First Challenge: Purposeful Team Staffing

Team staffing has motivated enormous research interest because is considered a critical team performance driver (Hollenbeck et al., Reference Hollenbeck, DeRue and Guzzo2004; Morgeson et al., Reference Morgeson, Reider and Campion2005). Team staffing consists in screening team members to determine the team composition (team members’ characteristics and attributes combination) ensuring team effectiveness (Morgeson et al., Reference Morgeson, Reider and Campion2005). As a second order variable, team composition originates from the combination of first order variables such as knowledge, skills, abilities and other team members’ traits (KSAOs), like personality, attitudes or values (Mathieu et al., Reference Mathieu, Tannenbaum, Donsbach and Alliger2014).

Team composition is an initial necessary condition for ensuring effective team members’ execution (Salas et al., Reference Salas, Cooke and Rosen2008), and the emergence of affective and motivational states, behavioral processes and cognitive states (ABCs of teamwork) critical for team effectiveness (Bell et al., Reference Bell, Brown, Colaneri and Outland2018; Salas et al., Reference Salas, Cooke and Rosen2008). From the condition-focused approach posit by Hackman (Reference Hackman2012), team composition (i.e., right people) can be viewed as one of the main conditions (not causes) under which teams chart their own courses to effectively perform. However, team composition is not a sufficient condition because teams in the wild should consider the influence of the embedding organizational context’s uniqueness (Salas et al., Reference Salas, Stagl, Burke, Cooper and Robertson2004). Thus, team composition must fit both the context embedding the team and the team’s task characteristics (e.g., task interdependence levels), while delivering team’s expected results.

From a strategic human resource management approach, team staffing may adopt two main forms: a) Selecting individuals to make up a team (team lifts); and b) incorporating a whole pre-existing team (cluster hiring) into the organizational context (Munyon et al., Reference Munyon, Summers and Ferris2011). The impact these team staffing forms may have on team composition will depend on the amount of team members or whole teams being substituted, subtracted, or added as a result of organizational mergers, restructuring, downsizing or redesign (Mathieu et al., Reference Mathieu, Tannenbaum, Donsbach, Alliger and Salas2013). Despite their potential clear benefits, team staffing decisions shall consider five main potential threats to reduce their latent cost regarding changes in organizational demographics, human capital and organizational strategy: 1) Oversimplifying team staffing and its differences with individual selection processes; 2) deciding the kind of individual characteristics to be considered when assessing team members; 3) ignoring time effects and team development issues; 4) overlooking the kind of organizational structure accommodating teams; and 5) neglecting the way team composition will impact team diversity.

First, team staffing can’t be oversimplified and reduced to a mere extension of individual selection processes for five main reasons (Zaccaro & DiRosa, Reference Zaccaro, DiRosa, Hodgkinson and Ford2012): a) Team staffing requires a precise definition of two types of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs): KSAs fostering both individual and team taskwork to attain effective task performance, and those required for effective teamwork that include both interpersonal and self-management KSAs (Cannon-Bowers et al., Reference Cannon-Bowers, Tannenbaum, Salas, Volpe, Guzzo and Salas1995; Stevens & Campion, Reference Stevens and Campion1999). b) Staffing for teams in real work settings needs to consider how the required task and team KSAs will combine between team members (i.e., interpersonal fit), and how all team members will blend as a whole (i.e., collective fit). c) The team’s temporal cycle (i.e., short-term project team vs. long-term team) should also be considered when deciding which competencies are required, that is: Task and team context-driven, task contingent, team contingent or task and team transportable competencies (Cannon-Bowers et al., Reference Cannon-Bowers, Tannenbaum, Salas, Volpe, Guzzo and Salas1995). d) Work settings create pressures on team members, frequently increasing team standardization, which leads to poor or even dysfunctional team processes due to the homogenization of skills, extant conflicts or negative experiences among team members (Zaccaro & DiRosa, Reference Zaccaro, DiRosa, Hodgkinson and Ford2012). And e) previous team members’ common experience and knowledge may shape their collaboration for better or worse (Mathieu et al., Reference Mathieu, Tannenbaum, Donsbach, Alliger and Salas2013); hence, the mnemic trace of the team is made up of possible resentments, rivalries, and distrust (or their positive counterparts).

A second potential threat is the identification of the individual characteristics to be assessed: Either deep-level variables, such as personality traits, values, and abilities (general mental ability and emotional intelligence –Bell, Reference Bell2007); or attributes directly related to KSAs, such as learnable behaviors or mental abilities (Aguado et al., Reference Aguado, Rico, Sánchez-Manzanares and Salas2014; Stevens & Campion, Reference Stevens and Campion1999). In this regard, empirical evidence offers more support to assessing task and team KSAs, as these are consistently related with team effectiveness (Aguado et al., Reference Aguado, Rico, Sánchez-Manzanares and Salas2014; Hollenbeck et al., Reference Hollenbeck, DeRue and Guzzo2004; Stevens & Campion, Reference Stevens and Campion1999). However, extant literature has shown that assessing personality characteristics have superior selection validity in teams operating in real work settings than lab teams (e.g., Halfhill et al., Reference Halfhill, Sundstrom, Lahner, Calderone and Nielsen2005). Therefore, both individual and teamwork technical KSAs should be assessed to predict performance in teams in the wild. Finally, in case of an internal team staffing process involving personnel hired using an individual assessment logic, their teamwork preference should be measured (Hollenbeck et al., Reference Hollenbeck, DeRue and Guzzo2004).

A third potential threat for teams staffing in real work settings is disregarding time effects and team development issues, whilst extant research highlights its relevance in the wild (e.g., Mohammed et al., Reference Mohammed, Hamilton, Lim, Salas, Goodwin and Burke2009; Tannenbaum et al., Reference Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas and Cohen2012). When deciding on the competencies required for selecting team members it should be considered the team’s developmental moment, which stage of the team project is transiting and the relative importance of skills depending on the role played by each member (Cannon-Bowers et al., Reference Cannon-Bowers, Tannenbaum, Salas, Volpe, Guzzo and Salas1995; Mathieu et al., Reference Mathieu, Tannenbaum, Donsbach and Alliger2014). In addition to this, the initial team composition should be considered as a departing point, given that team member relationships, the way in which KSAOs evolve along time (learning, routinization or obsolescence) and team results are likely to alter (positively or negatively) the effects of the initial composition (Arrow & McGrath, Reference Arrow, McGrath, Staw and Cummings1995; Mathieu et al., Reference Mathieu, Tannenbaum, Donsbach and Alliger2014).

The fourth and last potential threat for teams staffing concerns its impact on team diversity. Extant literature identifies two main types of diversity: a) Demographic or social diversity, which is relative to a social category or belonging to a group because of a shared characteristic (e.g., gender –Clair et al., Reference Clair, Beatty and Maclean2005), and b) functional diversity, which refers to characteristics that define what a person is capable of (e.g., knowledge); values, beliefs and attitudes; and personality characteristics, or cognitive, emotional and behavioral tendencies (Schneider & Northcraft, Reference Schneider and Northcraft1999). The effects of team composition on team diversity have not been acknowledged enough, because teams in real work settings tend to believe that diversity is naturally beneficial to their performance (Bowers et al., Reference Bowers, Pharmer and Salas2000, Hollenbeck et al., Reference Hollenbeck, DeRue and Guzzo2004). However, empirical results show that greater diversity does not lead to better team performance, and that functional diversity is more important for team performance than demographic diversity, especially over time (Bell et al., Reference Bell, Villado, Lukasik, Belau and Briggs2011; Hollenbeck et al., Reference Hollenbeck, DeRue and Guzzo2004). In addition, the effects of team diversity on team performance are mediated by different team processes (e.g., negatively mediated by team reflexivity, and positively by task conflict and team learning – Roberge & van Dick, Reference Roberge and van Dick2010; van der Vegt & Bunderson, Reference van der Vegt and Bunderson2005), and contingent on the type of team.

In any case, teams in real work settings often view team diversity as an objective variable, neglecting that team members actively construct representations of such diversity, leading to subgroup formation or team faultlines (Antino et al., Reference Antino, Rico and Thatcher2019). In this regard, the literature is consistent in showing that perceived subgroup splits have a curvilinear (inverted U) relationship with team performance, with high and low levels negatively affecting team outcomes (e.g., Gibson & Vermeulen, Reference Gibson and Vermeulen2003; Lau & Murnighan, Reference Lau and Murnighan1998; Rico et al., Reference Rico, Molleman, Sánchez-Manzanares and van der Vegt2007). In short, the potential threat for teams regarding diversity is treating diversity superficially without considering the differential effects of team diversity attributes, the type of team, as well as team members’ perceptions regarding their diversity.

Second Challenge: Proper Task Design and Team Allocation

Team staffing is just a starting point, since a suitable task for a team can be carried out in several ways. The second challenge faced by teams in real work settings is therefore the way their task is designed to reduce process losses and enhance team effectiveness. Team design depends on purpose, a powerful enabling condition. From the condition-focused approach (Hackman, Reference Hackman2012), a compelling team purpose energizes team members, guides and motivates them toward their collective goal, and enhances their task engagement. Team task design is a key element of team structure (Cohen & Bailey, Reference Cohen and Bailey1997; Ilgen et al., Reference Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson and Jundt2005) and should motivate team members to fully apply their skills and find meaning in their efforts (Hackman, Reference Hackman and Lorsch1987). In this regard, extant literature shows that task design providing reasonable levels of autonomy and continuous feedback to the team is a good starting point (Hackman, Reference Hackman and Lorsch1987; Stewart, Reference Stewart2006; Stewart & Barrick, Reference Stewart and Barrick2000). The effects of team task autonomy on team performance operate through motivational, informational (distributing information among team members) and structural processes (improving the alignment of task and teamwork –Langfred & Moye, Reference Langfred and Moye2004). Hence, the challenge in designing team tasks resides in reaching an optimal combination of team members and team autonomy (e.g., van Mierlo et al., Reference van Mierlo, Rutte, Vermunt, Kompier and Doorewaard2007). A combination that positively impacts team performance, despite task interdependence moderates such impact (Langfred, Reference Langfred2005). Accordingly, teams with high task interdependence perform better under high levels of task autonomy, but perform worse with high individual task autonomy; a pattern that is inverted when teams have low task interdependence (Langfred, Reference Langfred2005). Thus, a first potential challenge when designing teams’ tasks in real work settings is considering both team and individual task autonomy in conjunction with team task interdependence.

Beyond autonomy, the other two basic elements when designing a task for a team are meaningfulness and intra-team coordination (Stewart, Reference Stewart2006). Meta-analytical results show that team-level task meaningfulness presents a very modest positive relationship with team performance, but its relevance is contingent on the nature of the context surrounding the team. Regarding intra-team coordination, results show that in teams in real work settings, increased coordination is positively related to team performance, particularly for knowledge-based team tasks (Stewart, Reference Stewart2006). In sum, a second potential challenge for designing team tasks resides in overlooking the importance of intra-team coordination and task meaningfulness, especially for knowledge-based work teams.

Moreover, Wageman (Reference Wageman1997) identified two further challenges when designing tasks for teams. The first is creating a “team-in-name-only” (p. 55), grouping employees as a “team” without altering the nature of the individual work they are doing. The second is creating hybrid tasks that require individual work and occasionally teamwork. This simultaneously generates different levels of task and goal interdependence (Wageman, Reference Wageman1995) potentially yielding to situations of incongruent complex interdependence (i.e., high task interdependence but low goal interdependence, or vice versa —van der Vegt et al., Reference van der Vegt, Emans and van de Vliert2001). When complex interdependence is incongruent team members are less satisfied and experience increased levels of conflict; whereas when it is congruent (e.g., high task and high goal interdependence) team members are more satisfied (van der Vegt et al., Reference van der Vegt, Emans and van de Vliert2001; Wageman, Reference Wageman1997).

An additional challenge in designing team tasks is to maximize the connection between task and teamwork activities (Ilgen, Reference Ilgen1999). The importance of these two factors must be considered in the light of autonomy and interdependence levels, as well as from the configurations rendered by team structure (Rico et al., Reference Rico, Alcover and Tabernero2011). In this regard, Crawford and LePine (Reference Crawford and LePine2013) defined several kinds of team functioning networks (i.e., simplex taskwork and teamwork ties, and multiplex taskwork-teamwork ties), which create different configurations for taskwork and teamwork functioning networks. In this regard, it is very important for teams in real work settings to create a solid foundation for taskwork tracks (i.e., team charters) and teamwork tracks (performance strategies) during team development, especially in the early stages (Mathieu & Rapp, Reference Mathieu and Rapp2009). Further, Mathieu and Rapp (Reference Mathieu and Rapp2009) showed that high-performing teams simultaneously displayed quality of team charters and high-quality performance strategies. The consideration of these factors connects with other challenges for teams related to task and interaction processes, which are analyzed in the following section.

A final challenge when designing team tasks is enabling the team to minimize errors or to detect them early. In this regard, research on teams in real work settings (e.g., military aviation crews) identified different team task dimensions (Bowers et al., Reference Bowers, Baker and Salas1994; Sanchez & Levine, Reference Sanchez and Levine1989): a) The importance of training a specific task while considering other tasks to be done; b) task criticality, or the degree to which task failure has negative consequences; c) task frequency, defined as the number of times a task should be done compared to other team tasks; and d) the relevance of the task in the team work context. From these dimensions task importance and task criticality have received prominent attention because both determine the potential consequences of team errors when performing team tasks (Arthur et al., Reference Arthur, Edwards, Bell, Villado and Bennett2005). In conclusion, teams in real work settings face a potential threat when designing their tasks due to their limited capacity to detect failures and errors, a threat aggravated by the associated task criticality.

Third Challenge: Task and Interaction Process Functionality

A common way to comprehensively describe team processes is to group them according to the moment of occurrence when teams perform their tasks. Accordingly, Marks et al.’s (Reference Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro2001) multiphasic model of team processes describes team tasks as a collection of performance episodes articulated by sequences of transition and action phases, which set the pace for team performance along time. Transition phases prepare teams for performance, either preceding (analyzing the common goals, establishing plans and strategies and structuring the task accordingly) or following action phases (reflecting over performance, analyzing feedback and reformulating plans and strategies –Marks et al., Reference Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro2001). So, planning is a critical processes enabling teams’ performance (Stevens & Campion, Reference Stevens and Campion1994), because its relevance on preparing and guiding the team along action phases, fostering coordination and interpersonal processes (Fisher, Reference Fisher2014). Marks et al.’s (Reference Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro2001) model identifies three kinds of team planning: Deliberate, contingent and reactive. Deliberate planning refers to an up-front, primary course of team action, whereas contingent planning refers to backup plans. These two kinds of planning occur during transition phases. Reactive planning occurs during action phases and helps teams to adapt their plans according to task changes (DeChurch & Haas, Reference DeChurch and Haas2008; Marks et al., Reference Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro2001). Considering the effects of such team planning alternatives, DeChurch & Haas (Reference DeChurch and Haas2008) found that team effectiveness was determined by reactive adjustment rather than by contingent and deliberate planning.

Overall, team planning positive affects team performance and goal attainment (e.g. LePine et al., Reference LePine, Piccolo, Jackson, Mathieu and Saul2008; Mehta et al., Reference Mehta, Feild, Armenakis and Mehta2009). However, the degree of task complexity, and interdependence, and the quality of the plan itself enhance the effects of team planning on performance (Weldon et al., Reference Weldon, Jehn and Pradhan1991). Consequently, a potential threat for teams in real work settings resides in overseeing the advantages of reactive planning and the moderating variables enhancing overall planning benefits.

Another potential challenge is the creation of dysfunctional processes in teams, caused by affective, behavioral and cognitive states. We will now deal with the potential dysfunctional effects of behavioral and cognitive states, leaving affective states for the next subsection. Behavioral causes of dysfunctional processes might originate in dysfunctional behaviors (observable employee behaviors intended to impair team functioning –Cole et al., Reference Cole, Walter and Bruch2008), which may harm other team members, impair both task and team processes, negatively affect team goals and effectiveness, and even breach organizational and social norms (Cole et al., Reference Cole, Walter and Bruch2008; Priesemuth et al., Reference Priesemuth, Arnaud and Schminke2013). In addition, dysfunctional behaviors may spread between team members, creating a spillover effect, and even being accepted and justified as an appropriate reaction to the treatment received by the organization (Cole et al., Reference Cole, Walter and Bruch2008).

Counterproductive work group behaviors also are dysfunctional team behaviors (Priesemuth et al., Reference Priesemuth, Arnaud and Schminke2013), which can be of two types: Interpersonal deviance, or deviant acts intentionally directed at another teammate (violence, gossip, or threats); and self-serving political behaviors, or social influence attempts aiming to manipulate other team members to gain self-serving benefits (Priesemuth et al., Reference Priesemuth, Arnaud and Schminke2013). In any case, dysfunctional team behaviors shall be considered from a multilevel stance, as on top of bad apples spoiling barrels, there are also (team and organizational) bad barrels spoiling apples (O’Boyle et al., Reference O’Boyle, Forsyth and O’Boyle2011).

Ironically, there are also positive behaviors with unintended dysfunctional consequences. Hence, backing-up behaviors may turn dysfunctional and hinder social and task team outcomes when helping team members disregard their own tasks (particularly when they are critical for team effectiveness), when backing-up behaviors become redundant instead of complementary for the team (Porter et al., Reference Porter, Hollenbeck, Ilgen, Ellis, West and Moon2003), or when the support from their peers make team members decreasing their effort in subsequent tasks, especially when teammates cannot easily detect their workload (Barnes, et al., Reference Barnes, Hollenbeck, Wagner, DeRue, Nahrgang and Schwind2008).

This last effect closely relates with social loafing, defined as the effort reduction of one or more team members when they work as a team, in comparison to the effort made when they work individually or in co-action tasks (Karau & Williams, Reference Karau and Williams1993). Although social loafing behaviors are likely when team size increases and team cohesion decreases (Liden et al., Reference Liden, Wayne, Jaworski and Bennett2004), empirical evidence shows that evaluation potential, task valence, co-worker performance expectations and performance uniqueness, culture, and task complexity moderate its occurrence (Karau & Williams, Reference Karau and Williams1993). In teams performing in work settings, social loafing may increase when one or several members try to avoid the sucker role, try to look very competent or very incompetent, and when they perceive task dispensability or lack of influence over task team outcomes (Comer, Reference Comer1995). From the condition-focused approach (Hackman, Reference Hackman2012), clear team norms constitute another core enabling condition. When teams count with clear, well-enforced norms of conduct, the amount of time invested in monitoring member behavior is greatly reduced. This fact frees team capacity to better scan team processes and performance setting (Hackman, Reference Hackman2012), which helps reducing the occurrence of social loafing. In any case, not all social loafing effects are threats to teams: Extant research reports that team member perceptions of co-worker loafing is associated with reduced social loafing, which seems to point to a social compensation effect (Liden et al., Reference Liden, Wayne, Jaworski and Bennett2004). Similarly, social loafing trends are offset when a high degree of conscientiousness and agreeableness occurs in the team, and in this way team performance is not altered (Schippers, Reference Schippers2014).

Finally, regarding cognitive causes, research has been built around the potential dysfunctional consequences for teams of groupthink and teamthink (Neck & Manz, Reference Neck and Manz1994), and information-processing failures (Schippers et al., Reference Schippers, Edmonson and West2014). Departing from the “groupthink” and the “thought self-leadership” concepts (Janis, Reference Janis1983), Neck and Manz (Reference Neck and Manz1994) propose the concept of teamthink to refer to certain collective thought patterns that may affect self-managed team outcomes in a constructive way. The use of such thought patterns may enhance team effectiveness through improving team performance and decision-making quality. Considering self-managed teams’ tendency to be highly cohesive, the risk of groupthink is high (Manz & Neck, Reference Manz and Neck1995). Thus, to avoid a reduction of critical analysis and information search, and increased pressure on thoughts and attitude convergence that impairs team decision quality, teams in real work settings need to counteract this threat by using teamthink and an optimal trust levels (i.e., balance between trust and distrust –Manz & Neck, Reference Manz and Neck1995).

Dysfunctional team processes can induce intra-team conflict (i.e., task, relationship, and process conflict) and constitute a threat for teams’ performance and effectiveness (Jehn, Reference Jehn1995). Despite the abundant research on these three kinds of conflict, the available meta-analyses reveal disparities in the results. For example, De Dreu and Weingart (Reference De Dreu and Weingart2003) reported a strong negative correlation between task and relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction, and that both team conflicts had stronger negative relations with team performance in highly complex tasks than in less complex tasks (e.g., decision making vs. production). Meanwhile, De Wit et al. (Reference de Wit, Greer and Jehn2012) reported a positive relationship between task and team conflict and performance, which was strengthened when the association between task and relationship conflict was weak, when it occurred in top management teams, and in teams where performance was measured as decision quality outcomes or financial performance.

Fourth Challenge: Appropriate Team Affective Tone

Pursuing team outcomes at the expense of team affective tone will harm team effectiveness in the middle and long term (Barsade & Knight, Reference Barsade and Knight2015). As such, another challenge that teams in real work settings face is leveraging team members’ positive and negative affectivity to enhance team’s affective tone (“consistent or homogeneous affective reactions within a team” –George, Reference George1990, p. 108). Because it results from team member interactions, team affective tone is genuinely dynamic, resulting not only from aggregating each team member’s affectivity –positive or negative– but also from the relationships between them (Cronin et al., Reference Cronin, Weingart and Todorova2011).

Positive affective tone is important to teams as it reduces conflict and absenteeism, while improving team coordination, OCBs and performance; in contrast, negative team affective tone induces intra-team conflict, reducing pro-social behaviors and performance (Collins et al., Reference Collins, Lawrence, Troth and Jordan2013). In addition, negative team affective tone induces threat rigidity, which reduces cognitive and behavioral flexibility and team members’ responsiveness, really needed to identify and cope with threat sources (Edmonson, Reference Edmonson1999). These general results cannot be extrapolated to any kind of teams, as available evidence shows the moderating role of task type (Collins et al., Reference Collins, Lawrence, Troth and Jordan2013). In this way, for teams performing creative tasks positive team affective tone increased team creativity only when team trust was low, but negative group affective tone was high; high team trust combined with high positive team affective tone increases complacency and reduces team self-criticism (Tsai et al., Reference Tsai, Chi, Grandey and Fung2012). In this same task context, Shin (Reference Shin2014) and Shin et al. (Reference Shin, Kim and Lee2019) found that positive team affective tone induced team reflexivity and team promotion focus, which in turn led to team creative performance and OCBs.

Another related threat impacting teams affective tone is the leader’s mood influence (Barsade & Knight, Reference Barsade and Knight2015). Research shows that when team leaders are in a positive mood teams also exhibit a more positive affective tone and greater coordination, and members expend less effort in their tasks compared to when the leader is in a negative mood (Sy et al., Reference Sy, Côté and Saavedra2005). Similar effects were found by Walter and Bruch (Reference Walter and Bruch2008) regarding the positive effect of charismatic leadership on the creation of positive team affective spirals, a process which is sensitive to factors such as strong organizational identity and other organizational context facets (e.g., subgroups’ cynicism) which may very well reduce positive affective reciprocal spirals. In short, the available evidence indicates that team positive affective tone facilitates the achievement of both individual and team outcomes (Barsade & Knight, Reference Barsade and Knight2015). By contrast, negative team affective tone impair individual and team outcomes. However, negative team affective tone is sensitive to contextual contingencies that can lead to positive outcomes (Barsade & Knight, Reference Barsade and Knight2015), as mentioned above regarding team trust.

In closing this point, we draw from early team research considering how the continued team member’s interactions crystallize in stable patterns of relationships and norms, articulating its processes and structure during the initial phases of team activity (Sherif & Sherif, Reference Sherif and Sherif1969). Up to now, research has been scarce regarding how and when subsequent emergent states crystalize into more stable elements characterizing and patterning team processes in more advanced phases of team development. Considering that team affective tone may have very negative consequences, a clear potential threat for teams operating in real work settings is the difficulty to identify when these emergent states taint team processes, which will then become crystallized.

Fifth Challenge: Suitable Team Evaluation

The final challenge we identified for teams in real work settings is the extent to which teams engage in evaluation activities, for their critical value and their ties with team effectiveness (Salas et al., Reference Salas, Reyes, Woods, von Davier, Zhu and Kyllonen2017). Team evaluation is key to address how teams produce results and reach relevant goals for the team, the organization and third parties (e.g., clients). Essentially, team evaluation encompasses assessing individual and team processes and outcomes (Smith-Jentsch et al., Reference Smith-Jentsch, Zeisig, Acton, McPherson, Cannon-Bowers and Salas1998) which are directly linked to team effectiveness, either directly or through benchmarking to a standard. Hence, to ensure accuracy, team evaluation must match team outcomes with the correct measurement methods (Rosen et al., Reference Rosen, Wildman, Salas, Rayne, Hollingshead and Poole2012; Salas et al., Reference Salas, Reyes, Woods, von Davier, Zhu and Kyllonen2017). In so doing, team evaluation measurements in teams performing in real work settings should (1) be designed to focus on team processes and outcomes, (2) meet a specific goal or set of goals, and (3) be linked to the specific organizational context (Andersson et al., Reference Andersson, Rankin and Diptee2017). In addition, team evaluation should focus on attitudes, observable behaviors and cognitions (ABCs), and capture multiple levels of performance (i.e., individual, team, and organizational –Salas et al., Reference Salas, Reyes, Woods, von Davier, Zhu and Kyllonen2017).

A first element team members and managers should establish is whether the performance appraisal target involves team members and/or the whole team. Scott and Einstein (Reference Scott and Einstein2001) highlighted the need for considering first, the kind of team, regarding its task complexity levels, and its composition. Second, they emphasized the importance of identifying who qualifies to accurately assess the team and its members, and if the assessment is going to be either externally (e.g., customers) or internally (team members monitoring) conducted. A third consideration is to determine what is being assessed (e.g., outcomes). And finally, it should be determined whether the assessment purpose is development, evaluation or self-regulation (Scott & Einstein, Reference Scott and Einstein2001).

Identifying team performance dimensions and team effectiveness main contributing factors help teams to focus on key elements that both in terms of processes and outcomes, contribute to their excellence. In this regard, recent Kozlowski’s (Reference Kozlowski2018) taxonomy capturing core team processes and emergent states contributing to team effectiveness is extremely useful. This taxonomy classifies team processes into cognitive (team climate, team mental models, team transactive memory, and team learning), motivational-affective (cohesion, efficacy, and potency; affect, mood, and emotion; and conflict), and behavioral categories (team member competencies and knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), coordination, collaboration, communication, and performance regulation and adaptation). This classification reveals the importance of monitoring these team processes sets in teams in real work settings so that, considering their tasks, goals and operating context, they maximize team effectiveness.

An important question when referring to team evaluation is to establish clear team effectiveness criteria. In this regard, Mathieu and Gilson (Reference Mathieu, Gilson and Kozlowski2012) classify team effectiveness criteria into tangible outputs and members’ reactions. Tangible outcomes can be of three kinds: productivity, efficiency and quality, while members’ reactions can be distinguished as team level members’ reactions (i.e., emergent states) and individual-level reactions (i.e., attitudes, reactions, behaviors, and personal development). Mathieu and Gilson (Reference Mathieu, Gilson and Kozlowski2012) highlight the importance in teams in real work settings of using team assessment methods contingent upon the task and team context.

A potentially useful process to reduce performance assessment threats in teams is team reflexivity, or the extent to which team members overtly reflect upon the team’s objectives, strategies, and processes and adapt them to current or anticipated internal or external conditions (West, Reference West and West1996). In teams performing in real work settings, team reflexivity has shown its capacity to improve innovation (Schippers et al., Reference Schippers, West and Dawson2015), counteracting the negative effects of team orientation diversity on team performance and information-processing failures (Schippers et al., Reference Schippers, Edmonson and West2014), and on team effectiveness (Widmer et al., Reference Widmer, Schippers and West2009). Despite its benefits, team reflexivity should not be used as an omnibus assessment strategy for any kind of team (Moreland & McMinn, Reference Moreland and McMinn2010); its positive effects on team learning and performance are sensitive to the temporal character of team functioning in real work settings.

A final element potentially counterbalancing teams’ challenges regarding self-assessment or self-reflection is the existence of a team climate for psychological safety, created mainly by leaders (Edmonson, Reference Edmonson2003). Team members’ psychological safety fosters teamwork and team learning, by enabling team reflexivity processes regarding both, the task and the team (Edmonson, Reference Edmonson1999; Edmonson & Lei, Reference Edmondson and Lei2014). In addition, psychological safety promotes open discussions, error assumption, feedback seeking, and seeking assessment alternatives. In this way, psychological safety transforms threats associated to team errors into opportunities to enhance team reflexivity and learning conductive to team effectiveness (Carmeli & Gittell, Reference Carmeli and Gittell2009). In sum, psychological safety prevents teams from feeling infallible and inadvertently become trapped in self-complacency.

Up to here we have summarized the main team challenges that real teams currently suffer, and the threats they entail for their effective functioning (please, see Table 1). Our intention with this effort is to be in a more solid foot to tackle how such set of challenges could be managed to transform their potential threat into both practical developmental opportunities and research prospects.

Table 1. Team Challenges in Real Work Settings Overview

Empowering Interventions

We articulate different empowering interventions addressing the challenges discovered in our diagnosis, with the intention to better serve currently active teams with some experience as a team, rather than for newly formed teams.

Restorative Interventions

Paralleling the former section, we propose a set of restorative interventions to tackle the main five challenges identified in our diagnosis. Again, these restorative interventions suit better to seasoned teams than to newly formed ones.

Implications for Research

Our diagnosis is structured around five main challenges for teams in real work settings (purposeful team staffing, proper task design and team allocation, task and interaction process functionality, appropriate team affective tone, and suitable team assessment), and it is aligned with current research considering that these challenges are dynamic entities with potential reciprocal, albeit asymmetrical, relationships with one another and with team effectiveness and outcomes over time (Mathieu et al., Reference Mathieu, Hollenbeck, van Knippenberg and Ilgen2017). Such alignment between team challenges in real work settings and team research questions in academia will undeniably contribute to strengthening the science of teams. Extending earlier research efforts on team dynamics processes, which already identified different methodological and measurement challenges (Kozlowski, Reference Kozlowski2015), our work identifies practical and intervention challenges for teams in context.

Our piece pursues stimulating the design of naturalistic research studies from an action-research perspective. Studies departing from a solid theoretical grounding in team dynamic processes to support field experiments and interventions implementation, whose results will feedback existing theoretical models. Studying the new breed of teams in changing organizational settings will enrich both theory and research by updating our knowledge of teams processes and outcomes in real work settings. Such updating process will better define evidence-driven practices supporting the staffing, formation, development, leadership and management of teams in complex organizational contexts (Tannenbaum et al., Reference Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas and Cohen2012). Further, such accumulated knowledge will give value to qualitative research methods (e.g., in-depth case studies) studying teams in new organizational and work settings, high performance contexts or extreme conditions (e.g., Driskell et al., Reference Driskell, Salas and Driskell2018; O’Neill & Salas, Reference O’Neill and Salas2018; Santistevan & Josserand, Reference Santistevan and Josserand2019). Analogously, action-research studies will promote longitudinal research on teams operating in real work settings, addressing the temporal limitations that research imposes on teams secluded in the lab.

Additionally, our piece suggests the possibility of designing interventions for teams with longer life cycles. These will help us to unravel the potential benefits of different interventions performed over time, enabling a more realistic and rigorous adjustment of the theoretical corpus backing such interventions. Some interventions applied to short-term teams working on short contrived tasks (e.g., interpersonal interventions) do not show positive effects on team performance. However, when the same interventions are applied to long-term teams, they perform better (Bradley et al., Reference Bradley, White and Mennecke2003). As a whole, team research will benefit from the availability of data reporting the effectiveness of the different interventions detailed here. Particularly, when they are applied to teams in real and complex organizational settings, and such teams are assessed from a temporal and dynamic perspective.

Future research and theory development should focus on the proposal of a classification or taxonomy of real contexts that allows clustering teams in contexts with shared or similar characteristics. This could integrate research results using teams in the wild into broader categories and avoid the dispersion that comes with analyzing teams and specific contexts.

Finally, the range of interventions we propose are rooted in available theoretical models and empirical evidence. This fact may guide the design of interventions and field research seeking a methodological fit between theory (nascent, intermediate, mature) and data (qualitative, quantitative, hybrid) from a contingency approach (Edmonson & McManus, Reference Edmonson and McManus2007). Only from a solid relationship between theory and practice, and research and application, will we be able to ensure the effectiveness of our interventions on teams performing in real work settings and make the science of teams truly actionable for practitioners.

Implications for Practice

A first implication refers the possibility that team interventions will be designed and implemented by the team’s embedding organization as a formal intervention (e.g., problem solving). Also, they could be informally designed and implemented as ad-hoc interventions by the team itself departing from the alternatives included in the toolbox. The combination of formal and informal interventions in teams will allow them to determine when and how each kind of intervention will have differential impacts on team performance and outcomes, a very limited knowledge in practice (Okhuysen & Eisenhardt, Reference Okhuysen and Eisenhardt2002).

The versatility of the proposal presented herein supports team interventions design that address the needs of teams and the organizations in which they operate. Accordingly, we should be aware that team intervention fiascoes frequently occur when interventions ignore team’s performance phases or interventions are designed from team archetypes and outmoded team models (Barner, Reference Barner2006). As highlighted in the initial part of this piece, in real work settings teams they are a-changin’ and our empowering or restorative interventions should suit their new characteristics and needs.

Accordingly, our proposal for restorative interventions equip teams with tools that will be handy either when teams are in a transition phase after finishing a performance episode (Marks et al., Reference Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro2001), or when teams are in the midst of an action phase on a performance episode and need to make a ‘pit stop’. The dynamic adjustments needed during team development aim for the detection and early intervention of potential team malfunction, combining reactive and proactive actions. Thus, small on-the-fly adjustments may prevent teams from collapsing. For instance, in action teams involved in intense performance events, in‐action team reflexivity processes during such performance event are positively related to team performance, especially in larger teams (Schmutz et al., Reference Schmutz, Lei, Eppich and Manser2018). Moreover, empowering interventions will enhance informal learning, both at the team and individual levels. In this regard, extant research has identified several antecedents as conducive to informal learning in teams, such as task analysis and job task variation, role clarification, facilitation of informal communication, or problem solving and innovation (Kukenberger et al., Reference Kukenberger, Mathieu and Ruddy2015). In turn, improvements in team and individual learning facilitated by empowering interventions can increase team psychological safety.

The proposed toolbox for team intervention ease prioritization decisions about which interventions or new team arrangements (e.g., multi-team systems) are more necessary. Regarding multi-team systems and their increasing prevalence, it is essential to have a wide repertoire of interventions potentially applicable to any team in the system, with special consideration to those crossing boundaries. The different interventions proposed will help multi-team systems to clarify team goals within the system’s goal hierarchy, such that effectiveness could be increased across levels (i.e., teams and the system), avoiding potential coordination and motivation losses due to lack of goal alignment (Rico et al., Reference Rico, Hinsz, Burke and Salas2017).

Our toolbox is helpful both managers and team leaders in learning new ways to handle team processes (Tannenbaum et al., Reference Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas and Cohen2012). The new operating contexts, ongoing technological development, new ways of organizing work, and new kinds of teams that the future of work is bringing require bespoke tools. For example, if we consider ‘meta-teams’ (i.e., an intermediate team-like structure that allows dynamic teaming to take place within the complex matrices of multinational enterprises –Santistevan & Josserand, Reference Santistevan and Josserand2019) as a new team structure providing a common space of common mindsets and operational practices enabling the movement between local and global possible (Santistevan & Josserand, Reference Santistevan and Josserand2019). Such a new modality of teams, or teaming (Edmonson, Reference Edmondson2012), bears little resemblance to the work teams portrayed in the traditional literature (i.e., small size, face-to-face interactions, well-defined bounds). Thus, both meta-team conceptualization and management require new approaches and tools. Accordingly, our toolbox provides a set of flexible interventions selected according to their contingency to team’s needs.

Finally, given that a decontextualized team intervention is unlikely to be successful, our proposal strongly advocates fitting the interventions needed to the characteristics of the embedding environments. In this regard, teams’ capacity to cross boundaries and interrelate with the proximal and distal context is one of the most valuable predictors of their effectiveness (Marrone, Reference Marrone2010). Because this capacity depends on teams perceiving their environments as a source of opportunities rather than a pond of threats (Kouchaki et al., Reference Kouchaki, Okhuysen, Waller and Tajeddin2012), designing interventions to enhance this capacity could multiply team effectiveness.

Although our analysis and intervention proposals are based on the current five main challenges for teams in the wild, it is clear that additional factors, processes and emergent states may create further challenges. In this sense, our proposal does not exhaustively cover the myriad elements implied in team functioning, or the range of challenges faced by teams when pursuing and maintaining high performance (O’Neill & Salas, Reference O’Neill and Salas2018). Furthermore, our proposal has a general and contingent character making easy the assessment of each intervention pertinence as a function of the team characteristics, its tasks, goals and embedding context. Forthcoming analyses should specify the kind of interventions that will be found most adequate and most effective in each specific context.

There is not enough space in a single manuscript to assess the effectiveness of each proposed intervention and to value its potential suitability in different contexts. Thus, subsequent systematic reviews and meta-analysis shall develop a wider body of applied knowledge which will be of paramount assistance to practitioners and field researchers.

Finally, our proposal does not exhaust all potential empowering and restorative team interventions; crafting a comprehensive intervention catalogue was beyond our scope. Thus, the toolbox presented here has a heuristic value for scholars and practitioners, setting a stage to be expanded as new types of teams, tasks and organizational contexts generate new intervention needs. In short, we offer an open toolbox to be improved with the feedback and cross-fertilization of practice and research.