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Abstract
This review examines research and theory relevant to work groups and teams typically embedded in organizations and existing over time, although many studies reviewed were conducted in other settings, including the laboratory. Research was organized around a two-dimensional system based on time and the nature of explanatory mechanisms that mediated between team inputs and outcomes. These mechanisms were affective, behavioral, cognitive, or some combination of the three. Recent theoretical and methodological work is discussed that has advanced our understanding of teams as complex, multilevel systems that function over time, tasks, and contexts. The state of both the empirical and theoretical work is compared as to its impact on present knowledge and future directions.
Key Words teamwork, workgroup, groups, coordination, cooperation
INTRODUCTION
Over a decade ago, Levine & Moreland's (1990) Annual Review of Psychology chapter concluded that small groups/teams research was "alive and well, but living elsewhere" (p. 620)-in organizational, not social, psychology. Guzzo & Dickson (1996) made a similar observation, and Sanna & Parks (1997) documented this empirically with an analysis of the top three organizational psychology journals. Between 1996 and 2004 the trend continued.
The organizational domain has shown some shift from questions of what predicts team effectiveness and viability to more complex questions regarding why some groups are more effective than others. We review what has been learned over the past seven years by categorizing findings in terms of their relevance to the formation, functioning, and final stages of teams' existence. From the outset we note that whereas there seems to be consensus on the need to study affective, cognitive, and behavioral mediational processes, this effort has been somewhat fragmented and noncumulative due to a proliferation of constructs with indistinct boundaries at the conceptual level and item overlap between measures of constructs at the level of individual studies.
As is often the case for Annual Review authors, we struggled with the boundaries of our domain. One aspect of this struggle is the recognition that there have been a number of both methodological and substantive achievements over the last seven years, but in the limited amount of space we have here, we focused primarily on substantive studies. This should not obscure the fact that during the period covered by the review, several...