The challenges of working with “real” teams: Challenges, needs, and opportunities

Teams are ubiquitous in organizations, yet work contexts now make traditional teams—those that have identifiable boundaries, stable membership, and members who belong only to that single team—a rarity. Teamwork has evolved along with work itself, making the traditional means of studying and validating team experiences (e.g., agreement statistics) inadequate. Yet it is not merely that current measures are antiquated, many of the assumptions about teams themselves are no longer correct. We felt that rather than simply trying to further exploit our traditional approaches to studying teams, the field should explore new or different ways to capture the team experience. New ideas about how to study teams will necessarily start out as theoretical—arguments made based on disciplined imagination and actual experience for why such new approaches are credible. If those who study new forms of teams can then validate these theories, then such new approaches expand the field’s capabilities. Thus, over the next few issues of OPR, we will be featuring papers that present new stances on how to study real teams. Such papers will provide arguments as to why these approaches are legitimate and necessary, to hopefully help bring these new approaches to future empirical work on teams in the real world.