The History of Teamwork’s Societal Diffusion

Abstract

In the literature, the notion of the ever-growing prevalence of teamwork is dominating. First, has there indeed been a steadily increasing trajectory of the societal diffusion of and academic research on teamwork? If so, what have the main drivers of this trajectory been? In this review, we apply a multi-method approach to examine these questions. Specifically, we combine the established bibliometric method of scholarly article counts with the innovative approach of culturomics that allows the content analysis of a literature corpus spanning millions of books, both popular and scholarly. The results show that although academic research on teamwork has grown constantly and has shown a sharp increase over the past 40 years, the societal diffusion of teamwork, as indicated through the culturomics approach, actually followed a volatile trend in the past century. Certain large-scale events and developments, such as war, may serve as an explanation for these changing trends.

Mapping 50 Years of Small Group Research Through Small Group Research

“…Our analysis of the content responsible for this growth lent insight into the 10 major communities within the SGR corpus and their relationships over time. Conveniently, our mapping of the four editorships closely mirrors transition periods identified by leading group scholars regarding early increases in the interdisciplinarity of group research (McGrath et al, 2000), greater use of groups in organizations and broader society (Weiss & Hoegl, 2015), and more contemporary shifts in complexity and multilevel design (Mathieu et al, 2017), which our analyses support. Overall, we believe our results inform three major takeaways regarding small group research.…”

“…Second, during this period we clearly see more integrated communication between clusters. This aligns with the increased consideration of groups as interdisciplinary phenomenon during this period (Weiss & Hoegl, 2015) and the increased understanding that similar inputs and mechanisms (such as composition and emergent states) span group settings (Mathieu et al, 2017). For example, work on conflict was drawn into work on group decision-making (Pendell, 1990; Wiiteman, 1991).…”

“…In 1990, Charles Garvin and Richard Kettner-Polley began the first editorship of the modern version of SGR , and the longest of any time period. Because of the length of this period and coinciding developments in the small group literature (Mathieu et al, 2017; Weiss & Hoegl, 2015) we focus on four major takeaways from it, supported by Figure 3 and Table 5.…”

A two‐sided medal: On the complexity of international comparative and collaborative team research

“…In a broad sense, it incorporates various activities such as the division of labour and integration of knowledge, service collaboration, transmission of know‐how, provision of access to research requirements, and bilateral stimulation and critique (Jeong, Choi, & Kim, ; Katz & Martin, ; Laudel, ; Lewis et al, ) . Collaborative research teams are defined as largely voluntary, substantially autonomous, self‐governed social entities or systems based on mutual interest of multiple individuals (that see themselves and are seen by others as a team) (Wang & Hicks, ; Weiss & Hoegl, ). They can vary from pretty fluid ad hoc teams with unstable memberships and ill‐defined boundaries to a more stable temporary organisation in the form of research projects based on shared goals (e.g., as part of a research proposal), project funding and more stable memberships (Wang & Hicks, ; López‐Yáñez & Altopiedi, ).…”

A multilevel review of stressor research in teams

“…More than a quarter century has passed since James Driskell and Eduardo Salas () 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, ). Likewise, a sizable and increasing body of research has started to investigate stressors—defined as “the events or properties of events (stimuli) that are encountered by individuals” (Cooper, Dewe, & O'Driscoll, , p. 14)—in the context of teams.…”