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 c
Introduction
On Monday morning you begin your week as a medical intern on the blue team in the Kids’ Hospital General Pediatric Inpatient Unit Your team is entrusted with making and executing patient care decisions for a defined set of pediatric patients, and it has both the authority to act and the expectation to do so responsibly.
At 9 a.m., you’re told to meet your medical team in the patient’s room, but you’ve never worked with the other blue team members before Your supervising physician is worried about the first patient you’re about to see, and before you know it the team is heading into the room As you walk in, you wonder who will input the medical orders the team decides on and whether that task should fall to you Last week, a senior resident handled the orders, but that resident is now busy talking with the patient’s family.
Just as the care team is finalizing the patient’s care plan and stepping out of the room, the patient’s nurse approaches, asking why he wasn’t contacted earlier He explains that he heard new information from the consulting Infectious Disease group, information that prompts the team to revisit and completely revise the care plan This underscores the critical role of timely communication and multidisciplinary collaboration in hospital patient care, where infectious disease input can change treatment strategies to align with the latest recommendations.
This scenario, drawn from observations of inpatient medical teams, highlights how today’s work reflects a broader shift toward dynamic, decentralized organizational forms in healthcare It shows that the move to dynamic organizations is accompanied by a common distribution of authority to teams, enabling empowerment, rapid collaboration, and local decision making These insights align with the healthcare and organizational design literature (Malone, 2004; Powell, 1987; Moreland & Argote, 2003; Thomas-Hunt & Phillips).
Dynamic teams are defined by temporary membership and permeable boundaries, two dimensions widely documented in the literature (Klein, Ziegert, Knight, & Xiao, 2006; Valentine & Edmondson, 2015; Cummings & Pletcher, 2011; Mortensen & Haas, 2018) These short lifespans and permeable boundaries together define dynamic teams (see Figure 1.1 for a visual display of how dynamic teams relate to other team forms and phenomena) As discussed in Chapter 2, dynamic teams often exhibit a core–periphery network structure, whereby core members—those more central to the work and decision making (Humphrey, Morgeson, & Mannor, 2009)—work together for a brief amount of time.
2 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 &
Research by Wageman (2005), Majchrzak, Jarvenpaa, and Hollingshead (2007), Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, and Gilson (2008), and Mortensen and Haas (2018) documents a trend toward increasingly fluid collaborations This movement toward fluid teamwork enables more adaptive and flexible work arrangements that help organizations meet the demands of a changing environment.
Mortensen and Haas (2018) contend that extremely short team lifespans and highly permeable boundaries undermine the defining features once thought essential for coordination Short team lifespans create uncertainty about how to work with teammates, while boundary permeability raises uncertainty about who to work with Together, these challenges are likely to undermine emergent coordination within teams (Mortensen & Haas, 2018; Okhuysen).
Bechky (2009) argues that team stability and boundary impermeability provide a structural framework that guides attention and facilitates coordination; Hackman (2011) reinforces this view, noting that when these conditions are in place, coordination is smoother, whereas the absence of stability and impermeable boundaries 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.g., Valentine &
Edmondson (2015) notes that although stable core memberships can support team functioning, teams with permeable boundaries still benefit from some membership stability among core members (O’Leary, Mortensen, & Woolley, 2011) But neither fixed memberships nor permeable-boundary arrangements alone suffice for dynamic teams, which are inherently temporary and continually reconfigured As a result, current theories may need to be adapted to account for how fluid team compositions operate in practice.
Three dynamic contexts, as defined by Majchrzak et al (2007), frame the study of coordination in contemporary teams As discussed in Chapter 2, this gap in our understanding is critical given the prevalence of highly dynamic teams in organizations today Consequently, this dissertation investigates the conditions that enable effective coordination in dynamic teams, with the goal of identifying practical factors that improve collaboration and performance in fast-changing work environments.
Chapter 2 investigates the conditions under which dynamic inpatient teams coordinate effectively, drawing on qualitative observations and interviews and integrating existing literature to derive a grounded theory of enabling factors By adopting a hybrid team-network lens, the analysis distinguishes core from periphery members to locate the team andUnderstand how membership fluidity shapes coordination The findings indicate that a focused team launch with the core members, which channels early attention, builds team cognition and enables emergent coordination This emergent coordination offers benefits such as individual learning and improved team efficiency, suggesting that dynamic teams can succeed even without stable structures or impermeable boundaries by relying on attentional scaffolding to align actions.
Chapter 3, extending the qualitative work with Anita Woolley, Liny John, Christine March, Selma Witchel, and Andrew Nowalk, employs a field experiment to test two interventions that introduce cognitive scaffolding intended to anchor core team members’ attention and facilitate coordination in dynamic teams Within medical inpatient teams, the findings confirm our prediction that team launches directing attention to core members’ roles produce greater emergent interdependence among those core members, while a second set of launches directing attention to the team’s permeable boundary promotes expanded coordination across the group.
Core members’ views on who belongs on the team drive greater integration of peripheral members, supporting enhanced coordination in dynamic teams The study provides empirical evidence that attentional scaffolds foster this coordination, especially when combined with two coordination behaviors—emergent interdependence and periphery integration In fact, it is this combination that most strongly enhances core members’ learning Contrary to the expectation of a trade-off between individual learning and team efficiency, the findings show they go hand in hand.
Chapter 4 synthesizes the qualitative study and the field experiment to present the emerging theory of dynamic team coordination, offering a comprehensive discussion of how these methods together advance understanding in this area The chapter outlines theoretical implications for team beginnings, organizational design and scaffolds, learning, and the management of dynamic teams, highlighting how design choices and supportive structures shape coordination in evolving groups Collectively, these insights contribute to a coherent framework for studying and managing dynamic teams in real-world settings.
Team Launches and Initial Attention: Enabling Coordination in Dynamic Teams
Organizational structures have evolved dramatically from the centralized forms that dominated centuries ago (Chandler Jr., 1962; Malone, 2004) Today, researchers have built a robust body of knowledge outlining what centralized organizations—and the teams within them—need to operate effectively (Mathieu, Hollenbeck, Knippenberg, & Ilgen).
Organizational structures today reflect a shifting landscape driven by dynamic environments that demand rapid adaptation As knowledge-based work expands, specialization increases, and communication technologies enable swift sharing and gathering of information, organizations have adopted hybrid forms, boundaryless structures, and dynamic configurations In essence, these changes emphasize decentralization of authority and a move away from rigid hierarchies, enabling more flexible, adaptive work and improved responsiveness to change.
Organizations are shifting toward distributed authority and flexible organizing through dynamic, self-managing teams that operate as evolving entities (Moreland & Argote, 2003; Thomas-Hunt & Phillips, 2003) Research emphasizes attending to dynamic team processes (Cronin, Weingart, & Todorova, 2011), while recognizing that such teams face unclear, unstable, and fluctuating membership inputs due to their dynamic nature (Wageman, Gardner, & Mortensen, 2012) Consequently, organizations increasingly rely on self-managing teams that can self-select members (Bunderson & Boumgarden, 2010; Langfred, 2007; Harrison & Humphrey, 2010) and on temporary teams that can be formed quickly to address an immediate need and then disband (Bechky, 2006; Klein et al., 2006).
Research by Thomas-Hunt & Phillips (2003) and related work highlights “unbounded” teams whose membership evolves over time, with a highly fluid team composition (Bedwell, Ramsay, & Salas, 2012; Bernstein, Leonardi, & Mortensen, 2017; Edmondson, 2012) The collective impact of these trends is that team membership is continually changing, producing dynamic inputs in the form of a shifting roster of people working to accomplish a task (Humphrey & Aime, 2014; Mortensen & Haas, 2018).
Membership dynamics vary across dimensions, but this paper foregrounds temporality and movement into and out of groups, emphasizing the rise of short-term team lifespans and permeable boundaries that let individuals join and leave over time This combination defines what I term dynamic teams, a pattern observed across contexts from healthcare and consulting to product development and disaster response (Arrow & McGrath, 1993; Arrow et al., 2000; Edmondson, 2012; Edmondson & Harvey, 2018; Hackman & Wageman, 2005; Majchrzak et al., 2007; Mathieu et al., 2008; Mortensen & Haas, 2018) While membership instability in dynamic teams can offer flexibility, it also challenges coordination by undermining stable processes and clear boundaries, since permeable boundaries raise questions about who to work with and when (Hackman, 2011; Ginnett, 2010; Mortensen & Haas, 2018; Mortensen & Hinds, 2002).
Emerging research suggests current theories of coordination may need adaptation to fit more dynamic contexts (Majchrzak et al., 2007) More broadly, we are just beginning to grapple with the conditions needed to enable effective coordination in highly dynamic teams that lack stable structures (Mathieu et al., 2017) At the same time, scholars are exploring how to foster coordination in fluid environments where traditional frameworks are less applicable.
7 organizations are increasingly relying on fluid collaboration structures, heightening the importance of understanding how unstable teams can coordinate
Given our limited understanding of how coordination occurs in highly dynamic teams, researchers call for qualitative investigations and grounded theory development (Cronin et al., 2011; Edmondson & McManus, 2007; Mathieu et al., 2017) Accordingly, this paper reports a qualitative study of a prototypical highly dynamic team—the medical inpatient team—which is both extremely temporary and characterized by highly permeable boundaries, and it develops a grounded theory on the conditions that enable coordination in such settings.
Defining teams in fluid, evolving contexts remains challenging, so this work builds on the emerging view of teams as networks Recent perspectives encourage focusing on organizing activities and teaming rather than fixed team constructs, describing teams as networks of individuals or hubs of participants The next section reviews extant literature on dynamic teams and demonstrates that a hybrid team–network perspective is increasingly supported, guiding the subsequent qualitative inquiry.
Coordination in Highly Dynamic Teams
Today, many organizations operate teams whose membership changes frequently Although some contend that stable, well-defined teams are optimal for coordination (Hackman, 2011; Hackman & Wageman, 2005), practical constraints often prevent limiting who belongs to the team So how can such organizations still achieve effective coordination? Insights come from several research streams, including membership change and turnover, the deployment of temporary teams, and multiple related areas of study.
8 team membership, fluid teams, and boundary spanning (both from a teams and social network analysis perspective) These areas of research highlight key challenges faced when membership is in flux
Dynamic teams with brief lifespans often leave members lacking familiarity, which creates uncertainty about how to work together (Levine & Choi, 2004; Summers, Humphrey, & Ferris, 2012) To support temporary collaborations, research indicates that teams experiencing frequent membership changes rely on standardized procedures that clarify who should do what, on a clear communication structure that specifies with whom to coordinate, and on formal roles (Cox et al., 2017; Haynes et al., 2009; Ton & Huckman, 2008; Argote, Aven, & Kushner; Katz & Kahn…).
Early work dating back to 1966 offers insights into how individuals can collaborate effectively, a view supported by Bechky (2006) and Valentine & Edmondson (2015) In this context, the use of roles is particularly beneficial when those roles are clearly organized, such as through a hierarchical structure (Klein et al.).
When teams experience membership changes, defining a clear set of roles helps establish boundaries and expectations for collaboration Drawing on prior work (2006) and Valentine & Edmondson’s concept of a bounded set of roles (2015), explicit role clarity reduces ambiguity about who does what By outlining each member’s responsibilities, teams create shared norms for interaction and a predictable workflow, facilitating smoother integration of new members and more effective teamwork.
Relying solely on role-based structures to guide teamwork may be insufficient Even when roles set expectations, those guidelines can be unclear, leaving teams to struggle with coordination Research shows that much of today’s work is defined by structural interdependence that is ambiguous, creating uncertainty about how members should collaborate (Wageman & Gordon, 2005) In some contexts, such as airline crews, roles for pilots, co-pilots, and flight engineers may seem clear, but this clarity does not automatically resolve coordination challenges in other settings.
Research on airline crews shows that even when roles are formally defined, they often remain inchoate, and initial clarification of those roles has been shown to improve performance (Ginnett, 2010) This indicates that relying on formal roles alone may be insufficient to achieve effective coordination.
Although many workplaces rely on a clearly defined team boundary, this approach alone is often insufficient The reviewed research shows that teams can improve performance by adopting explicit structures, such as role sets, to cope with frequent membership changes; however, the benefits of these structures typically depend on maintaining a stable and clearly defined team boundary.