Researchers Unlock the Science of Team Potential with 40 Questions

Teams are core to modern organizations, leading to exponential growth in research on the topic over the last few decades. Rapid expansion in any research area can make it difficult for new researchers or practitioners to wrap their arms around what is known versus what is open pasture. In a new article, “Personnel Psychology’s 40-Questions Series: The Science and Practice of Groups and Teams,” a group of experienced teams researchers, including Professors Anita Woolley and Laurie Weingart of the Tepper School, summarized the current state of evidence organized around 40 questions about the scope, design, function, leadership, and evolution of teams.

The article was written by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Delaware, Cornell University, Michigan State University, the University of Connecticut, London Business School, and the Group for Organizational Effectiveness. Published in Personnel Psychology, it is intended for practitioners, scholars, and students.

“The science behind teams has grown increasingly specialized, making it difficult to integrate insights across levels of analysis and emerging contexts,” notes Anita Williams Woolley, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the article. “By synthesizing current knowledge, clarifying boundary conditions, and identifying unresolved tensions, we aim to inform organizational decisions while advancing a more cumulative, multilevel science of groups and teams.”

From frontline production crews and project teams to top management teams and multiteam systems that span organizational boundaries, teams have become the primary way organizations generate value, adapt to uncertainty, and carry out strategy. But they are complex. Because of teams’ structure—open systems with lower-level units embedded in higher-level contexts—their parts influence each other reciprocally over time. Changing environmental demands and new technologies (including fast-developing artificial intelligence, or AI) add to the complexity.

Increasingly, those who study teams have found it difficult to form a cumulative science because it takes time to generate new theoretical insights and understand how these advances integrate with current theory. It is also difficult for practitioners to translate insights into clear, actionable guidance.

To fill this gap, the authors reviewed key areas of team science organized around 40 questions. They addressed foundational issues of team definition and enabling conditions; composition, diversity, and reward structures; team cognition, conflict, affect, and learning; leadership and coaching; top management teams and board dynamics; and multiteam systems and technology-mediated collaboration. Across these domains of team research, the authors identified four themes:

• Team effectiveness is rarely accidental; instead, team performance is usually shaped by enabling conditions, structural choices, monitoring of emergent properties, and appropriate intervention, which leaders and managers can influence at key points.
• Team potential must be used. Across the authors’ discussion of teams’ composition, diversity, cognition, and leadership, they reinforce the need to understand the difference between what team members can do and what they actually do.
• Interventions to ensure teams’ effectiveness do not scale linearly. Both team and organizational leaders need to consider the context and scope of teams’ design and interventions.
• Finally, technology can amplify but not replace fundamental team design and choices about process. Distributed teamwork boosts the importance of explicit communication of norms; asynchronicity requires more structured protocols and practices. AI can facilitate these processes, but it still depends on shared understanding and trust. If anything, the increased speed, and complexity of team arrangements enabled by technology make the fundamentals of team design and process more important.

“Our work does not simply summarize the issues, but highlights high-level integrative insights, clarifies what we know, challenges common misperceptions, and identifies unresolved tensions where theoretical and empirical advances are most needed,” says Laurie R. Weingart, Professor of Organizational Behavior at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, who coauthored the article. “At a time when the world’s most pressing challenges are too large for any one person to solve, the science of teams provides the architecture for our collective success. We must ensure that teams are not just prepared for the future but are actively shaping it and shaping it well.”

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Emich, K. J., Bell, B. S., Hollenbeck, J. R., Mathieu, J. E., Peterson, R. S., Tannenbaum, S. I., Weingart, L. R., & Woolley, A. W. Personnel Psychology's 40-Questions Series: The Science and Practice of Groups and Teams. Personnel Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.70033