Luận án Hành vi Tổ chức 2019: Điều kiện thuận lợi và kết quả phối hợp của đội nhóm động

DYNAMIC TEAMS: EXPLORING THE ENABLING CONDITIONS AND OUTCOMES OF COORDINATION Anna T. Mayo Carnegie Mellon University Spring 2019 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University Committee: Anita Woolley, Carnegie Mellon University (Chair) Linda Argote, Carnegie Mellon University Brandy Aven, Carnegie Mellon University Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School Christoph Riedl, Northeastern University TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements. iii Chapter 1: Introduction. 1 Chapter 2: Team Launches and Initial Attention: Enabling Coordination in Dynamic Teams.

5 Chapter 3: Attentional Scaffolds and Anchors in Dynamic Teams: Using Team Launches to Improve Coordination, Individual Learning, and Team Efficiency. 45 Chapter 4: General Discussion. 107 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the healthcare providers who volunteered their time and energy to participate in this research. Without them this work would not have been possible.

Additional thanks to my advisor and dissertation chair, Anita Woolley, who offered support, guidance, and encouragement throughout my doctoral studies. Her insights and input helped this dissertation come to fruition, and I cannot thank her enough for the training she has given me. I would also like to thank my committee members, Linda Argote, Brandy Aven, Amy Edmondson, and Christoph Riedl, who offered helpful feedback on this work, and whose own research has profoundly shaped my own. Thank you to Selma Witchel, Andrew Nowalk, Christine March, and Liny John, who introduced me to the important and complex world of healthcare delivery.

Their partnership has been invaluable. Thank you also to the Organizational Behavior & Theory faculty and students at the Tepper School of Business who offered comments on the many iterations of this work. Thank you to the dear friends I’ve met through research, especially Matt Cronin, Jerry Guo, Leah Clark, Zhe Zhang, Esther Sackett, and Ninja Janardhanan for their constant support. And finally, thank you to my parents, Patricia and John Mayo, my siblings, Jessie and Kirby Mayo, and my partner, Sophie Choukas-Bradley.

I would never have thought this endeavor possible if not for their unwavering support and the love of learning they inspire in me. ii ABSTRACT Organizational structures are increasingly dynamic, boundaryless, and fluid. One example of this trend is the use of highly dynamic teams—teams with short lifespans and permeable team boundaries. These conditions can offer the promise of flexible, adaptive work, but simultaneously undercut the characteristics of teams that were considered definitional in the past and are thought to be critical for facilitating coordination.

Dynamic teams thus should face serious coordination challenges, and we are just beginning to understand the conditions needed for them to be effective. I begin by asking “What are the conditions necessary for dynamic teams to operate effectively?” and derive theory from qualitative observations coupled with existing literature. I then test two interventions focused on putting some of those conditions in place in a field experiment, and I examine their implications for both individual learning and team effectiveness. The emergent grounded theory and field experiment results suggest that team launches, conducted only with a dynamic team’s core team members, can serve as cognitive scaffolds to anchor core team members’ attention either towards core team members or periphery team members.

While initial attention to fellow core members and the clarification of roles can promote more emergent interdependence among those core members, initial attention to periphery members and expansion of the definition of the team can promote more integration of those periphery members into the work. That is, while dynamic teams lack the structure afforded by stability and an impermeable boundary, they can still rely on cognitive scaffolding to enable coordination. Finally, the combination of these two coordination behaviors, together, is what enhances core team members’ learning; and, counter to beliefs that individual learning and team efficiency present a tradeoff to be balanced, individual learning is shown to facilitate team efficiency. I conclude by discussing implications of these findings for theory and research related to team beginnings, organizational design and scaffolds, learning, and the management of dynamic teams.

iii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION It’s Monday morning. You have been assigned to work this week as a medical intern on the “blue” team in the Kids’ Hospital General Pediatric Inpatient Unit. Your team is tasked with making and executing decisions about patient care for a set of patients – it has both the authority to do this and the expectation that it will. You receive a message stating that you should meet your team at 9am at a patient’s room.

When you get there, you note that you’ve never worked with the other blue team members. Your supervising physician is worried about the first patient you are planning to see and before you know it your team is heading to the patient’s room. As you are walking in, you realize you aren’t sure who is going to input the medical orders that your team decides on as you discuss what to do for this patient – should you be doing that? Last week the senior resident input orders, but this senior resident is busy talking with the patient family. Just as your team decides on a care plan and leaves the patient’s room, the patient’s nurse sees you and asks why no one called him, then he shares information he heard from the consulting Infectious Disease group that leads to completely revising the care plan.

This scenario above is based on observations of medical inpatient teams, and it highlights some realities of much work today—realities that stems from a broader shift to organizing work in forms that are increasingly more dynamic and decentralized (Malone, 2004; Powell, 1987). In particular, the scenario highlights how the shift toward dynamic organizations has come with a common distribution of authority to teams (Moreland & Argote, 2003; Thomas-Hunt & Phillips, 2003), with often constantly membership. More specifically, teams are often temporary in nature (e., Klein, Ziegert, Knight, & Xiao, 2006; Valentine & Edmondson, 2015) and face permeable boundaries (Cummings & Pletcher, 2011; Mortensen & Haas, 2018). These two dimensions— short lifespans and highly permeable boundaries—are definition to what I refer to as dynamic teams.1 for a visual display of how dynamic teams relate to other team forms and phenomena.) As discussed more fully in Chapter 2, dynamic teams often exhibit a core-periphery network structure, whereby the team’s core members (those more central to the work and decision making, Humphrey, Morgeson, & Mannor, 2009) work together for a brief amount of 1 time, and during that time must manage a permeable boundary that allows for more periphery members to join the work as their expertise is needed.

Researchers are increasingly acknowledging the existence of dynamic teams in contexts ranging from healthcare to consulting, product development, and disaster response (Arrow, McGrath, & Berdahl, 2000; Edmondson, 2012; Edmondson & Harvey, 2018; Hackman & Wageman, 2005; Majchrzak, Jarvenpaa, & Hollingshead, 2007; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008; Mortensen & Haas, 2018). This trend toward increasingly fluid collaborations can offer more adaptive, flexible work that can meet the demands of a changing environment (Mortensen & Haas, 2018). Yet, the conditions of an extremely short lifespan and a highly permeable boundary undercut the characteristics of teams that were considered definitional in the past and are thought to be critical for facilitating coordination. As hinted at in the opening scenario, the short lifespans of teams can create uncertainty about how to work with teammates, while boundary permeability can create uncertainty about with whom to work.

And both of these challenges are likely to undermine emergent coordination (Mortensen & Haas, 2018; Okhuysen & Bechky, 2009). In other words, while team stability and boundary impermeability have been acknowledged as providing structure that can guide attention and facilitate coordination (e., Hackman, 2011), their absence is likely to inhibit coordination. Current research on overcoming the challenges inherent to dynamic teams suggests that temporary teams can rely on impermeable boundaries to guide work (e., Valentine & Edmondson, 2015), while teams with permeable boundaries can rely on some membership stability among core team members (e., O’Leary, Mortensen, & Woolley, 2011). But neither of those solutions will work for dynamic teams as they are both temporary and have permeable boundaries.

Moreover, research suggests that current theories may need to be adapted in such 2 dynamic contexts (Majchrzak et al. As elaborated on in Chapter 2, this gap in our understanding is a critical one given the prevalence of highly dynamic teams in organizations today. In this dissertation, I, therefore, explore conditions that can enable coordination in dynamic teams. In Chapter 2, I begin by asking “What are the conditions necessary for dynamic teams to coordinate effectively?” Using qualitative observations and interviews in the setting of medical inpatient teams, coupled with existing literature, I derive grounded theory of conditions that enable dynamic teams to coordinate.

Given the fluid nature of membership in these teams, I adopt a hybrid team-network perspective to identify the team in terms of core and periphery members. I find that key to effective coordination is a team launch conducted with only the core team members and that directs their initial attention in ways that develop team cognition and thereby enable emergent coordination. Findings also point to potential benefits of this emergent coordination: both individual learning and team efficiency. In sum, these findings suggest that, although dynamic teams lack the structure afforded by stability and an impermeable boundary, they can rely on attentional scaffolding to enable effective coordination.

In Chapter 3 (work conducted with Anita Woolley, Liny John, Christine March, Selma Witchel, and Andrew Nowalk), we build on that qualitative work and use a field experiment to test two interventions focused on putting into place some of the cognitive scaffolding that is theorized to anchor core team members’ attention and thus facilitate coordination in dynamic teams. Continuing in the context of medical inpatient teams, we find support for our prediction that team launches that direct attention to core team members’ roles lead to greater emergent interdependence among those core members. At the same time, we also find support for the prediction that team launches that direct attention to the team’s permeable boundary and expand 3 core members’ view of who is on the team lead to greater integration of periphery members. In this way, we find empirical evidence to support the theory that attentional scaffolds can foster coordination in dynamic teams.

Further, we find that it is the combination of the two coordination behaviors—emergent interdependence and periphery integration, together—that most enhances core members’ learning. Finally, contrary to expectations that individual learning and team efficiency present a trade-off, we find that the two go hand-in-hand. In Chapter 4, I conclude by considering the qualitative study and the field experiment as a whole to offer a general discussion of the resulting developing theory of dynamic team coordination. I also discuss implications of this research for theory related to team beginnings, organizational design and scaffolds, learning, and the management of dynamic teams.

4 CHAPTER 2: TEAM LAUNCHES AND INITIAL ATTENTION: ENABLING COORDINATION IN DYNAMIC TEAMS Organizational structures have evolved dramatically from the centralized forms that became predominant centuries ago (Chandler Jr, 1962; Malone, 2004). While researchers have developed a canon of knowledge around what is needed for these centralized organizations, and the teams within them, to operate effectively (Mathieu, Hollenbeck, Knippenberg, & Ilgen, 2017), organizational structures today reflect a different landscape. In the face of changing environments that demand adaptation, and with the rise of knowledge-based work, specialization, and communication technology that allows for rapidly sharing and gathering information, organizational structures have evolved into “hybrid organizational forms” (Shane, 1996),“boundaryless organizations” (Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick, & Kerr, 2002) and “dynamic organizations” (e. In short, organizational forms have shifted toward a decentralization of authority (Malone, 2004; Powell, 1987) and less hierarchical organizing (Lee & Edmondson, 2017) that can allow for more flexible, adaptive work.