid advancement of digital technologies and collective experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic have profoundly changed the way people work together in organizations. For example, on the technological front, the broad application of virtual technology has made hybrid work (i.e., combinations of working in the office and at home) the new norm in many organizations. Algorithms and business analytics have been applied to many managerial areas to enhance decision-making quality. Electronic platforms have been used to connect service employees and customers, and humanoid robots have been introduced to alleviate staff shortages in the hospitality and healthcare sectors. On the social front, the collective experience of the pandemic has prompted employees to reflect upon the meaning of work and organizations to realize the importance of resilience. The rise of the gig economy has made collaborations and teamwork more loosely-bounded, dynamic, and complex than ever before, with different members moving in and out of teams to carry out collective tasks at different time points.  

These new work and organizational contexts (e.g., virtuality, boundary-less collaboration) have presented new challenges for managing collaborations and teamwork. For example, when managers and employees work in virtual team environments and do not meet each other on a daily basis: How do leaders exercise influence in a timely manner and continuously motivate team members to collaborate? How can hybrid work be effective for complex collaborations like innovation, given evidence that virtuality may hurt collective idea generation (Brucks & Levav, 2022)? When Artificial Intelligence (AI) and humanoid robots are introduced in the workplace: How do managers and organizations effectively incorporate AI in team decision-making? How do team leaders and members collaborate with robots to serve customers and clients well? When seeking meaning and building up resilience become important for employees and organizations: What can leaders do to motivate and retain talented employees and star performers in their teams? What can leaders do to enable teams to weather different types of adversities and bounce back to perform well again? When collaboration becomes complex and team boundaries become fuzzy: How do individuals perform well across multiple teams? How do teams perform well with a dynamic churn in membership? 

These new work and organizational contexts create a need for researchers to compile and develop new knowledge about effective collaborations and teamwork to guide managerial practice throughout these unprecedented challenges. 

Topic and Boundaries of the Special Issue

The aim of the special issue is to advance the knowledge about effective collaboration and teamwork in new work and organizational contexts, with a specific focus on team dynamics. We define team dynamics broadly as multilevel processes unfolding over time that involve the intersection of individual, dyadic, team, and/or organizational level actions that are relevant to short-term and/or long-term changes during the team lifecycle. 

Traditionally, team research has followed a general Input-Process-Output (IPO) framework, in which team inputs are what is brought into teamwork (e.g., team size, team composition), team processes are what teams do (e.g., team coordination, team planning), and outputs are what teams produce (e.g., team performance, team satisfaction). Initially proposed by Joseph McGrath (1964) as a framework to organize literature, the IPO framework was later popularized by Richard Hackman (e.g., Hackman & Morris, 1975) as a framework to understand team effectiveness. The IPO framework also corresponds well with the static statistical model of predictor-mediator-outcome (and also with team contexts as moderators), which may explain its acceptance and influence in team research (Kozlowski, 2015). 

Although the IPO framework has advanced research on team effectiveness, much of that research has used static data. It is only recently that team scholars have started to systematically and deliberately re-consider changes in all the aspects in the IPO framework. Notable examples include Kozlowski and colleagues’ (1996, 1999, 2009) theorizing about the dynamics of team development, team leadership, and team performance; Marks and colleagues’ (2001) work on dynamics in team processes and emergent states; and Ilgen and colleagues’ (2005) work in Input-Mediator-Output-Input (IMOI) model. Lately, this collective reflection upon the dynamic features of the IPO framework has further moved to consider changes in team inputs such as membership and composition (Li & van Knippenberg, 2021; Mathieu et al., 2014; Trainers et al., 2020) and team contexts (Ployhart et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2019). To further research development on this topic, especially in the new work and organizational context highlighted above, there is an urgent need for a special issue dedicated to research on team dynamics in new work and organizational contexts, with a focus on change and dynamicsin team composition, structure, processes, emergent states, contexts to outcomes, dyadic relationships, networks within and between teams, and organizational environments. Examples of research questions include:  

1. What influences does hybrid working have on employees, teams, and organizations? What team dynamics are effective in fostering collaboration and achieving effective teamwork in virtual work environments?

• How do leaders leverage team dynamics to effectively manage and lead virtual teams?

• How does team leadership emerge in self-managed virtual teams? Does this leadership emergence pattern differ from that in traditional teams and how and why is it so?  

• What team dynamics are key to effectively incorporating AI solutions in team decision-making? What influences do algorithms have on employees’ collaborations with each other as a team and relationships with supervisors? 

• How can humans and social robots effectively team up to serve consumers and clients? What characterizes effective team processes and emergent states in human-robot teaming?  

• How do dynamics in multiple team membership affect employees? How do team members switch between different teams or projects over time? How do leaders effectively manage and lead teams with constantly in-and-out members over time?

• How do employees and teams handle the complexity in communication and diversity in connectivity in hybrid working? How do individual networks and team networks form and develop over time?  

• How do multi-team systems adapt to the new work and organizational contexts? What influences does virtuality have on the within-team and between-team dynamics in multi-team systems over time?  

• Does team members’ pursuit of meaning and purpose emerge into team-level phenomena? If so, how does it affect teamwork? 

1. How do organizations build up resilience over time? Facing disruptive events, how do employees, teams, and organizations effectively adapt to them over time? 

These are exemplars but not exhaustive research questions to be addressed in the special issue. Any submission that helps to advance current knowledge on team dynamics as defined above is suitable for this special issue. Besides a range of research topics, we welcome submissions with diverse theoretical lenses across disciplines, a variety of research types (e.g., theory, methods, to empirical papers etc.), and use of different research methods (e.g., qualitative, archival, survey, experiments, computational modeling, etc.).  

Submission Process and Timeline

To be considered for the Special Issue, manuscripts must be submitted between August 1 and 31, 2024 (by 8:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time, August 31^st, 2024). Papers for this Special Issue cannot be submitted prior to the first day of August 2024. Submitted papers will undergo a double-blind review process and will be evaluated by two reviewers and one special issue editor. Final acceptance is contingent on the review team’s judgments of the paper’s contributions on four key dimensions:

Theoretical contribution: Does the article offer new and innovative ideas and insights or meaningfully extend existing theory? Are the articles embedded in the relevant literature?

Empirical contribution: Does the article offer new and unique findings, and are the study design, data analysis, and results rigorous and appropriate in testing the hypotheses or examining the research questions? This applies only to empirical submissions.

Practical contribution: Does the article contribute to improving the management of people in organizations?

Contribution to the special issue topic: Does the article contribute to the literature on team dynamics in new work and organizational contexts?

Authors should prepare their manuscripts for blind review according to the directions provided in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). Formatting guidelines are also provided on Personnel Psychology’s website, under “author guidelines”: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/17446570/homepage/forauthors.html. Be sure to remove any information that may potentially reveal the identity of the authors to the review team. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically at: https://wiley.atyponrex.com/journal/PEPS. 

Questions on the Special Issue?

Please direct your questions about the Special Issue to Jia Li (jia.li@vlerick.com; j.li@rsm.nl), Steve Kozlowski (skozlowski@usf.edu), Mo Wang (mo.wang@warrington.ufl.edu), and Gerben van der Vegt (g.s.van.der.vegt@rug.nl).  

References

Brucks, M.S., & Levav, J. (2022). Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. Nature, 605, 108–112.

Hackman, J. R., & Morris, C. G. (1978). Group tasks, group interaction process, and group performance effectiveness: A review and proposed integration. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Group processes (pp. 1-55). New York: Academic Press

Ilgen, D. R., Hollenbeck, J. R., Johnson, M., & Jundt, D. (2005). Teams in organizations: From input-process-output models to IMOI models. Annual Review of Psychology, 56(1), 517–543.

Kozlowski, S. W. J. (2015). Advancing research on team process dynamics: Theoretical, methodological, and measurement considerations. Organizational Psychology Review, 5, 270-299.

Kozlowski, S. W. J., Gully, S. M., Nason, E. R., & Smith, E. M. (1999). Developing adaptive teams: A theory of compilation and performance across levels and time. In D. R. Ilgen & E. D. Pulakos (Eds.), The changing nature of work performance: Implications for staffing, personnel actions, and development (pp. 240-292). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kozlowski, S. W. J., Gully, S. M., McHugh, P. P., Salas, E., & Cannon-Bowers, J. A. (1996). A dynamic theory of leadership and team efectiveness: Developmental and task contingent leader roles. In G. R. Ferris (Ed.), Research in Personnel and Human Resource Management (vol. 14, pp. 253–305). Greenwich, CT: JAI.

Kozlowski, S. W. J., Watola, D. J., Jensen, J. M., Kim, B. H., & Botero, I. C. (2009). Developing adaptive teams: A theory of dynamic team leadership. In E. Salas, G. F. Goodwin & C. S. Burke (Eds.), Team effectiveness in complex organizations: Cross-disciplinary perspectives and approaches (pp. 113-155). New York: Routledge.

Li, J., & van Knippenberg, D. (2021). The team causes and consequences of team membership change: A temporal perspective. Academy of Management Annals, 15(2), 577–606

Marks, M. A., Mathieu, J. E., & Zaccaro, S. J. (2001). A temporally based framework and taxonomy of team processes. Academy of Management Review, 26(3), 356–376.

Mathieu, J. E., Tannenbaum, S. I., Donsbach, J. S., & Alliger, G. M. (2014). A review and integration of team composition models moving toward a dynamic and temporal framework. Journal of Management, 40, 130-160

McGrath, J. E. (1964). Social psychology: A brief introduction. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Ployhart, R. E., Schepker, D. J., & McFarland, L. A. (2022). A review and theoretical framework for understanding external team contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(7), 1052–1069.

Trainer, H. M., Jones, J. M., Pendergraft, J. G., Maupin, C. K., & Carter, D. R. (2020). Team membership change “events”: A review and reconceptualization. Group & Organization Management, 45, 219–251.

Zhou, L., Wang, M., & Vancouver, J. (2019). A formal model of leadership goal striving: Development of core process mechanisms and extensions to action team context. Journal of Applied Psychology, 104, 388-410.