Team adaptive performance in the metaverse workspace: Team cohesion as a mediator

• Provides empirical insights on the effects of the agile way of working. • Agile way of working positively related to team adaptive performance. • Relationship is partly through the mechanism of team goal specificity. • Shows importance of integrating goal-setting theory into agile way of working. The agile way of working gained prominence in business due to its promise of improving team adaptive performance. However, empirical assessment whether it indeed relates to the expected improvement in team adaptive performance and the underlying processes is lagging. We researched the link between the agile way of working and team adaptive performance in a diverse sample of 71 agile teams. Based on goal-setting theory, team goal specificity and goal difficulty were explored as mediators in this link. Results indicate that the agile way of working contributes positively to team adaptive performance, and team goal specificity partially mediates this relationship, while team goal difficulty does not. Our findings shed light on the goal-setting processes involved in agile ways of working and contribute to our understanding of how the agile way of working grants autonomy to teams in setting and specifying goals, ongoing goal refinement, and the ability to prioritize goals.

The objective of this research is to investigate the link between team cohesion and team adaptive performance (TAP) directly and via team ambidexterity. This research also examines the moderating effect of team empowerment climate on the link between team cohesion and TAP. Data were collected through a time-lagged design (two waves) from a sample of 62 teams consisting of 296 software developers working in the software development industry in Pakistan. The team-level hypothesised framework was analysed through Hayes’ PROCESS Macro using SPSS. The results revealed that team cohesion positively influences TAP directly, as well as via team ambidexterity. Moreover, the results also reveal that team empowerment climate positively moderates the direct association between team cohesion and TAP. This study implies that the managers of software houses should enable software developers to address challenging and uncertain situations by promoting high-quality relationships among team members and by supporting a perception of an empowered climate within teams. This study makes an important contribution to the nascent literature on TAP by highlighting team cohesion as a predecessor of TAP and by examining employee ambidexterity as a mechanism in this relationship.

Team adaptation is particularly impactful within extreme and isolated environments, where sudden and abrupt events drastically challenge effective teamwork. To advance the team adaptation literature, we examined how event characteristics influence the relationship between team adaptation processes and team adaptive performance. To do so, we conducted an on-site, multi-study research using sequential explanatory mixed methods and a retrospective event history approach. The first study (based on a quantitative multilevel methodology) was designed to understand how the characteristics of the events influenced team adaptation processes and team adaptive performance (we collected data of 86 events described by 56 informants nested within 21 teams) during one Antarctic Summer Campaign at the South Shetland Islands Archipelago, Antarctica. The second study, based on qualitative methodology focused on thematic analysis, was designed to obtain a detailed description of the relationship between adaptation triggers and team adaptation (we collected data from 20 semi-structured interviews). Overall, our findings highlight that different team processes are significant in shaping perceptions of team adaptive performance, making the modification of transition and interpersonal processes the most critical. We additionally show how these relationships are moderated by the characteristics of adaptation triggers. We discuss the implications of these findings for teams within extreme environments and beyond.

PurposeModern business environments present tremendous uncertainties, risks, novelties, and opportunities. Organizational teams must identify emerging cues before they grow into full-blown issues, to adapt effectively to fast-changing environments. Team mindfulness is a socio-cognitive capability that enhances the ability to detect cues and creates richer awareness of the context. This paper proposes a conceptual model highlighting that team mindfulness directly strengthens the team’s adaptive capabilities and also enhances the absorptive capacity to learn from external sources, thereby further promoting readiness toward change and transformation.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual paper draws from mindfulness theory and team adaptive performance theory to explore how team mindfulness influences the four dimensions of absorptive capacity related to knowledge acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and utilization, which together determine how effectively teams adapt to novelty.FindingsThis paper presents a conceptual model to show that mindfulness directly affects team learning and adaptive capabilities that are specifically related to acquiring and utilizing knowledge from sources outside the team. It suggests several measures and managerial initiatives promoting mindfulness and absorptive capacity in teams.Originality/valueIntegrating research on team mindfulness, absorptive capacity, and adaptive performance, this paper provides a starting point for deeper investigations into the mechanisms through which team mindfulness may enable teams to adapt effectively to novelty and uncertainty. Further, it calls attention to the systematic development of mindfulness in organizational teams.

Despite agreement among leadership scholars that the effectiveness of a leadership style is situationally dependent, little is known about the process of effectively switching among different leadership styles as situations unexpectedly change. Organizations rely heavily on teams to quickly and accurately adapt in dynamic contexts, and we focus here on clarifying the process of adaptive leadership style transitions in teams as they cope with situations unexpectedly shifting from requiring process efficiency to requiring collective sensemaking. We review and build on pertinent literature to develop a process model depicting switching among leadership styles not as an isolated act of a team leader, but as interdependent behaviors of a leader and team members in co-constructing the adaptive switching process. We offer testable propositions derived from the model that delineate variables influencing the adaptive leadership process and team adaptive performance. Finally, we discuss future research and practical implications based on the model's exploration.

As part of a transactive memory system, meta-knowledge of “who knows what” reduces team members’ effort to seek for experts, enables them to correctly request each other’s expertise, and improves their performance compared to teams without meta-knowledge. As technology advances, software agents can be used to communicate between experts to reduce team members’ cognitive demands. In this paper, we analyze the effect of meta-knowledge on expert seeking, mistakes in expert requesting, and (adaptive) team performance by comparing task phases with manual or full automated communication. 360 students in 120 three-person teams played an interdependent computer-based control-center simulation-task in three phases. We manipulated meta-knowledge, with 61 teams learning and 59 teams not learning meta-knowledge in advance. In phase 1 and 3, team members had to request experts manually. In phase 2, communication is fully automated. In line with our hypotheses, results showed that in phase 1 and 3, teams with meta-knowledge showed less expert seeking, made fewer mistakes in expert requesting, and performed better than teams without meta-knowledge. Results suggest that meta-knowledge improves performance and the ability to adapt to switching levels of automation underlining its importance for flexible applications of team support systems.

Effective emergency department care requires individuals and teams to adapt to changes in patient condition, team factors, environmental issues, and system-level challenges. Adaptability is often listed as an important skill for emergency medicine physicians; however, conceptual models describing the processes involved in adaptive performance have not been translated for health care settings. Similarly, educators have not described training design strategies that support the development of adaptive performance. We examined the team science and health care literatures for key concepts in adaptive performance, health care team performance, and diagnostic decision-making. Using expert consensus, we integrated these concepts to develop the team adaptive performance model and to identify training design approaches that support the development of adaptability. We identify nine training principles supported by the team adaptive performance model and the adaptive learning system. Each training principle is accompanied by recommendations and mechanisms for implementation in emergency medicine simulation-based education. Training experiences can be designed to target processes that support adaptive performance.

In this longitudinal laboratory study, we investigated the effects of an adaptive followership training intervention on team adaptive performance. One hundred two four-person teams were assigned to one of the six conditions resulting from the 2 (adaptive followership training vs. control training) x 3 (change magnitude: team, task, or team & task) factorial repeated measures design. Results revealed the magnitude of change exerted a moderating effect on the relation between adaptive followership training and team adaptive performance, such that adaptive followership training significantly increased team adaptive performance when teams faced both a task and a team change, but not when they faced only a task or a team change. Additionally, we found that adaptive followership increases leader psychological safety across change conditions, and that leader psychological safety mediates the positive effect of adaptive followership on team adaptive performance in the team and task change condition. Our work extends both team adaptation and followership literatures and enhances organizational practice, providing vital insights for training program development to increase teams’ ability to adapt effectively during environmental complexities.

The concept of shared mental models refers to the shared understanding among team members about how they should behave in different situations. This article aimed to develop a new shared mental model measure, specifically designed for the refereeing context. A cross-sectional study was conducted with three samples: national and regional football referees (n = 133), national football referees and assistant referees and national futsal referees (n = 277), and national futsal referees (n = 60). The proposed version of the Referee Shared Mental Models Measure (RSMMM) has 13 items that are reflected on a single factor structure. The RSMMM presented good validity evidence both based on the internal structure and based on relations to other variables (presenting positive associations with team work engagement, team adaptive performance, and team effectiveness). Such promising psychometric properties point to an optimistic outlook regarding its use to measure shared mental models in futsal and football referee teams.

Here, we report a longitudinal experiment testing the combined effects of leadership style and the magnitude of the disruption on team adaptive performance over time. We hypothesized that teams led by a directive leader would outperform teams led by an empowering leader when task conditions do not change (pre-change), while teams with an empowering leader would outperform teams with a directive leader under changing task conditions (post-change), especially when task changes are high in magnitude. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a 2 (leadership: directive/empowering) x 2 (magnitude of the disruption: low/high) experiment with repeated measures of team performance before and after the change occurred. Sixty-seven three-member teams participated in a computer-based firefighting simulation. Evidence from discontinuous growth modeling partially supported our hypotheses by showing that before the task change, directively led teams outperformed teams led by an empowering leader. After the task change, however, directively led teams still outperformed teams with empowering leaders. The magnitude of the disruption had a significant main effect on team adaptive performance but did not significantly moderate the effect of leadership style. Implications for the team adaptation literature and the management of teams under complex, changing conditions are discussed.

Organizations use teams as an adaptive and flexible response to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Team adaptive performance, which is team performance under changing environmental conditions, can be facilitated by motivational mechanisms. In this paper, we investigated the effect of team rewards on team adaptive performance. Noting the temporal nature of team adaptation and emergent states, we hypothesized that team reward consistency over time (as compared to inconsistency) would result in higher team adaptive performance. We further posited that team efficacy beliefs and team distributive fairness perceptions would partially mediate this relationship. We used a between-subjects (team reward condition: consistent or inconsistent) experimental study with 43 3-person student teams who performed a coordination task with a change in the task at the midpoint. The empirical results supported our predictions. Team reward consistency led to higher team adaptive performance. Team distributive fairness perceptions fully mediated this relationship. Team reward consistency also resulted in higher team efficacy beliefs, which also contributed to team adaptive performance. Thus, our paper highlights the importance of team rewards on team adaptation.

When teams operate in a dynamic and complex environment, their ability to adapt to changing demands is crucial for organizational success. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of empowering behaviors exhibited by team leaders in team adaptive performance by taking into account the mediating role of shared leadership displayed by team members and the moderating effect of access to resources. Data were collected from 82 work teams (i.e., 394 members and 82 immediate supervisors) in a public safety organization. Results of path analyses show that the relationship between empowering leader behaviors and team adaptive performance is mediated by shared leadership. Moreover, we found that the relationship between empowering leader behaviors and shared leadership is moderated by access to resources, such that this relationship is stronger when the level of access to resources is high. Overall, the findings shed light on the process through which team leaders can enhance the adaptive performance of their team.

In spite of much research effort, the understanding of team adaptation, particularly its contextual factors remains incomplete. We address the issue from leaders’ cognitive style perspective and investigate the predicting role of leader Zhong Yong thinking, a culturally-rooted cognitive style. Drawing on social information processing theory, we examine the mechanism through which leader Zhong Yong thinking influences team adaptive performance. We collect two-source data from 296 members in 74 work teams over three time periods in China. We find that leader Zhong Yong thinking positively influences team flexibility and team cooperation, and further team adaptive performance via team flexibility and team cooperation when employees have higher ambiguity tolerance. That is, team ambiguity tolerance moderates the main and indirect effects of leader Zhong Yong thinking. To demonstrate the unique effect of leader Zhong Yong thinking, we control for inclusive climate as a parallel independent variable. The study contributes to team adaptation literature and leadership theory.

This study developed a model of team mental models’ influence on team adaptive performance at different stages. It proposed that mental models have different relationships with adaptive performance as a function of the performance stage when teams experience changes: early on (i.e., during situation assessment) more divergent mental models are needed for performance; later on (i.e., during plan execution) more convergent mental models are needed. The model was tested in an experiment with 33 teams (N= 99) faced with unforeseen change at task midway. Partially supporting the predictions of a divergence-convergence model, at situation assessment, teams that developed more dissimilar mental models attained a higher performance originality, but not higher efficiency or usefulness. However, at plan execution, team mental models’ convergence did not lead to higher performance. Implications for research on team mental models are discussed.

Organizations depend on teams to achieve their proximal or distal objectives. They are required to perform at high level in dynamic contexts and unclear situations. In these environments, teams must be capable to adapt and adjust their performance according to the changes they are facing. This paper examines the relation between transactional leadership and adaptive performance mediated by task conflict and cross-understanding. These two mediators seem to be an important part of team cognition. We analysed 33 real working teams and their leaders, these teams operating in different domains. We found that task conflict and cross-understanding mediated he relation between transactional leadership and adaptive performance. This result contributes to the literature stating that transactional leadership can have benefits on adaptive performance. Another contribution is that we analysed the newly introduced concept of cross-understanding, and we identified situations where task conflict is benefic for adaptive performance.

Team adaptation in context: An integrated conceptual model and meta-analytic review

팀은 환경변화에 적응하는 중요한 조직의 수단으로 팀제와 관련된 많은 연구들이 팀 효과를 강화하는 요인에 대하여 초점을 맞추어 지면서, 지난 15년간 적응수행은 팀 효과를 강화하는 행위로서 주목을 받아 왔다. 팀 적응성과에 있어 많이 적용되고 있는 프로세스적 관점은 실제 적응이 발생하는 메카니즘을 설명 할 수 있지만, 다양한 적응과 관련된 행위를 포괄적으로 설명하는데 한계를 가지고 있으므로, 본 연구에서는 동적인 과업수행 행위에 초점을 두고 팀 적응성과를 환경변화에 대한 대응으로 발생되는 팀 성과로서 정의하였다. 적응성과를 측정하기에 적합한 액션팀인 특수 임무팀을 대상으로 팀 적응성과의 선행요인으 로서 팀장의 변혁적 리더십의 효과와 변혁적 리더십과 팀 적응성과의 관계에서 공유멘탈모델의 매개효과 를 검증하였다. 본 연구를 위하여 군 조직의 89개 특수 임무팀들을 대상으로 설문조사를 실시하였고, 불성 실한 응답을 제외하고, 65명의 특수 임무팀장들과 497명의 팀원들의 자료를 사용하여 통계 분석하였다. 매개효과 검증을 위하여 위계적 회귀분석을 실시한 결과, 특수 임무팀에서 팀장의 변혁적 리더십과 팀 적응성과 간의 관계에서 팀 공유멘탈모델은 유의한 정적인 부분 매개효과가 있는 것으로 나타났다. 이러 한 결과는 팀장의 변혁적 리더십이 팀 구성원들 개인에게 새로운 과업환경을 극복할 수 있도록 동기부여 를 제공할 수 있으며 이러한 과정을 통해 구성원들은 자신의 과업환경의 변화에 적응함으로서 결과적으 로 팀 적응성과를 높이는 결과를 가져오게 하며, 동시에 팀장의 변혁적 리더십은 전문성을 가진 다양한 팀 구성원들이 사회적 정체성 갖도록 유도함으로서 다양한 정보의 공유를 가능하게 한다. 또한 팀장은 외부환경에 대한 중요한 정보를 제공하여 팀 구성원들이 직무환경에 대한 유용한 정보체계를 공유함으로 서 팀의 적응성과에 미치는 긍정적 효과를 실증하였다. 연구결과를 토대로 본 연구의 학문적 의의 및 실 무적 시사점, 그리고 한계점에 대하여 논의하였다.

Team Leaders' Charismatic Leadership, Team Efficacy, Team Adaptive Performance : The Moderated Mediation Model of Team Leaders' Tenure

Purpose– While scales were developed to measure individual adaptive performance (IAP), fewer contributions have been done to assess the construct at the team level of analysis. This issue is addressed through two related studies: Study 1 builds on Pulakoset al.(2000) to develop a measure of IAP. Study 2 follows from the results in Study 1 and tests a measure of team adaptive performance (Chan, 1998).Design/methodology/approach– Scale development was done adopting a single level (Study 1) and multi-level (Study 2) structural equations modeling approach.Findings– Results suggest that both measures of individual and team adaptive performance are reliable and show evidence supporting the adequacy of adopting referent-shift methodologies to the measurement and aggregation of team members’ rating of team adaptive performance.Originality/value– The study offers a reliable, parsimonious and easy to apply measure of individual and team adaptive performance in organizational work environments.