Intra-team Coordination Research Articles

Shared Mental Models and Boundary Management Activities in New Product Development: A Perspective on Multiteam Systems

Multiteam systems (MTSs) have been increasingly adopted as an organizational form to manage large-scale projects. However, new product development (NPD) in the MTSs structure entails challenges with respect to achieving efficiency due to interteam coordination challenges. Shared mental models (SMMs) within a single team have been found to facilitate intrateam coordination; however, further exploration is needed as to whether SMMs within MTSs can improve interteam coordination among component teams and, if so, what mechanisms underlie this. The present article examines the theoretical underpinning of the impacts of SMMs among component team leaders on MTSs’ NPD efficiency, and further considers the impact of external conditions of requirement uncertainty, the most common external situation during NPD. Using survey data from 110 information technology development MTSs and drawing on boundary management perspective, the results reveal that SMMs among component team leaders positively affect NPD efficiency by managing the MTSs boundary, i.e., through boundary entrainment and boundary buffering activities at the system level. In addition, we find that requirement uncertainty plays a vital role in determining the nature of this relationship. Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of the role of SMMs among component team leaders in facilitating NPD efficiency in MTSs settings.

The Dual Effects of Team Contest Design on On-Demand Service Work Schedules

Emerging on-demand service platforms (OSPs) have recently embraced teamwork as a strategy for stimulating workers’ productivity and mediating temporal supply and demand imbalances. This research investigates the team contest scheme design problem considering work schedules. Introducing teams on OSPs creates a hierarchical single-leader multi-follower game. The leader (platform) establishes rewards and intrateam revenue-sharing rules for distributing workers’ payoffs. Each follower (team) competes with others by coordinating the schedules of its team members to maximize the total expected utility. The concurrence of interteam competition and intrateam coordination causes dual effects, which are captured by an equilibrium analysis of the followers’ game. To align the platform’s interest with workers’ heterogeneous working-time preferences, we propose a profit-maximizing contest scheme consisting of a winner’s reward and time-varying payments. A novel algorithm that combines Bayesian optimization, duality, and a penalty method solves the optimal scheme in the nonconvex equilibrium-constrained problem. Our results indicate that teamwork is a useful strategy with limitations. Under the proposed scheme, team contest always benefits workers. Intrateam coordination helps teams strategically mitigate the negative externalities caused by overcompetition among workers. For the platform, the optimal scheme can direct teams’ schedules toward more profitable market equilibria when workers have inaccurate perceptions of the market. History: This paper has been accepted for the Service Science Special Issue on Innovation in Transportation-Enabled Urban Services. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant FW-HTF-P 2222806]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2023.0320 .

Being a team player: Approaching team coordination in sports in dialog with ecological and praxeological approaches.

This paper discusses key conceptual resources for an understanding of coordination processes in team sports. It begins by exploring the action guidance provided by the environment, studied in terms of affordances. When conceptualizing sporting performances in general, we might distinguish social and object affordances, think about the spatial and temporal order of affordances in terms of nested and sequential affordances, and differentiate between global, main, and micro-affordances within an action sequence. In the context of team sports, it is crucial to understand how affordances might be given to a plurality of athletes. For that purpose, the paper defines shared, common, and collective affordances. A distinguishing characteristic of team sports is the key role of collaborative intra-team coordination which take place within a setting of antagonistic team-team interactions. A key proposal from dynamical systems theory is to conceptualize intra-team coordination in terms of synergies. Synergies are emergent systems of several athletes who coordinate their movements to achieve specific performance tasks. Many of the embodied skills that players need to develop to become suitable participants in the coordination processes of sport teams are abilities to participate in dynamic sequences of collective activity. Praxeological approaches have emphasized that training processes in team sports are aimed at transforming athletes into skillful participants in sequences of collective play. Athletes need to develop their ability-to-play-with to become proficient in contributing to the formation of suitable collectives for specific performance tasks.

When Teams Agree While Disagreeing: Reflexion and Reflection in Shared Cognition

Drawing on dual-systems theory, we propose a new typology for analyzing shared cognition in workgroups and teams that differentiates reflective (i.e., C-system) mental models formed through reasoning and deliberation from reflexive (i.e., X-system) representations that are more automatic, intuitive, and affective in nature. Our analysis demonstrates how team members’ X-system representations pertaining to the team’s task and its members can compete with shared C-system mental models of the task and team in terms of their respective effects on team functioning. We highlight the consequences for intrateam coordination when team members have similar C-system mental models but dissimilar X-system representations (illusory concordance) and when team members have similar X-system representations but dissimilar C-system mental models (surface discordance). Finally, we consider the implications of our arguments for extending current team cognition theory predicated on reflective cognition and suggest new directio...

The Too-Much-Talent Effect: Team Interdependence Determines When More Talent Is Too Much or Not Enough

Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: Participants expected that more talent improves performance and that this relationship never turns negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance—but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental as intrateam coordination suffers. We also predicted that the level of task interdependence is a key determinant of when more talent is detrimental rather than beneficial. Three archival studies revealed that the too-much-talent effect emerged when team members were interdependent (football and basketball) but not independent (baseball). Our basketball analysis also established the mediating role of team coordination. When teams need to come together, more talent can tear them apart.

Competing with lower level opponents decreases intra-team movement synchronization and time-motion demands during pre-season soccer matches.

This study aimed to quantify the time-motion demands and intra-team movement synchronization during the pre-season matches of a professional soccer team according to the opposition level. Positional data from 20 players were captured during the first half of six pre-season matches of a Portuguese first league team. Time-motion demands were measured by the total distance covered and distance covered at different speed categories. Intra-team coordination was measured by calculating the relative phase of all pairs of outfield players. Afterwards, the percentage of time spent in the −30° to 30° bin (near-in-phase mode of coordination) was calculated for each dyad as a measure of space-time movement synchronization. Movement synchronization data were analyzed for the whole team, according to each dyad average speed and by groups of similar dyadic synchronization tendencies. Then, these data were compared according to the opponent team level (first league; second league; amateurs). Time-motion demands showed no differences in total distance covered per opposition levels, while matches opposing teams of superior level revealed more distance covered at very high intensity. Competing against superior level teams implied more time in synchronized behavior for the overall displacements and displacements at higher intensities. These findings suggest that playing against higher-level opponents (1st league teams) increased time-motion demands at high intensities in tandem with intra-team movement synchronization tendencies.

Patterns of Interpersonal Coordination in Rugby Union: Analysis of Collective Behaviours in a Match Situation

This study aims to analyze how intra-team coordination patterns in the team sport of rugby union influenced successful performance. We hypothesized that high interpersonal coordination patterns are a crucial issue to cross (or not) the gain line. Video record and digitizing procedures were used as a method to collect data for further analysis of interpersonal coordination patterns that took place during the formation of subunits of attack. The results showed the existence of three types of outputs, which differ depending on the correlations between attackers and defenders. Therefore, for high and positive values of interpersonal coordination (r values between 0.8 < r < 1), there are possibilities of action that lead to success when the opponents have inverse or lower values of correlation. The conclusion was that interpersonal coordination within subunits becomes a relevant factor in analyzing the success in each game situation.

Interpretative case studies on agile team productivity and management

ContextThe management of software development productivity is a key issue in software organizations, where the major drivers are lower cost and shorter time-to-market. Agile methods, including Extreme Programming and Scrum, have evolved as “light” approaches that simplify the software development process, potentially leading to increased team productivity. However, little empirical research has examined which factors do have an impact on productivity and in what way, when using agile methods. ObjectiveOur objective is to provide a better understanding of the factors and mediators that impact agile team productivity. MethodWe have conducted a multiple-case study for 6months in three large Brazilian companies that have been using agile methods for over 2years. We have focused on the main productivity factors perceived by team members through interviews, documentation from retrospectives, and non-participant observation. ResultsWe developed a novel conceptual framework, using thematic analysis to understand the possible mechanisms behind such productivity factors. Agile team management was found to be the most influential factor in achieving agile team productivity. At the intra-team level, the main productivity factors were team design (structure and work allocation) and member turnover. At the inter-team level, the main productivity factors were how well teams could be effectively coordinated by proper interfaces and other dependencies and avoiding delays in providing promised software to dependent teams. ConclusionTeams should be aware of the influence and magnitude of turnover, which has been shown negative for agile team productivity. Team design choices remain an important factor impacting team productivity, even more pronounced on agile teams that rely on teamwork and people factors. The intra-team coordination processes must be adjusted to enable productive work by considering priorities and pace between teams. Finally, the revised conceptual framework for agile team productivity supports further tests through confirmatory studies.

White Collar Incentives

Using novel compensation data on white collar employees (WCE) in large, public U.S. firms, we examine their explicit financial incentives and implicit incentives arising from promotions and labor market opportunities. We find that employees with stronger (weaker) implicit incentives receive more (less) retention incentives measured by long-term equity-based incentives. We also find a dynamic relation between the use of long-term equity-based incentives and employee tenure: long-term equity-based incentives are used intensively in the early years of WCE’s tenure to help attract and retain them in the firm. As employees’ firm-specific human capital increases over time limiting their mobility in the external labor market, the use of long-term equity-based incentives becomes less intensive. Finally, we find that WCE incentives reflect lower horizontal pay disparity in functions where productivity depends significantly on intra-team coordination and information sharing, such as R&D. The overall findings suggest that firms fine-tune explicit incentives to account for differences in implicit incentives arising from job and individual employee characteristics.

Editorial

Editorial

Networks as a novel tool for studying team ball sports as complex social systems

This paper describes and evaluates the novel utility of network methods for understanding human interpersonal interactions within social neurobiological systems such as sports teams. We show how collective system networks are supported by the sum of interpersonal interactions that emerge from the activity of system agents (such as players in a sports team). To test this idea we trialled the methodology in analyses of intra-team collective behaviours in the team sport of water polo. We observed that the number of interactions between team members resulted in varied intra-team coordination patterns of play, differentiating between successful and unsuccessful performance outcomes. Future research on small-world networks methodologies needs to formalize measures of node connections in analyses of collective behaviours in sports teams, to verify whether a high frequency of interactions is needed between players in order to achieve competitive performance outcomes.

Communication, cooperation and collusion in team tournaments—An experimental study

We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous effects on effort choices. Communication within teams may promote higher efforts by mitigating the internal free-rider problem. Communication between competing teams may lead to collusion, thereby reducing efforts. In our experiment we control the channels of communication by letting subjects communicate through an electronic chat. We find, indeed, that communication within teams increases efforts and communication between teams reduces efforts. We use team members' dialogs to explain these effects of communication, and check the robustness of our results.

A Meta-Analytic Review of Relationships Between Team Design Features and Team Performance

This article presents a quantitative review of 93 studies examining relationships between team design features and team performance. Aggregated measures of individual ability and disposition correlate positively with team performance. Team member heterogeneity and performance correlate near zero, but the effect varies somewhat by type of team. Project and management teams have slightly higher performance when they include more members. Team-level task meaningfulness exhibits a modest but inconsistent relationship with performance. Increased autonomy and intrateam coordination correspond with higher performance, but the effect varies depending on task type. Leadership, particularly transformational and empowering leadership, improves team performance.