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Teams perform cognitive activities such as making decisions and assessing situations as a unit. The team cognition behind these activities has traditionally been linked to individual knowledge and its distribution across team members. The theory of interactive team cognition instead argues that team cognition resides in team interactions and that it is an activity that takes place in a rich context that needs to be measured at the team level. This article describes this dynamic perspective on team cognition, some research that supports it, and the implications for measuring, understanding, and improving team cognition.

This study examines how updating—the process of revising provisional sensemaking to incorporate new cues—occurs within teams during unexpected events. I compare how 19 teams of emergency department staff managed the same unexpected event (a broken piece of equipment) in a medical simulation scenario. Using a microethnographic approach to analyze video recordings of these teams, I conduct a fine-grained examination of how updating takes place and find considerable variation in its effectiveness across teams. I show that the effectiveness of updating depends not only on how teams remake sense but also on how they engage in trajectory management, balancing the work of updating with their ongoing work (in this case, patient care). Trajectory management practices related to monitoring cues and managing engaging tasks facilitated effective updating and allowed teams to detect and identify the problem caused by the broken piece of equipment and correct it before it led to serious consequences. More-effective teams monitor and rapidly interpret cues, confirming them with others and evaluating changes over time; they then investigate cues, develop plausible explanations, and quickly test them, monitoring cues for feedback. Less-effective teams fail to monitor and confirm cues with others, overlook or misinterpret cues, and delay investigating cues and developing plausible explanations; they also delay testing explanations, often being sidetracked by patient care tasks.

The current study draws on work in the areas of team adaptation, team compilation, and small groups as complex systems to predict and test relationships between time, taskwork team mental models, team action patterns, and team effectiveness. Three-person teams performed 9 scenarios of a firefighting simulation distributed over 3 days with discontinuous task changes introduced in the fourth and seventh scenarios (N = 41 teams; 123 individuals). We applied pattern detection algorithm software to the behavioral data to identify emergent performative patterns in the team members’ task-oriented actions. We also used discontinuous growth modeling to track the development of these team action patterns and their dynamic relation to team effectiveness. The results indicate that pattern emergence increased over time. This was particularly true for teams with similar taskwork mental models, and these teams also showed a more acute decrease in action patterns after a task change. In addition, team action patterns became increasingly positively related to team effectiveness over time, but this effect was reset after the occurrence of a task change. Overall, our research provides practical guidance to managers by illustrating the value of teams having highly shared taskwork team mental models and of enhancing the effects of teams’ action patterns on team adaptive outcomes.

Researchers have suggested that humility is an adaptive strength at the individual level, but the questions of whether, and how, leader humility influences team adaptation are yet to be addressed. In this study we explored the relationship between leader humility and team flexibility. Drawing on social information processing theory, we theorized that humble leaders would promote team flexibility directly and indirectly by fostering team reflexivity. Analysis of survey data collected from 625 employees of a company in China provided empirical evidence for the proposed relationship of leader humility with team reflexivity and team flexibility. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Rapid developments in real-time collaborative technologies, coupled with the quest for innovation and creativity, have made global virtual teams (GVTs) a viable workplace collaboration option that many companies are turning to. Although diverse team member perspectives in GVTs are expected to foster creativity, cultural diversity within GVTs also poses significant challenges related to knowledge exchange and integration among team members. Grounding our work in the team adaptation and cultural intelligence (CQ) literatures, we suggest CQ as a plausible modality for cultural adaptation in GVTs. Specifically, we propose a nomological network comprising CQ dimensions (motivation, cognition, metacognition, and behavior) serving as a cultural adaptation mechanism for fostering creativity in GVT outcomes. We contextualize and extend CQ theory, which has previously focused on face-to-face contexts, to the virtual collaborative GVT environment. For this, we conceptualize the significant role of deep-level implicitly negotiated adaptative behavior (role structure adaptation) in GVTs—in addition to surface-level explicitly displayed adaptative behavior (CQ behavior). We tested the proposed model through a sequential mixed methods approach that integrated the results from a quantitative two-wave survey study with findings from a qualitative study comprising expert interviews, to arrive at rich and robust inferences and metainferences. The proposed CQ-for-GVT framework, along with delineated boundary conditions and associated propositions, explicates an integrative model explaining the role of CQ for GVT creativity performance. The delineated model not only has theoretical implications but also provides useful directions for GVT practitioners.

Many organizations and software firms these days use pair programming to meet the challenges posed by digital transformations and to meet customer needs. They use pair programming to become more agile and responsive to their competitive environment. Although some studies suggest that pair programming can potentially increase the quality of developed software code and the satisfaction and confidence of developers, very little is known as to how pair programming affects team performance. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study at one of the largest enterprise software firms that serves a large number of Fortune 500 companies, and we collected data from the software developers, Scrum masters, and product owners of 62 software development teams. Our findings show that pair programming affects team performance positively by changing cognitive structures and behavioral patterns in software teams. Pair programming helps team members develop shared mental models and, as a consequence, increases backup behavior among team members. Backup behavior is particularly valuable for teams facing high task novelty. Our findings have critical implications for organizations and senior managers as they lead their digital transformation efforts where they often rely on autonomous teams for providing digital innovation. We show that pair programming can be a key ingredient for high-performance teams. Establishing the practice of pair programming promises to be particularly valuable for those teams that lack shared mental models and teams whose members fail to provide each other backup. This study examines the team-level effects of pair programming by developing a research model that accounts for mediators and moderators of the relationship between pair programming and team performance. We hypothesize that pair programming helps software development teams establish backup behavior by strengthening the shared mental models among developers. In turn, backup behavior attenuates the negative effect of task novelty on team performance. We collect data from the software developers, Scrum masters, and product owners of 62 software development teams in a global enterprise software firm and find broad support for our research model. The study makes important contributions by shifting attention to the team-level effects of pair programming and by explicating mediating and moderating mechanisms related to the roles of shared mental models, backup behavior, and task novelty. The results underline the importance of viewing pair programming as a context-specific practice that helps establish backup behavior in teams. In terms of implications for practitioners, our results show that pair programming can be a valuable element of team governance to create shared mental models and backup behavior and to achieve high team performance when teams face high levels of task novelty.

Background Teams are inherently adaptive entities that continuously adapt to changes or disruptions in their tasks or environments. During collaboration, interbrain synchrony (IBS) emerges, reflecting the temporal alignment of neural activity between team members. Building on this, IBS has been proposed as a potential marker of teamwork, suggesting that IBS should be sensitive to changes in teamwork. Purpose The present study investigated whether IBS is sensitive to changes in teamwork. We hypothesized that disruptions in teamwork would be accompanied by alterations in IBS dynamics. Methods Ninety-eight healthy adults (mean age = 22.5 ± 3.22 years; 69 females, 65.1%) were assigned to forty-nine dyads. Each pair completed a 20-minute computer-based navigation task while their brain activity was simultaneously recorded using fNIRS hyperscanning. Dyads in the experimental group encountered an unexpected increase in task difficulty midway through the task, whereas those in the control group completed the task without disruption. We examined three features of IBS - its overall level, temporal slope trajectory, and the temporal recurrence patterns. Results Control analyses confirmed that IBS reliably emerged during the task (χ²(1) = 50.24, p < .001) and that the experimental manipulation successfully disrupted teamwork, as reflected in altered team behavioral responses in communication (χ²(1) = 8.48, p = 0.004) and performance (χ²(1) = 24.99, p < .001). Nevertheless, no evidence was found for disruption-related changes in IBS across the three features examined (all Time x Group interactions p > .05. Conclusion These findings raise the possibility that IBS may reflect a stable collective state rather than a reactive one, thereby challenging its interpretation as a direct marker of teamwork. Methodological considerations, including the operationalization of IBS, are also discussed as potential explanations for the lack of observed change in IBS. Highlights A sudden increase in task difficulty was used to disrupt teamwork. Three interbrain synchrony features (level, slope, %DET) were used to assess temporal dynamics. Interbrain synchrony remained unchanged despite teamwork disruption. Teamwork adaptation was observed in communication but not in interbrain synchrony. Findings question whether interbrain synchrony reflects reactive or stable team state.

PurposeAlthough strategic scholars have made great effects to exploring the moderating roles of team interaction in explaining the effect of top management team (TMT) diversity, they have adopted seemingly conflicting theoretical perspectives to explain how it works. Drawing on ideas from the threat rigidity theory, the authors integrated these perspectives by proposing a contingency model in which the relationships between TMT diversity and adaptive firm performance depend on the matching between the internal context (i.e. overlapping team tenure) and external context (i.e. severity of threat).Design/methodology/approachThis study sampled 579 Chinese A-share listed companies that have been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and multilevel linear regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis.FindingsResults provided support for this hypothesis. Specifically, the interaction between TMT age/tenure diversity and overlapping team tenure is significant only when the severity of threat is high, while the interaction between TMT functional diversity and overlapping team tenure is significant only when the severity of threat is low.Originality/valueThe results of this study provide a comprehensive perspective to predict the performance impact of team diversity and contribute to diversity research and practice.

Researchers have suggested that humility is an adaptive strength at the individual level, but the questions of whether, and how, leader humility influences team adaptation are yet to be addressed. In this study we explored the relationship between leader humility and team flexibility. Drawing on social information processing theory, we theorized that humble leaders would promote team flexibility directly and indirectly by fostering team reflexivity. Analysis of survey data collected from 625 employees of a company in China provided empirical evidence for the proposed relationship of leader humility with team reflexivity and team flexibility. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.