Groups at Work: Team Processes, Leadership, Autonomy, and Diversity

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering theoretical frameworks, empirical models, taxonomic dimensions, and core constructs across Team Processes, Team Leadership, Autonomy vs. Control, and Work Group Diversity.

Team Processes

Members' interdependent acts that convert inputs to outcomes through cognitive, verbal, and behavioral activities directed toward organizing taskwork to achieve collective goals (Marks et al., 2001).

Taskwork vs. Teamwork

Taskwork represents what teams are doing (interacting with tasks, tools, and technical systems), whereas teamwork describes how members work with each other to direct, align, and monitor taskwork.

Team Performance Episode

A distinguishable period of time over which team performance accrues and feedback is available, identifiable by goals and alternating rhythms of transition and action phases.

The Rhythm of Team Task Accomplishment

A temporal model showing how teams multitask across multiple simultaneous performance episodes, alternating between transition phases ($I \rightarrow P \rightarrow O$ evaluation and planning) and action phases ($I \rightarrow P \rightarrow O$ goal-directed execution).

Transition Phase Processes

Team processes occurring during periods set aside for evaluation and planning to guide goal achievement, specifically comprising mission analysis, goal specification, and strategy formulation and planning.

Mission Analysis

A transition process involving the interpretation and evaluation of the team's mission, identifying main tasks, operative environmental conditions, and available team resources through backward evaluation and forward visioning.

Goal Specification

A transition process involving the identification and prioritization of specific goals and subgoals for mission accomplishment.

Strategy Formulation and Planning

A transition process entailing the development of alternative courses of action, structured into deliberate planning (principal course of action), contingency planning (a priori alternatives), and reactive strategy adjustment (impromptu modifications during execution).

Action Phase Processes

Team processes occurring during periods when teams are actively engaged in acts contributing directly to goal accomplishment, comprising goal progress monitoring, systems monitoring, team monitoring and backup, and coordination.

Systems Monitoring

An action process tracking internal team resources (personnel, equipment, internal information) and environmental conditions (constituents, market trends, weather) to maintain situational awareness.

Team Monitoring and Backup

An action process involving the cognitive surveillance of teammates' actions for discrepancies, coupled with behavioral assistance through verbal feedback/coaching, behavioral assistance, or completing a teammate's task.

Coordination

An action process focused on orchestrating the sequence and timing of interdependent member activities through information exchange and mutual adjustment.

Interpersonal Processes

Processes that govern interpersonal relations and occur continuously through both transition and action phases to preserve the relational foundation of the team, comprising conflict management, motivating and confidence building, and affect management.

Preemptive vs. Reactive Conflict Management

Preemptive conflict management establishes conditions, norms, and procedures to prevent or guide disagreements before they occur, whereas reactive conflict management works through task, process, or interpersonal disputes after they emerge.

Affect Management

An interpersonal process of regulating members' emotional states during mission accomplishment, including fostering social cohesion, easing frustration, providing empathy, and calming stress.

Team Emergent States (TES)

Dynamic constructs characterizing properties of the team that originate in member cognitions, affect, and behaviors, amplify through interaction, and vary as a function of team context, inputs, processes, and outcomes.

Amalgams (in Team Emergent States)

Hybrid team emergent states identified by Rapp et al. (2021) that combine two or more distinct categories, such as cognitive/affective states (team identification) or cognitive/motivational states (team psychological empowerment).

Team Potency vs. Team Efficacy

Team potency is a motivational emergent state reflecting a team's broad, generalized belief in its effectiveness across all situations, whereas team efficacy reflects shared beliefs in the team's capability to execute a specific, bounded task.

Team Charter

A codified plan establishing how a team manages its teamwork, detailing member backgrounds, roles, timetables, communication norms, decision rules, and reward/sanction systems (Mathieu & Rapp, 2009).

Team Performance Strategy

A codified, deliberate plan formulated before task engagement detailing what the team intends to do regarding taskwork, specifying competitive positioning, goals, indicators to monitor, and contingency plans.

Team Foundations Trajectory Model (Mathieu et al., 2009)

The longitudinal growth model demonstrating that team charter quality drives midpoint performance ($\Gamma = 10.52$), performance strategy quality drives trajectory slopes ($\Gamma = 5.87$), and their interaction ($\Gamma = -3.87$) produces the highest sustained long-term performance.

Team Psychological Safety (TPS)

A shared belief held by team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, allowing members to express authenticity, ask questions, admit mistakes, and offer critique without fear of embarrassment or marginalization (Edmondson, 1999).

Four TPS-Fostering Processes (Fyhn et al., 2025)

The four interaction processes that dynamically build and sustain team psychological safety over time: Connecting (building personal relationships), Clarifying (establishing shared structure and boundaries), Supporting (mutual encouragement and empathy), and Performing (experiencing collective results and synergy).

Study 1 vs. Study 2 Methodological Comparison (Fyhn et al., 2025)

A comparative overview showing differences between short-term student project teams ($11\,\text{days}$, $35\,\text{participants}$, $3\,\text{processes}$) and long-term public administration teams ($9\,\text{months}$, $16\text{--}19\,\text{participants}$, $4\,\text{processes}$ including performing).

IMOI Model (Input-Mediator-Output-Input)

A team effectiveness framework (Ilgen et al., 2005) replacing linear I-P-O models by conceptualizing the middle stage as Mediators (encompassing cyclical processes and emergent states), integrating feedback loops ($O \rightarrow I$), and accounting for contextual moderators.

Functional Leadership Theory

A leadership approach positing that the leadership role is to do, or get done, whatever is not being adequately handled to satisfy critical team needs (McGrath, 1962), viewing the leader as an adaptive completer rather than an individual person.

Four Sources of Team Leadership Grid

A 2×2 taxonomy cross-classifying locus of leadership (internal vs. external) and formality of leadership (formal vs. informal), generating team leaders/project managers, sponsors/coaches, shared/emergent leaders, and mentors/champions (Morgeson et al., 2010).

Shared Leadership

A dynamic, emergent, and horizontal team phenomenon characterized by the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members rather than centralized in a single designated hierarchical authority.

Shared Leadership Integrated Framework

The meta-analytic model by Wu et al. (2020) linking internal team environment ($\rho = .50$) and team heterogeneity ($\rho = .11$) to shared leadership emergence, which predicts overall team consequences ($\rho = .39$) moderated by intragroup trust, interdependence, and network measurement.

Social Network Analysis vs. Aggregation in Shared Leadership

Measurement approaches for shared leadership where social network analysis captures specific peer-to-peer influence structures (yielding stronger outcome relationships, $\rho = .46$) compared to aggregated scale ratings that average team responses ($\rho = .35$).

Managing from the Boundary

A leadership strategy in self-managing teams where external leaders leverage their position at the team-organization interface by moving across boundaries to secure resources, buffer politics, and build external support (Druskat & Wheeler, 2003).

Boundary-Spanning Leadership Process Model

A sequential model depicting four boundary-spanning behavior clusters (Relating $\rightarrow$ Scouting $\rightarrow$ Persuading $\rightarrow$ Empowering) that external leaders execute across organization-focused and team-focused dimensions to drive team effectiveness.

Four Shared Leadership Configurations Typology

The latent profile taxonomy by Chamberlin et al. (2024) classifying teams into Collective ($61\%$), Distributed ($22\%$), Centralized ($4\%$), and Void ($13\%$) profiles based on leadership density, centralization, and centrality variance across task, social, and external roles.

Temporal Dispersion

The extent to which team members are distributed across different time zones, creating coordination challenges that are most effectively managed by prototypical collective shared leadership configurations.

Team Autonomy

The degree to which a team or individual task provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion in scheduling work and determining execution procedures (Hackman & Oldham, 1980).

Bureaucratic Pull vs. Autonomy Push

The organizational paradox where competitive pressures and knowledge work push organizations to grant employee discretion, while inherent bureaucratic imperatives for predictability and control pull management to retain oversight (Langfred & Rockmann, 2016).

Temporal Stability

A structural team characteristic denoting the degree to which a team expects to work together over an extended duration, affecting the establishment of norms, implicit coordination, and cohesion (Hollenbeck et al., 2012).

Skill Differentiation

The degree to which team members possess specialized, non-overlapping knowledge, training, or functional expertise that cannot be easily evaluated or substituted by teammates (Hollenbeck et al., 2012).

Authority Differentiation

The degree to which decision-making authority and leadership responsibilities are concentrated in a subset of team members rather than dispersed equally across all members (Hollenbeck et al., 2012).

Collective Efficacy

A group's shared belief in its conjoint capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to produce given levels of attainment on collective tasks (Bandura, 1997; Elms et al., 2023).

Intrateam Trust

The aggregate level of trust and willingness to be vulnerable that team members have regarding the competence, benevolence, and dependability of their fellow teammates (Langfred, 2004; De Jong et al., 2016).

Team Monitoring

An action process involving members' surveillance, awareness, and observation of teammates' activities to identify discrepancies and provide timely corrective feedback.

Autonomy-Monitoring-Trust Interaction Plots

Plots illustrating that high autonomy damages team performance when monitoring is low (slope $= -13.27$) or trust is high (slope $= -11.46$), demonstrating that high trust suppresses the monitoring necessary to prevent coordination loss under high autonomy (Langfred, 2004).

Cognition-Based vs. Affect-Based Trust

Cognition-based trust stems from rational assessments of teammates' competence, reliability, and integrity ($\beta = .24$), whereas affect-based trust stems from emotional ties, mutual care, and social bonds ($\beta = .15$) (De Jong et al., 2016).

Diversity

Differences between individuals on any attribute that may lead to the perception that another person is different from oneself (Van Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004).

Social Category Diversity vs. Informational Diversity

Social category diversity reflects explicit demographic characteristics (gender, age, ethnicity), whereas informational diversity reflects job-related attributes (education, functional discipline, organizational tenure).

Diversity Faultlines

Hypothetical dividing lines that split a group into distinct subgroups based on the alignment or convergence of multiple diversity attributes simultaneously (Lau & Murnighan, 1998).

Information Elaboration

The team process of exchanging, individually processing, feeding back, discussing, and integrating task-relevant information and diverse perspectives to enhance decision quality and innovation (Van Knippenberg et al., 2004).

Categorization-Elaboration Model (CEM) Diagram

The conceptual framework showing how diversity triggers both social categorization (leading via identity threat to adverse evaluative reactions) and information elaboration (moderated by task requirements, motivation, and ability to yield creativity and performance).

Comparative Fit

The extent to which observable differences between individuals align into clear, recognizable subgroups that maximize within-group similarity and between-group differences.

Normative Fit

The extent to which perceived categorization matches an individual's background knowledge, stereotypes, and subjective expectations of why group differences are meaningful in a context.

Cognitive Accessibility

The ease and automaticity with which a specific social categorization schema or social identity category is activated in a person's cognitive processing.

Identity Threat

A condition occurring when a subgroup's status, distinctive value, or self-worth is challenged or subordinated, triggering negative affective reactions and destructive intergroup bias.

Rater Bias in Diversity Evaluations

The phenomenon identified by Van Dijk et al. (2012) where external evaluators give biased subjective ratings against demographically diverse teams ($r = -.06$) and in favor of functional diversity ($r = .09$), an effect absent under objective performance measures ($r = -.01$ and $r = .02$).

Diversity Training

Instructional programs designed to facilitate positive intergroup interactions, diminish prejudice and discrimination, and build behavioral skills, knowledge, and motivation to interact with diverse others (Bezrukova et al., 2016).

Integrated vs. Standalone Diversity Training

Integrated training embeds diversity curricula into broader, ongoing organizational initiatives (yielding larger effects, $g = .57$), whereas standalone training delivers isolated, single-event programs ($g = .36$) (Bezrukova et al., 2016).

Diversity Mindset

A team member's mental representation of team diversity, containing goals for utilizing differences, procedural knowledge on how to elaborate diverse inputs, and an understanding of diversity's potential impact (Van Knippenberg et al., 2013).

Accuracy (in Diversity Mindsets)

The degree to which a diversity mindset's goals and procedural understanding correctly conceptualize diversity as an informational resource, defined by promotion focus, exploration focus, and team-specific procedural knowledge.

Sharedness vs. Awareness of Sharedness

Sharedness refers to the degree to which members hold congruent diversity mindsets, whereas awareness of sharedness is the explicit mutual realization that teammates hold matching mindsets, which fosters psychological safety to voice views.

Leading Diversity (LeaD) Model

A contingency framework by Homan et al. (2020) proposing that leaders must diagnose the team's dominant process and dynamically match person-focused leadership to intergroup bias and task-focused leadership to information elaboration.

Functional Matching in the LeaD Model

The strategic alignment where leaders apply person-focused leadership as a complementary match to address intergroup bias, and task-focused leadership as a supplementary match to provide structure and epistemic drive for ongoing information elaboration.

Leader Competencies in the LeaD Model

The three core competencies enabling effective diversity leadership: Cognitive Understanding (predicting dominant processes), Social Perceptiveness (diagnosing emergent dynamics), and Behavioral Flexibility (adapting actions to fit the diagnosed process).