Shifting Team Research after COVID‐19: Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change

• Author: Mark Mortensen,Deborah Ancona,Henrik Bresman
• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12651

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Shifting Team Research after COVID-19: Evolutionary

and Revolutionary Change

Deborah Anconaa, Henrik Bresmanb and

Mark Mortensenb

aMIT Sloan School of Management; bINSEAD

EVOLUTIONARY AND REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE IN TEAM

RESEARCH

Even before COVID-19 we saw an evolution in team discourse that will continue long

after the disease is gone. That said, COVID-19 has been a disruptor that has shifted the

trajectory of that evolution, accelerating some trends and introducing others. This is

not a story of moving from one state to another, but rather shifting the ongoing arc of

change. In this brief we examine the shifts before the pandemic, where COVID-19 has

taken us, and implications for future research.

EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE – ACCELERATING AND REDIRECTING

EXISTING TRENDS IN TEAM RESEARCH

Richard Hackman’s definition of a team has been active for decades: a set of individu-

als who work interdependently toward a common goal and view themselves as a team

(Hackman, 2003). While this definition still holds, underlying it are several unstated as-

sumptions that have been under assault for decades – and on which COVID-19 has had

a significant effect:

Journal of Man agement Studi es 58:1 Januar y 2021

doi:10. 1111/j oms .12 651

Address for reprints: Deborah Ancona, MIT Sloan School of Management, Building E62-434 100 Main Street,

Cambridge, MA 02142, USA (ancona@mit.edu).

Authors contributed equally to this work and are listed in alphabetical order.