50 Years of Sports Teams in Work Teams Research: Missed Opportunities and New Directions for Studying Team Processes

For the last 50 years, sports team samples have played a significant role in mainstream management literature. Prior research has analyzed different kinds of data, such as archival, survey-based, and interviews/observations, from a wide range of sports teams. These teams differ greatly in terms of contexts (i.e., recreational to intercollegiate to professional) and types of interdependence. We explore this body of work and focus on what is germane for the work teams literature as we examine 255 relevant articles spanning the years 1972–2021 in major management, organizational behavior (OB), human resource management (HRM), and strategy journals. Using the input-process-outcome model in our coding process, we identify the relative absence of the study of team processes. We develop a conceptual framework linking team interdependence, team processes, and the initiation and maintenance of these processes. This framework is intended to help guide future research on team processes in the context of sports team samples and enhance the generalizability of this research to the work teams domain. Additionally, we identify an agenda for future research using sports team samples for work groups/teams researchers. Overall, we intend to spur thoughtful and creative future research in the work groups/teams area using the rich field environment that sports teams present.

Team Membership Change “Events”: A Review and Reconceptualization

Driven by views of teams as dynamic systems with permeable boundaries, scholars are increasingly seeking to better understand how team membership changes (i.e., team members joining and/or leaving) shape the functioning and performance of organizational teams. However, empirical studies of team membership change appear to be progressing in three largely independent directions as researchers consider: (a) how newcomers impact and are impacted by the teams they join; (b) how teams adapt to member departures; or (c) how teams function under conditions of high membership fluidity, with little theoretical integration or consensus across these three areas. To accelerate an integrative stream of research on team membership change, we advance a conceptual framework which depicts each team membership change as a discrete team-level “event” which shapes team functioning to the extent to which it is “novel,” “disruptive,” and “critical” for the team. We use this framework to guide our review and synthesis of empirical studies of team membership change published over the past 20 years. Our review reveals numerous factors, across conceptual levels of the organization, that determine the strength (i.e., novelty, disruptiveness, criticality) of a team membership change event and, consequently, its impact on team functioning and performance. In closing, we provide propositions for future research that integrate a multilevel, event-based perspective of team membership change and demonstrate how team membership change events may impact organizational systems over time and across levels of observation.