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Abstract
While numerous organizing frameworks have provided a solid foundation for teams scholarship, they are either ill-equipped to handle the current complexity of teams, or not logically coherent. More so, extant reviews of the Management literature on teams, which serve to chart current progress and outline future directions, are only based on either very narrow, or very impressionistic assessments of the literature. Given the risks associated with credibility when engaging in academic scholarship without either a holistic framework or systematic review, the purpose of this thesis is to address these issues by conducting the most comprehensive review of the Management literature on teams to date.
To help do this, four different forms of analysis are conducted. First, using a grounded theory approach, a typology of inductively generated, hierarchically nested, and mutually exclusive team concept categories is created. Second, through the use of innovative bibliometric mapping techniques, a science map, which reveals four distinct team type taxonomic clusters, is presented through the analysis of 5,058 academic articles on teams – the most comprehensive sample of teams literature ever assembled. Third, by way of this same sample of articles, a longitudinal analysis of the teams literature’s proliferation in Management from 1991-2015 is examined, with major trends and topics that have shaped the fields trajectory over this period described. Forth, a compendium of meta-analytic findings on teams is provided, detailing the bi-variate relationships between 1,500 plus variables considered in the teams literature. These four forms of analysis all serve as a backbone for the review, which highlights major contributions over the past 25 years, and outlines the many factors that can be leveraged to build an effective team.
Beyond this, the thesis also presents a critique of the teams literature, which is based on the assessment of the four analyses. This critique argues that teams scholarship in Management in plagued by a generalizability problem, which stems from three inter-related issues. Each of these three issues is considered in turn, before a roadmap to help overcome them is outlined. It is hoped that this research will incite discussion regarding the proper cumulation of academic scholarship.