He thought, she thought: The importance of subjective patterns to understanding team processes

• Author: Li Lu,Kyle J. Emich
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2122
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• Date: 01 January 2017

He thought, she thought: The importance of

subjective patterns to understanding team

processes

KYLE J. EMICH

1

*AND LI LU

2

1

Department of Business Administration, Alfred Lerner College of Business & Economics, University of Delaware,

Newark, Delaware, U.S.A.

2

Department of Management, College of Business & Public Affairs, WestChester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania,

U.S.A.

Summary Teams are often described using the mean and variance of their member’s characteristics. Recently, research

has advanced this paradigm by beginning to explore the importance of patterns of team member perceptions

regarding themselves, their teammates, and their teams. We highlight this work and suggest several directions

for future research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: groups and teams; perception; emergence; patterns in team functioning

Teams are vital to modern organizations because they help to combine diverse resources to achieve tasks beyond the

ability of a single individual. However, despite their importance, much about the processes underlying team

functioning and performance remains vague. One reason for this involves the prevailing assumptions made. Much

current research exploring team functioning assumes that teams constitute entities unto themselves, whose

characteristics originate in their individual members, are amplified by their interactions, and ultimately manifest at

a higher collective level (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000).

This process is known as emergence and occurs in one of two conceptually independent ways: compositionally—

when team members come to a homogenous understanding of their team environment—or compilationally, when

members vary in regard to their behaviors, characteristics, or perceptions (Crawford & LePine, 2013; Kozlowski

& Klein, 2000). Although many teams exhibit a mixture of compositional and compilational emergence, we treat

these two categories as theoretical exemplars. For example, a synchronized swimming team may undergo composi-

tional emergence because of members’need to think and behave identically. Alternatively, compilational emergence

is much more common, occurring any time a team has members with different roles, characteristics, or backgrounds.

This can apply to teams as diverse as sports teams with specialized positions, multidisciplinary product teams, and

multinational top management teams.

Despite the prevalence of compilational emergence, researchers predominantly treat team properties as emerging

in a purely compositional manner by employing mean scores of individual attributes extracted from members’

evaluations to account for them, for example, team efficacy or psychological safety. While this approach makes

sense when describing compositional emergence because compositional emergence results in homogeneity among

team members, using means to describe compilational emergence is far less useful. In a team whose properties

emerge compilationally, a mean value will not reflect fully the characteristic richness of its individual members

and cannot adequately account for any meaningful differences among them. Additionally, researchers generally

use standard deviations to account for within-team differences, further compounding the issue of accurately

measuring differences within teams.

*Correspondence to: Kyle J. Emich,Department of BusinessAdministration, AlfredLerner College of BusinessEconomics, Universityof Delaware,

222 Lerner Hall,Newark, DE 19716, USA. E-mail: kemich@udel.edu

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 03 June 2016, Accepted 11 June 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 152–156 (2017)

Published online 7 July 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2122

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