Fluid and stable: Dynamics of team action patterns and adaptive outcomes

• Author: Sjir Uitdewilligen,Mary J. Waller,Ramón Rico
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2267
• Published date: 01 November 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Fluid and stable: Dynamics of team action patterns and

adaptive outcomes

Sjir Uitdewilligen

1

|Ramón Rico

2,3

|Mary J. Waller

4

1

Department of Work and Social Psychology,

Maastricht University, Maastricht, The

Netherlands

2

Department of Social Psychology and

Methodology, Universidad Autónoma de

Madrid, Madrid, Spain

3

Management and Organizations, The

University of Western Australia, Perth, WA,

Australia

4

Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian

University, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.A.

Correspondence

Sjir Uitdewilligen,Department of Work and

Social Psychology,Maastricht University,

Maastricht,The Netherlands.

Email: sjir.uitdewilligen@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Summary

The current study draws on work in the areas of team adaptation, team compilation, and small

groups as complex systems to predict and test relationships between time, taskwork team mental

models, team action patterns, and team effectiveness. Three‐person teams performed 9 scenarios

of a firefighting simulation distributed over 3 days with discontinuous task changes introduced in

the fourth and seventh scenarios (N= 41 teams; 123 individuals). We applied pattern detection

algorithm software to the behavioral data to identify emergent performative patterns in the team

members' task‐oriented actions. We also used discontinuous growth modeling to track the

development of these team action patterns and their dynamic relation to team effectiveness.

The results indicate that pattern emergence increased over time. This was particularly true for

teams with similar taskwork mental models, and these teams also showed a more acute decrease

in action patterns after a task change. In addition, team action patterns became increasingly

positively related to team effectiveness over time, but this effect was reset after the occurrence

of a task change. Overall, our research provides practical guidance to managers by illustrating the

value of teams having highly shared taskwork team mental models and of enhancing the effects

of teams' action patterns on team adaptive outcomes.

KEYWORDS

growth modeling,interaction patterns, shared mental models, team adaptation, team dynamics

1|INTRODUCTION

In order to effectively function in a dynamic work environment, teams

must find a balance between stability and change. This balancing act is

clearly visible in the extent to which team members perform recurring

patterns of activity in their collective task‐oriented work (Zellmer‐

Bruhn, Waller, & Ancona, 2004). We define these team action patterns

in concordance with existing work (e.g., LePine, 2003; Zellmer‐Bruhn

et al., 2004) as recurring sets of actions performed for coordination

and taskwork. As such, action patterns in teams differ from the infor-

mation‐laden and chiefly verbal interaction patterns explored in previ-

ous work (e.g., Stachowski, Kaplan, & Waller, 2009; Zijlstra, Waller, &

Phillips, 2012). Instead, team action patterns are emergent performa-

tive patterns “created through practice”(Feldman, 2000, p. 622) and

composed of task‐directed actions engaged in by team members.

These patterns differ from routines, however, as they are not “bound

by rules and customs”(Feldman, 2000, p. 622). For instance, if a pro-

duction team receives a customer order, a logistics worker may gather

the required materials, hand these over to two production workers

who will prepare the subcomponent of the order, after which a third

worker will assemble the separate components. If this same sequence

of actions is repeatedly performed over time and with very little or no

variation, it becomes a stable action pattern within the team.

On one hand, it is important that teams quickly develop such

action patterns, as this creates stability through predictability and effi-

ciency (Cohen & Bacdayan, 1994). When team members know what

actions they can expect from each other, they can easily adjust and

anticipate their own actions to match those of their team members,

becoming coordinated in an implicit way (Rico, Sanchez‐Manzanares,

Gil, & Gibson, 2008). On the other hand, stability can become detri-

mental when teams are faced with novel situations that significantly

differ from situations for which stable action patterns within the teams

exist (e.g., Stachowski et al., 2009; Uitdewilligen, Waller, & Pitariu,

2013). In such cases, relying on stable action patterns may lead to

the rigidity that limits teams' ability to adapt to novel situations

(LePine, 2003).

Related previous research on verbal interaction patterns suggests

that there is a strong situational influence on the relationship between

Received: 1 October 2016 Revised: 1 January 2018 Accepted: 6 January 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2267

J Organ Behav. 2018;39:1113–1128. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 1113

team effectiveness and the extent to which team interaction occurs

according to stable patterns. Zijlstra et al. (2012) found that teams with

communication that fell into patterns early in team formation subse-

quently outperformed those teams with comparatively less communi-

cation that composed patterns during team formation. Stachowski

et al. (2009) found that during critical nonroutine situations, teams

with less complex interaction patterns outperformed teams with more

complex patterns. In a study with 12 flight crews working in a flight

simulator, Lei, Waller, Hagen, and Kaplan (2016) found that pattern

length (measured as the amount of time within which a pattern

unfolded), pattern complexity (measured as the number of hierarchical

levels within a pattern containing smaller, embedded subpatterns), and

actor switches (or turn‐taking among team members) interacted

with environmental volatility to predict team effectiveness. In routine

environments, these interaction pattern characteristics were positively

related to effectiveness; however, in nonroutine environments, the

relationship was negative.

Although these previous studies have focused on verbalized

interaction patterns, little is known about the recurring performative

patterns of behaviors that emerge in teams as structured ways of

doing when teams perform coordinated tasks. Moreover, although

the temporal elements of pattern development and change have been

implicit in these studies, an analysis of the antecedents, development,

and changes in patterns, as well as of the dynamic relationship

between patterns and team effectiveness, is missing. How do patterns

of teams' actions develop and emerge over time, and how does the

nature of this development influence team outcomes? In this study,

we take a dynamic perspective on team development and effective-

ness (Collins, Gibson, Quigley, & Parker, 2016), and we take a team

adaptation perspective (Baard, Rench, & Kozlowski, 2014; LePine,

2005) to assess the effect of unexpected task changes on team action

pattern development; additionally, we build on Kozlowski, Gully,

Nason, and Smith's (1999) model of team compilation by predicting

the development of team action patterns over time. We suggest that

taskwork team mental models (TMMs)—a similar understanding among

the team members about the central aspects of the task (Mohammed,

Ferzandi, & Hamilton, 2010) —function as a key antecedent of team

action pattern development and change. We focus on TMMs as they

are the most advanced and frequently studied form of team cognition

and due to their consistent relationship with the capacity of team

members to articulate their interactions in a way that improves

both coordination and outcomes (Mohammed, Hamilton, Sanchez‐

Manzanares, & Rico, 2017). Finally, we propose a dynamic relationship

between these action patterns and team effectiveness. In this regard,

we address how repeated changes in the task over time influence

the relationship between team action patterns and team effectiveness.

This study thus tests key theoretical propositions to advance the

study of team dynamics in four important ways. First, responding to

calls for studies on the dynamics of team effectiveness (Ballard,

Tschan, & Waller, 2008; Collins et al., 2016; Cronin, Weingart, &

Todorova, 2011; Roe, 2008; Waller, Okhuysen, & Saghafian, 2016),

we do not treat our focal constructs as static; instead, we model and

track the development and change of team effectiveness and action

patterns over time. Second, the literature on team interaction patterns

shows contrasting findings regarding the influence of interaction

patterns on team effectiveness (Kanki, Folk, & Irwin, 1991; Stachowski

et al., 2009; Uitdewilligen et al., 2013); by applying our temporal

design, we show that patterns are not good or bad per se but that their

influence depends on the timing within the team's trajectory. Third, we

contribute to the team literature by identifying shared mental models

(Mohammed et al., 2010) as an important antecedent of team action

pattern development and change. Finally, because task changes over

time are a central issue in this research, we contribute to the

burgeoning literature of team adaptation in two main ways: (a) by

revealing the role of TMMs and team action patterns in transition

and reacquisition adaptation, thus addressing recent calls in the field

to characterize what is being changed in the team when adaptation

occurs (Maynard, Kennedy, & Sommers, 2015); and (b) by testing cen-

tral postulates from Kozlowski's et al. (1999) team compilation model

that remained unexplored.

2|THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND

HYPOTHESES

2.1 |Team adaptation and the development of

action patterns

In general, research on teams postulates that adaptation may be moti-

vated by a decrement (or expected decrement) in team effectiveness,

and some scholars have provided conceptual approaches portraying

how teams cope with and adapt to the changes believed responsible

for these decrements. In this regard, it is suggested that team adapta-

tion occurs through an emergent and recursive multilevel process com-

bining situation assessment, plan formulation, plan execution, and

team learning (Burke, Stagl, Salas, Pierce, & Kendall, 2006; Kozlowski

et al., 1999). However, team adaptation scholars are still struggling to

properly characterize the specific underlying mechanisms that drive

team adaptation and, in particular, the measurement and characteriza-

tion of the behaviors that constitute team adaptation (Maynard et al.,

2015).

In looking for a response to this particular issue, we submit that

the behavioral manifestation of the team adaptation process can be

observed in the moment‐to‐moment manifestations of team function-

ing, indicated by the observable patterns occurring among the team

members' actions (Kozlowski et al., 1999). Here, following work specif-

ically in the team dynamics literature, we consider team action patterns

as the recurring sequences of performative task‐oriented actions exe-

cuted by team members (LePine, 2003; Zellmer‐Bruhn et al., 2004). As

such, the notion of action patterns is closely related to the concept of

collective routines, which are also characterized by repeatedly exhib-

ited similar patterns of behavior (Cohen & Bacdayan, 1994; Gersick

& Hackman, 1990). In addition to not being bound by rules and

customs (Feldman, 2000), a central distinction between routines and

action patterns is that routines are often associated with unconscious

or nondeliberate behavior, whereas action patterns refer purely to the

behavioral aspects without inferences about the extent to which these

behaviors are consciously developed or executed (Schulz, 2008).

Cohen and Bacdayan (1994) provide a compelling account of how

collective routines are stored as situation‐action linkages in the

1114 UITDEWILLIGEN ET AL.