Embracing Complexity: Reviewing the Past Decade of Team Effectiveness Research

By John E. Mathieu, P. Gallagher, Monique Alexandria Alvarez Domingo, Elizabeth A. Klock. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2019

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We conceptualize organizational teams as dynamic systems evolving in response to their environments. We then review the past 10 years of team effectiveness research and summarize its implications by categorizing studies under three main overlapping and coevolving dimensions: compositional features, structural features, and mediating mechanisms. We highlight prominent work that focused on variables in each of these dimensions and discuss their key relationships with team outcomes. Furthermore, we review how contextual factors impact team effectiveness. On the basis of this review, we advocate that future research seek to examine team relationships through a dynamic, multilevel perspective, while incorporating new and novel measurement techniques. We submit that the future of teams research may benefit from a conceptualization of them as dynamic networks and modeling them as small complex systems.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Social Psychology, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/211784f16d1baff636a68dd8c5aa695a832b90db

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Matthew A. Cronin
2. Kyle J. Emich
3. Satish Kumar
4. Elizabeth George
5. Bradley L Kirkman

In Social Psychology

1. Matthew A. Cronin
2. Kyle J. Emich
3. Satish Kumar
4. Troy A. Smith
5. Elizabeth George
6. Bradley L Kirkman
7. John E. Mathieu

In Strategy and Management

1. Matthew A. Cronin
2. Kyle J. Emich
3. Satish Kumar
4. Elizabeth George
5. Bradley L Kirkman
6. Ricky W. Griffin

Citations in the corpus

• The Why and How of the Integrative Review (2020, background): “Mathieu et al. (2019) reviewed evidence across a range of studies on team structural and compositional features that most reliably affected performance.”
• The Emergence of Emergent Leadership: A Comprehensive Framework and Directions for Future Research (2021, background): “One context that has grown in importance over the last 30 years is the increasing use of teams (Mathieu et al., 2019; Morgeson et al., 2010), and teams research from the 1990s and 2000s is likely to be much less applicable today.”
• Mapping 50 Years of Small Group Research Through Small Group Research (2020, background): “Emich et al. 665 This pattern of continued growth reflects the necessity of small groups to modern society and particularly its organizations (Mathieu et al., 2019).”