Event criticality, urgency, and duration: Understanding how events disrupt teams and influence team leader intervention
Section snippets
The performance environment of semi-autonomous teams
The sine qua non of semi-autonomous teams is that they assume responsibility for managing and executing major production activities (Banker, Field, Schroeder, & Sinha, 1996). As part of managing their own activities, teams will seek to develop routines that specify what behaviors should be performed in different circumstances (Gersick & Hackman, 1990). In the course of routinizing their behavior, teams develop a set of shared expectations and norms that give the team a sense of shared identity
Understanding event characteristics and leader intervention
To identify what event characteristics influence the degree to which an event disrupts team functioning, we drew from the literature on team routines and other event-based research (Dohrenwend et al., 1993, Gersick & Hackman, 1990, Lee & Mitchell, 1994, Olson-Buchanan et al., 1998, Thomas, 1992, Trevino, 1992, Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). This research concerns the central role events play in a host of different outcomes.
A critical aspect of events concerns their ability to prompt an individual
Research setting
The data used in this study was collected as part of a larger research project, part of which was reported in Morgeson (2005). For the current study, data from one new organization is reported and with the exception of a single measure (disruption to the team), none of the data reported has been previously published. Four different organizations were involved in the present research. All teams had only one formally designated leader. The first organization was a large pharmaceutical company and
Results
Because teams provided multiple ratings of events, there is a lack of independence in team ratings of events (i.e., events are nested within teams). To take this lack of independence into account, the hypotheses were formally tested with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM; Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992, Hofmann, 1997, Hofmann et al., 2000). In addition, there are a variety of factors other than event characteristics that may influence the observed relationships among the study variables. As such,
Discussion
Many have discussed, in general, how events can influence social system functioning (Barley, 1986, Louis, 1980, Schneider & Reichers, 1983). Such events are notable because they can disrupt automated routines and otherwise affect task performance (Gersick & Hackman, 1990, Louis & Sutton, 1991). Considering such events and their relationship to team functioning is particularly important because it provides a justification for the existence of team leaders in self-managing environments and
Acknowledgment
Thanks to the many team leaders and team members who participated in the study. Also thanks to Darren Moeller for his assistance in coding the events and Anne Downey for her proofreading and editing assistance.
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