Dynamic Teams: Exploring the Enabling Conditions and Outcomes of Coordination

Abstract

Organizational structures are increasingly dynamic, boundaryless, and fluid. One example of this trend is the use of highly dynamic teams—teams with short lifespans and permeable team boundaries. These conditions can offer the promise of flexible, adaptive work, but simultaneously undercut the characteristics of teams that were considered definitional in the past and are thought to be critical for facilitating coordination. Dynamic teams thus should face serious coordination challenges, and we are just beginning to understand the conditions needed for them to be effective. I begin by asking, “What are the conditions necessary for dynamic teams to operate effectively?” and derive theory from qualitative observations coupled with existing literature. I then test two interventions focused on putting some of those conditions in place in a field experiment, and I examine their implications for both individual learning and team effectiveness. The emergent grounded theory and field experiment results suggest that team launches, conducted only with a dynamic team’s core team members, can serve as cognitive scaffolds to anchor core team members’ attention either toward core team members or periphery team members. While initial attention to fellow core members and the clarification of roles can promote more emergent interdependence among those core members, initial attention to periphery members and expansion of the definition of the team can promote more integration of those periphery members into the work. That is, while dynamic teams lack the structure afforded by stability and an impermeable boundary, they can still rely on cognitive scaffolding to enable coordination. Finally, the combination of these two coordination behaviors, together, is what enhances core team members’ learning; and, counter to beliefs that individual learning and team efficiency present a tradeoff to be balanced, individual learning is shown to facilitate team efficiency. I conclude by discussing implications of these findings for theory and research related to team beginnings, organizational design and scaffolds, learning, and the management of dynamic teams.