Effects of Flux in Coordination Caused by Membership Change on Team Performance

Abstract

Although researchers have examined what happens in a team after membership change, we know little about what happens in a team before the change happens but after members are informed about upcoming change. Drawing on social identity theory and studies on individuals’ response to change, I theorize that the way team members coordinate their work will start to shift during the pre-change period. I predict that change of in members’ coordination system would undermine a team’s short-term performance. I reconcile two opposing views regarding the effect of flux in coordination on a team’s long-term performance by predicting an inverted U-shaped relationship. I test my hypotheses with the data collected from an online study. While working on a video-recording task in a virtual meeting room, three-person teams were informed that one of them will leave and a new member will join after 10 minutes. After 10 minutes from the announcement, membership change was implemented. I found that after learning about impending change, teams shifted the way they coordinate work and less engaged in activities that facilitate coordination. Flux in coordination during the pre-change period was positively related with a team’s short-term performance and did not have a curvilinear relationship with a team’s long-term performance. I contribute to the literature on membership change by investigating the pre-change period and elaborating a path-dependent view of the effects of membership change on team performance.