How Team Familiarity Mitigates Negative Consequences of Team Composition Disruptions: An Analysis of Premier League Teams.

While prior research has found that familiarity is beneficial to team performance, it is not clear whether different kinds of familiarity are more or less beneficial when the work has different types of complexity. In this paper, we theorize how task and team familiarity interact with task and team coordination complexity to influence team performance. We posit that task familiarity is more beneficial with more complex tasks (i.e., tasks that are larger or with more complex structures) and that team familiarity is more beneficial when team coordination is more difficult (i.e., for larger or geographically dispersed teams). Finally, we propose that the effects of task familiarity and team familiarity on team performance are complementary. Based on a field study of geographically distributed software teams, two of our hypotheses are disconfirmed: Our results show that the beneficial effects of task familiarity decline when tasks are more structurally complex and are independent of task size. Conversely, the hypotheses for team familiarity are confirmed as the benefit of team familiarity for team performance is enhanced when team coordination is more challenging—i.e., when teams are larger or geographically dispersed. Finally, surprisingly, we find that task and team familiarity are more substitutive than complementary in their joint effects on team performance: Task familiarity improves team performance more strongly when team familiarity is weak and vice versa. Our study contributes by revealing how different types of familiarity can enhance team performance in a real-world setting where the task and its coordination can be highly complex.

Help or Hindrance? The Role of Familiarity in Collaborative Product Development

The rise of team-based structures within organisations has prompted increasing research focused at improving team processes, typically with a view to increasing team performance (e.g., Allen & Hecht, 2004). This expanding team-level focus within the organisational behaviour literature has required researchers to consider the complexities surrounding the conceptualisation and measurement of team-based constructs and phenomena (e.g., team satisfaction; team cohesion; team conflict), including how best to aggregate traditionally individual-level phenomena to the team level (Bliese, 2000; Chan, 1998). Increasing recognition of the role of affect in organisations ( e.g., Ashkanasy & Dorris, 2017; Barsade & Gibson, 2007) has similarly led to a growing cohort of researchers conceptually and empirically considering affect-related constructs at the team level (e.g., Ashkanasy, 2003; Barsade & Gibson, 2012; Cote, 2007). One influential stream within this area is research on group affective tone established by George and her colleagues ( e.g., George, 1990, 2002; George & King, 2007). George (1990) provided some of the earliest empirical evidence for group affective tone by demonstrating that individuals in workgroups tend to experience highly similar levels of state affect. The affective tone of a team has been shown to have significant impact on team functioning. A more positive affective tone has been linked with a number of advantageous team outcomes, including better team cooperation (Barsade, 2002), better coordination (Sy, Cote, & Saavedra, 2005), lower team conflict (e.g., Barsade, 2002), lower absence rates within the team (Mason & Griffin, 2003), and more helping behaviours displayed within the team (Chi, Chung, & Tsai, 2011 ). However, there have also been some counterintuitive findings that suggest the impact of group affective tone on team outcomes is more complex than sometimes theorised. In line with the IPSO model of team effectiveness (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001) my program of research will consider the interplay of affective input variables of the team (specifically trait affect and emotional intelligence) on the development of group affective tone and discrete emotional tones as an emergent state. I use affect-as­information theory (Schwarz & Clore, 2003) and the emotions-as-social-information model (EASI; Van Kleef, 2009) to guide my propositions regarding the influence of group affective tone on team dynamics ( conflict) and outcomes (team performance and team satisfaction). Finally, my expectations regarding the impact of team conflict on team outcomes are based on Jehn and Bendersky's (2003) contingency theory of the consequences of conflict. My broad research questions are: RQ 1. Under what conditions will team members' positive affect and negative affect converge? RQ2. What are the consequences of group affective tone on team conflict? RQ3. What are the consequences of group affective tone on team performance/ satisfaction? RQ4. To what extent does team emotional intelligence influence the interplay of team conflict and team performance? Three studies were conducted to address these questions. All studies used student samples in order to have a high amount of control over the formation of teams and the tasks they completed. Study 1 involved existing student teams assessed during the completion of a survival decision-making task. It examined the convergence of team members' affect, and whether the consequences of teams' affective tone on experienced conflict and objective performance in the task was dependent on teams' (self-rated) collective emotional intelligence, as well as the role of collective emotional intelligence in determining the effectiveness of team conflict on performance. Study 2 utilised an experimental design of randomly formed university teams, and addressed how the trait affective composition of a team contributed to the affective tone of teams, and whether this link was contingent on teams' self-rated level of emotional intelligence, as well as the impact of collective emotional intelligence and formally imposed display rules on the link between teams' affective tone and performance (both self-rated and objective) in a creative task. Finally, the aim of Study 3 was to take a more fine-grained look at the collective emotions of a team, and investigate the convergence of discrete emotions (e.g., joviality, fear, and hostility) in university teams completing a workplace-based decision-making task, as well as whether the consequences of teams' various emotional tones on experienced conflict and objective performance was dependent on teams' collective emotional intelligence (assessed via a situational judgement test). Results of my program of research have both supported previous research on affective tone and extended knowledge regarding the impact of collective emotional intelligence on team interactions with some counterintuitive findings. In an extension of previous research on affect at the team level, I examined specific emotions and their convergence in short tasks, and demonstrated that specific emotions will have differential influences on team outcomes which are not easily apparent when researchers classify affect as either globally positive or negative in nature. Regarding the role of emotional intelligence in team affectivity, different facets were found to have opposing effects. My research has extended past findings by demonstrating that the awareness facets of emotional intelligence can be harmful to a team's functioning when considering the negative affective tone of the team. When a team is lower in negative affective tone, having high awareness of emotions can be detrimental in terms of both relationship conflict experienced in the team, and objective performance of the team. This finding is in contrast to the majority of affective tone models which predict emotional intelligence will help buffer against the harmful impacts of negative affective tone. However, certain management aspects of emotional intelligence were found to be highly valuable in the interplay between positive affective tone, task conflict, and team performance. Contrary to past theory suggesting the desirability of a highly positive affective tone (e.g., George, 1995), and research demonstrating a simple positive link between positive tone and performance ( e.g., Hmieleski, Cole, & Baron, 2012; Kim & Choi, 2012) my research has challenged the notion that a positive affective tone is universally advantageous. Based on my research, during complex decision-making or creative tasks, teams need to be able to manage their positivity so that it remains functional, rather than making them complacent about their task; providing team-level support for affect-as-information theory (Schwarz & Clore, 2003). The practical implications of my research include the notion that team-level emotional intelligence may be a vital resource for maximising team performance. Managers of teams, in particular, should be aware that a highly positive team atmosphere may not be beneficial unless team members possess the skills to manage that collective positive emotion productively. Team selection which considers the emotional intelligence of potential members to ensure adequate collective levels, or training interventions which aim to increase employees' emotional intelligence are two options for organisations to consider.

Using longitudinal data on teams and quality competition results, this study examines the impact of team and task familiarity on brewing excellence in the Japanese sake industry from 1956 to 2018. Sake production involves teamwork at every stage, but while some teams work together long term, others experience high turnover. The study highlights two factors: team familiarity, the collective experience of working together, and task familiarity, the individual experience of the task. High familiarity can strengthen team bonds and improve teamwork, but it can also limit the inflow of new knowledge and thus hinder innovation. This study uses data from national quality competitions and brewer lists, and considers the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 as an external shock to address endogeneity and estimate the causal relationship between familiarity and competition outcomes. The empirical results show that increases in both team and task familiarity are negatively associated with quality superiority.

Examination of team productivity finds that team familiarity, i.e., individuals' prior shared work experience, can positively impact the efficiency and quality of team output. Despite the attention given to team familiarity and its contingencies, prior work has focused on whether team members have worked together, not on which team members have worked together, and under what conditions. In this paper, I parse overall team familiarity to consider effects of geographic location and the hierarchical roles of team members. Using data on all software‐development projects completed over 3 years at a large Indian firm in the global outsourced software services industry, I find that team familiarity gained when team members work together in the same location has a significantly more positive effect on team performance compared with team familiarity gained while members were collaborating in different locations. Additionally, I find that hierarchical team familiarity (a manager's experience with front‐line team members) and horizontal team familiarity (front‐line team members' experience gained with one another) have differential effects on project team performance. These findings provide insight into the relationship between team experience and team performance.

In knowledge-intensive settings such as product or software development, fluid teams of individuals with different sets of experience are tasked with projects that are critical to the success of their organizations. Although building teams from individuals with diverse prior experience is increasingly necessary, prior work examining the relationship between experience and performance fails to find a consistent effect of diversity in experience on performance. The problem is that diversity in experience improves a team's information processing capacity and knowledge base, but also creates coordination challenges. We hypothesize that team familiarity - team members' prior experience working with one another - is one mechanism that helps teams leverage the benefits of diversity in team member experience by alleviating coordination problems that diversity creates. We use detailed project- and individual-level data from an Indian software services firm to examine the effects of team familiarity and diversity in experience on performance for software development projects. We find the interaction of team familiarity and diversity in experience has a complementary effect on a project being delivered on time and on budget. In team familiarity, we identify one mechanism for capturing the performance benefits of diversity in experience and provide insight into how the management of experience accumulation affects team performance.

The impact of team familiarity on intra and postoperative cardiac surgical outcomes

Investigating the effects of time pressure on new product development teams

Reflexivity—the extent to which teams reflect upon and modify their functioning—has been identified as a possible key factor in the effectiveness of work teams. We examined the extent to which team composition affected team process (i.e., reflexivity) and in turn team outcomes (i.e., satisfaction, commitment, and performance). The results of diversity research thus far have been inconclusive in terms of positive or negative effects of team composition on team process and outcomes. In the current research, group longevity and outcome interdependence were expected to moderate the relationship between diversity on the one hand and reflexivity and team outcomes on the other hand. Reflexivity was expected to mediate these interaction effects. The current field study was conducted among 54 work teams from 13 different organizations. As predicted, few main effects were found. Instead, analyses showed interaction effects of diversity and outcome interdependence on the measures of reflexivity, satisfaction, and performance. As predicted, interaction effects were also found for diversity and group longevity on the measures of reflexivity, satisfaction, and performance. Three‐way interactions were found for satisfaction and commitment. Also, reflexivity was shown to mediate these relationships, indicating that the moderating effects of outcome interdependence and group longevity on the relation between diversity and team outcomes are due to the effects on process. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We read with interest the recent article written by Goto, Morris & Nevill: 'Match Analysis of U9 and U10 English Premier League Academy Soccer Players using a Global Positioning System: Relevance for Talent Identification and Development'. In summary, the authors reported time motion analysis data from match-play showing that players who were retained by their Academy covered a significantly greater distance overall and in low-speed running in comparison to peers who were released. Consequently, the authors discussed their results in the context of talent identification and development processes. In light of their findings and discussion, it is of our opinion that further debate in the context of the current body of literature is necessary.

Purpose This study aims to examine the relationship between concrescent conversation environment (CCE), psychological safety and team effectiveness. Although CCE has been known to influence team outcomes, little is known about how it influences them. Integrating the social constructionist and social psychology perspectives, this study argues that CCE ignites a climate of psychological safety resulting in “joint-action” necessary for positive team outcomes. Design/methodology/approach Survey data were collected from 301 team members from US firms operating in different industries. Data were analyzed using SmartPLS. Findings The study establishes CCE as an antecedent to psychological safety and demonstrates that psychological safety mediates the relationship between CCE and team effectiveness. Research limitations/implications This is one of the initial studies to show how verbal behaviors socially construct team dynamics in the shape of psychological safety to influence team outcomes. In doing so, the authors advance the theory pertaining to the role of social exchanges in team processes and outcomes. Practical implications The results provide insights on how managers can improve team outcomes by influencing the conversational environment of the team to elicit feelings of psychological safety. The results also suggest that managers must focus on relational outcomes as well, along with performance outcomes. Originality/value From a social constructionist perspective, team development is built upon the verbal behaviors of the members as they pursue tasks. However, the extant group dynamics literature undervalues conversations’ role in team processes and outcomes. This is the first study that examines the link between a team's conversational environment, psychological safety and team outcomes.

IntroductionDue to the increasing complexity and diversity of work tasks in teams, teams need team members who are dedicated and energetic, both characteristics attributed to team members’ work engagement. Especially in the domain of health care, high demands at work impact professionals’ work engagement. Despite teams being the main work unit in this domain, team research on antecedents of work engagement has been neglected. The present study examines the role of team behaviors such as reflection activities in the relationships between demands at work and team members’ work engagement. In doing so, the study aims to extend findings on team behaviors by considering cognitive and work-task related team behaviors as well as team behaviors that focus on emotional aspects.MethodsData of 298 team members of 52 interdisciplinary teams of health and social care organizations which provide care and assistance were collected in this cross-sectional survey study. Relationships between team demands at work, team learning behaviors, dealing with emotions in the team and team members’ work engagement were estimated in a mediation model using structural equation modeling (SEM).ResultsThe results indicate that team members’ work engagement is positively related to team learning behaviors and dealing with emotions in the team. Cognitive team demands at work such as the complexity of work tasks, were found to relate positively to team members’ work engagement, while emotional team demands such as the amount of emotional labor at work had a negative relationship. Team learning behaviors and dealing with emotions in the team were found to mediate the relationship between team demands at work and team members’ work engagement.DiscussionOur results provide insights into the actual behavior of teams in the domain of health care, both on cognitive and emotional aspects, and the capability of team learning behaviors and dealing with emotions in the team to mediate the relationship between team demands at work and team members’ work engagement. The findings encourage future researchers and practitioners to address cognitive, emotional and motivational components in team research to provide a better understanding of team conditions, team behavior and team outcomes.

Teams are composed of individual members who collectively contribute to team success. As a result, contemporary team research tends to focus on how team overall properties (e.g., the average of team personality and behavior) affect team processes and effectiveness while overlooking the potential unique influences of specific members on team outcomes. Drawing on minority influence theory (Grant & Patil, 2012), we extend previous teams research by demonstrating that an extra miler (i.e., a team member exhibiting the highest frequency of extra-role behaviors in a team) can influence team processes and, ultimately, team effectiveness beyond the influences of all the other members. Specifically, based on a field study, we report that the extra miler's behavioral influences (i.e., helping and voice) on team monitoring and backup processes and team effectiveness are contingent on his or her network position in the team, such that the member tends to have stronger influence on team outcomes when he or she is in a central position. We also find that even a single extra miler in a vital position plays a more important role in driving team processes and outcomes than do all the other members. Therefore, our research offers an important contribution to the team literature by demonstrating the disproportionate influences of specific team members on team overall outcomes.

Teams are a basic building block of organizations. Over the past twenty-five years, a great deal of research has focused on what can be done to improve team effectiveness. Team design characteristics represent inputs that can be manipulated by organizational leaders and can be grouped into three broad classifications: Team Composition, Team Task Design Characteristics, and Team Leadership. The first team design characteristic—composition—focuses on the attributes of individuals who are team members and is generally captured either as the average standing on a particular trait such as mental ability or as a pattern of a characteristic such as the variability in team member conscientiousness. Teams composed of members with desirable traits generally outperform teams composed of members who do not possess desirable individual characteristics. Members with negative individual characteristics harm cooperation and are often rejected by teammates. The impact of some team members—frequently labeled the strategic core—is, however, greater than the impact of others. Team Member Diversity of individual characteristics also corresponds with team processes and outcomes, although the effect is positive in some instances and negative in others. A particularly difficult methodological issue associated with team composition research concerns missing data that occurs when some team members fail to complete survey measures. The second team design feature—team task characteristics—arises from the work itself and how the team accomplishes its prescribed tasks. Some teams have a high level of collective autonomy whereas others work under strict hierarchical control. Teams vary in interdependence with some operating such that members work together very closely and others allowing members to work primarily as individuals. Differences in reward structure also vary from teams that are rewarded collectively to teams with individual-based rewards that result in some members being rewarded more than others. Moreover, an increasingly important task feature of teams is the degree of virtuality, with some teams interacting primarily face-to-face and others interacting mostly through electronic means. The third team design feature is leadership. Teams are facilitated by Empowering Leadership that encourages the team to collectively lead itself, by Shared Leadership that exists when leadership functions are dispersed throughout the team, and by Transformational Leadership that provides teams with a vision that transcends individual interests.

Research on fluid teams has consistently found a positive relationship between team familiarity and performance, but little empirical research has investigated whether these benefits of familiarity extend to times of crisis and uncertainty. This study examines how team familiarity influences provider decision times in the emergency department, focusing on how its effects vary across different crisis and uncertainty contexts. Using patient and provider assignment data from a large, multisite emergency department, we construct care team familiarity networks and analyze familiarity’s impact on decision-making speed during both low-uncertainty crises (high-acuity patient surges) and high-uncertainty crises (early COVID-19 pandemic), as well as under conditions of patient-level task uncertainty. We find that team familiarity consistently reduces provider decision times; familiarity is particularly beneficial during crises. However, across both crisis and noncrisis situations, we find that the positive effects of familiarity are significantly weakened under conditions of high uncertainty. These findings underscore the conditional nature of familiarity’s benefits, suggesting that in highly uncertain or novel situations, teams cannot rely solely on past shared experience to maintain performance. Implications for staffing strategies in healthcare and other high-stakes environments highlight the need for organizations to balance the benefits of familiarity with adaptability in the face of uncertainty. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2025.20912 .