When Teams are Caught in Discussion Circles: Introducing Team Rumination

Abstract

This research introduces a new team-level construct, referred to as team rumination. Building on increasing attention of social forms of rumination, we propose that team rumination is a higher-order phenomenon that unfolds unique dynamics in the team context. We define team rumination as an ineffective attempt to make sense of a shared problem at work that the team perceives to be adverse and beyond its control. It is characterized by intrusive discussions, in which the team repetitively talks about the same aspects again and again, speculates about causes and consequences, shares negative thoughts and feelings, and mutually reinforces the problem talk. Team rumination is ineffective because the team uses up resources and cannot accomplish actual tasks while it does not produce a solution for the problem at hand. First, in performing a literature review on individual, co-rumination, and collective rumination and conducting 13 semi-structured interviews with team members, we 1) established a conceptual definition of team rumination. Second, in applying a confirmatory factor analysis to a sample of 303 working adults, we 2) propose a 25-item measure of team rumination. Our research lays the groundwork for the empirical examination of this novel team phenomenon.