Fuzzy Teams: Why Do Teams Disagree on Their Membership, and What Does It Mean?

Abstract:     
The organizational team is ubiquitous and team membership is far-reaching in its effects, recognized by scholars and practitioners as affecting cognition, dynamics, processes, and performance. While team membership is straightforward in traditional contexts, organizations’ increasing reliance on partially-overlapping, fluidly shifting project-based teams increases the likelihood of “boundary disagreement” in which individual disagree on the membership of their teams. In a study of 39 formally defined software and product development teams, I build on social categorization to examine the processes in project-based work that lead to team boundary disagreement. I find boundary disagreement is predicted by the amount of time dedicated to the team, level and patterns of interdependence, and members’ task-relevant uniqueness. Mediated transactive memory, it is negatively related to team performance. I discuss the impacts of boundary disagreement on our theories, of team dynamics and performance as well as our methods and management practice.

Keywords: team dynamics, boundary disagreement

Working Paper Series