A multilevel review of stressor research in teams

• Date: 01 February 2020
• Author: Stefan Razinskas,Martin Hoegl
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2420
• Published date: 01 February 2020

THE JOB ANNUAL REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

ISSUE

A multilevel review of stressor research in teams

Stefan Razinskas |Martin Hoegl

Institute for Leadership and Organization, LMU

Munich School of Management, Ludwig‐

Maximilians‐Universität München, Munich,

Germany

Correspondence

Stefan Razinskas, Institute for Leadership and

Organization, LMU Munich School of

Management, Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität

München, Geschwister‐Scholl‐Platz 1, 80539

Munich, Germany.

Email: razinskas@bwl.lmu.de

Summary

The contemporary work environment is characterized by an ongoing trend to embed

employees in teams because of their expected abilities for handling complex tasks

and integrating diverse sets of knowledge and skills. However, leveraging this poten-

tial is endangered by stimuli within and outside of teams that take a toll on cohesion

and teamwork among team members. Understanding the role that stressors and

demands play in the work‐related functioning of teams and their members is there-

fore an increasingly important challenge in the organizational behavior literature.

Whereas research on stressors and demands has primarily focused on the individual

level, we expand the research scope by considering these phenomena to be multi-

level. We perform an interdisciplinary review of the literature on these stimuli in

teams and show how related research, such as that on destructive leadership, may

benefit from a more balanced account and integration of frameworks on stressors.

Our multilevel review is informative for the literature on stressors and demands at

the individual and team levels, as it offers an important conceptual grounding for

how and why various stimuli in this social environment differentially influence both

the collective entity and its individual team members.

KEYWORDS

demands, stressors,teams, work groups

1|INTRODUCTION

More than a quarter century has passed since James Driskell and Eduardo

Salas (1991) published their seminal work on collaborative decision‐

making under stress. In the years that followed, the trend of teamwork

in the workplace increased rapidly, paralleled by a corresponding increase

in the number of academic publications on this topic (Weiss & Hoegl,

2015). Likewise, a sizable and increasingbodyofresearchhasstartedto

investigate stressors—defined as “theeventsorpropertiesofevents(stim-

uli) that are encountered by individuals”(Cooper, Dewe, & O'Driscoll,

2001, p. 14)—in the context of teams. Although this research on team

stressors (i.e., the demanding stimuli encountered by teams and their

members) has been slow to accumulate and long occurred predominantly

in the military context (for a comprehensive overview, please refer to

Cannon‐Bowers & Salas, 1998), team stressors are receiving heightened

attention in leading journals today (e.g., Maruping, Venkatesh, Thatcher,

& Patel, 2015; Sacramento, Fay, & West, 2013). Traditional team‐level

studies have shown, for example, how team performance is driven by

team stressors through specific intrateam processes and boundary condi-

tions (Drach‐Zahavy & Freund, 2007; Pearsall, Ellis, & Stein, 2009),

whereas first cross‐level studies have detected how specific team

stressors translate into performance‐relevant attitudes, behaviors, and

emotional states within individual team members (e.g., Kozusznik,

Rodríguez, & Peiró, 2015; Westman, Bakker, Roziner, & Sonnentag, 2011).

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided

the original work is properly cited.

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Organizational Behavior published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Received: 27 October 2017 Revised: 26 September 2019 Accepted: 15 October 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2420

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:185–209. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 185

Studies accounting for higher level stressors have revealed the

complex nature of team stressors, identifying some team stressors as

beneficial for team performance and others as detrimental (Drach‐

Zahavy & Freund, 2007; Gardner, 2012; Pearsall et al., 2009). Studies

on cross‐level effects have shown that among other factors, team

members' exhaustion and engagement depend on the stressfulness

of their team's climate (i.e., ranging from distressed to eustressed;

Kozusznik et al., 2015). Most of these findings are in line with findings

at the individual level showing that stressors differentially affect out-

comes such as performance, commitment, and engagement (for

reviews at the individual level, please refer to Bakker, Demerouti, &

Sanz‐Vergel, 2014; LePine, Podsakoff, & LePine, 2005; Podsakoff,

LePine, & LePine, 2007).

Notably, however, only a few studies conducted in actual team

contexts have explicitly drawn upon and theoretically extended

stressor frameworks that were originally conceptualized at the individ-

ual level (e.g., Ellis & Pearsall, 2011; Pearsall et al., 2009). This is sur-

prising, given that the need for multilevel approaches in occupational

stress research was articulated long ago (Bliese & Jex, 1999). Conse-

quently, although team research is gradually expanding the knowledge

of how teams are affected by specific stimuli (e.g., time or perfor-

mance pressures), the development of explicit stressor research in

teams is potentially stalled. This is particularly critical because the

bifurcation of literature leading to two separate streams (i.e., micro

and macro) impedes the advancement of knowledge (House, Rous-

seau, & Thomas‐Hunt, 1995), thereby creating unnecessary pluralism

(Goldspink & Kay, 2004). A more integrative approach to the study

of stressors and teams is hence needed to effectively use any poten-

tial synergies currently lying dormant.

By extending the informative literature reviews of workplace

stress (Ganster & Rosen, 2013) and stressors (Cooper et al., 2001) at

the individual level, we provide a unified overview of the empirical

research addressing stressors and demands in teams to allow such

synergies to surface. Our contribution is thus threefold. First, as team

research on stressors appears to be unstructured in terms of a rather

random selection of stressors, outcomes, and potential buffering

mechanisms, we align and structure previous findings to put scholars

who are interested in the same specific phenomena within those cat-

egories (e.g., stressors intrinsic to a team's job or originating from rela-

tionships at work) on the same page. This approach will connect their

research ideas to findings from potentially related stressors. Second,

although research on work stressors has become increasingly invested

in the study of collectives, much of the discussion is implicitly applied

as analogous to the individual level. However, especially when

stressors affect individuals embedded in collective structures such as

teams, interactions and team‐internal processes are pivotal to the

effects of the stressors. To avoid an overly restricted and static under-

standing of stressors and demands at work, we systematically review

the literature across multiple levels of analysis and discuss the multi-

level nature of stressors (Bliese, 1998; Bliese & Jex, 1999). Third, as

scholars from related fields of team research arguably investigate

stressor‐like phenomena without explicitly drawing on this stream of

research, we raise their awareness of a more balanced account of

team‐stressor research. We exemplify this by the literature on

destructive leadership behaviors (e.g., Mawritz, Dust, & Resick, 2014;

Tepper, 2007). Applying a team‐stressor lens to these behaviors will

give rise to substantial progress that would otherwise be overlooked.

Taken together, we contribute to the existing literature by explicitly

focusing on stressors in collective entities (e.g., Maruping et al.,

2015; Rodríguez‐Escudero, Carbonell, & Munuera‐Aleman, 2010;

Savelsbergh, Gevers, Van der Heijden, & Poell, 2012), and we advance

related streams of team research that center on stressful stimuli jeop-

ardizing the proper functioning of teams and their members.

2|REVIEW METHOD

2.1 |Theoretical approach and structuring

Because teams and work groups are characterized as collectives oper-

ating in settings that link individuals to one another (Ilgen, Hollenbeck,

Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; McGrath, Arrow, & Berdahl, 2000), we inte-

grate studies on both forms of interdependent collective work in our

systematic literature review. Some authors consider their studies to

relate to teams exclusively, but blurring the lines between the two

terms may provoke others to classify these studies as research on

work groups, or vice versa. In keeping with previous reviews (e.g.,

Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Costa, Fulmer, & Anderson, 2018; Thatcher &

Patel, 2012), we use the terms “team”and “group”interchangeably

for simplicity's sake, although we more frequently use the term team.

As Kerr and Tindale (2004, p. 624) noted, “the distinction is a rather

artificial one that reflects more about subdisciplinary territoriality than

about fundamental differences in focus or objectives.”If a distinction

is to be made, then team studies typically, but not exclusively, tend

to be of an applied nature, with data collected in real work teams,

whereas group studies tend to be of an experimental nature in that

they investigate groups in laboratory settings (Kerr & Tindale, 2004;

McGrath et al., 2000).

Because research on stressors in the organizational context of

teams appears to be rather unstructured, the approach to organizing

our interdisciplinary literature review is twofold. On the one hand,

we classify the extant empirical research on stressors and their effects

on and within teams into three broader categories reflecting the hier-

archical levels considered. First, there are studies investigating

individual‐level stressors and their effects on team members (e.g.,

Jex & Bliese, 1999; Jex & Thomas, 2003). These studies apply a

single‐level approach by observing individuals embedded in teams

and how individual‐level stressors affect their work. Second, by apply-

ing this single‐level approach to the higher level, that is, the team level,

some studies consider the team‐specific and team‐external influences

that affect collective entities as a whole (e.g., Ellis, 2006; Maruping

et al., 2015). This vein of research has started to emerge due to the

increasing relevance of teams in organizational practice. Third, studies

perform multilevel investigations of stressors within teams. Articles

simultaneously accounting for individual‐level and team‐level models

(i.e., homologous multilevel models; Klein & Kozlowski, 2000; e.g.,

RAZINSKAS AND HOEGL

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