The Social‐psychological Aspects of Team Formation: New Avenues for Research

Abstract

The ubiquity of teams in the modern workplace cannot be denied, as Curseu, Kenis, and Raab (2009, p. 30) note, “team formation is a challenge in modern organizations as most of them use teams to perform a variety of organizational tasks.” How teams form is, therefore, a question of much practical interest. Research illustrates that stratified social systems influence the choice and decision‐making behaviors that shape group and team formation (Hechter, 1978). From a structural social psychological perspective (Sell & Kuipers, 2009; Lawler, Ridgeway, and Markovsky, 1993), teams are like microcosmic societies. They represent a process of social cohesion through interaction. Additionally, they can be organic, mechanical, homogeneous, and heterogeneous. In other words, teams are structural and cultural artifacts of societies. Members of society through interaction create these “social artifacts,” which may consist of hierarchically organizing sets of individuals into a group, or multiple groups, relative to power and status dimensions. In this paper, we aim to show how contributions from social psychology have informed research on team formation. Thus, two research questions guide this paper: What are the mechanisms of team formation via partner selection for self‐organizing teams? In what ways, can these studies advance scholarship focusing on the social psychology of inequality? To establish a foundation for understanding the various studies on team formation, we begin with a general overview on how team and team formation has been conceptualized. Next, we examine the social psychological research on team formation via partner selection. In doing so, we note the importance given to the 4 major mechanisms of team formation emerging from the literature: competence, homophily, familiarity, and affect. Lastly, we conclude the paper with a discussion addressing the research questions guiding this paper and suggest opportunities for social psychologists to consider for future team formation studies.

Team Formation Using a Systems Thinking Approach

“…There are two clearly differentiated interpretations of trans‐disciplinary teams: (i) teams whose members integrate to work jointly and develop a ‘shared conceptual framework that synthesizes and extends discipline‐specific knowledge, creating new models and language to address a common research problem’ (Norris et al, ); and (ii) teams requiring the inclusion of ‘non‐traditional research partners, taking it to be a collaborative process of knowledge production that involves multiple disciplines plus stakeholders from other sectors of society, benefiting from multiple sources of knowledge and ways of knowing’ (Brown, ). Skvoretz and Bailey () and Bailey and Skvoretz () focused on mechanisms that have been used to determine team constitution or formation, like competence , homophily , familiarity and affection of team members. This psychology‐oriented study describes the nature of such mechanisms and how they drive the whole process of team formation, finding valuable facts like the tendency of people to form teams with people they know (by familiarity), with similar profiles (by homophily), with established teammates that cohere as a team (by competence).…”

The Role of Shared Leadership in Managing Conflicts in Multigenerational Teams: A Research Framework

“…Much work in organisations today is structured around teams (Bailey & Skvoretz, 2017; Burton et al, 2019; Gupta et al, 2010; Tamunomiebi & Uhuru, 2018). Even though organisations in the past had also witnessed multiple generations working at the same time, hierarchy, bureaucratic structure and job descriptions separated them and did not allow for multiple generations working together in teams (Gursoy et al, 2008; Stanley, 2010).…”

gruepr: An Open Source Program for Creating Student Project Teams

“…The order of the ID numbers within the array determines, in conjunction with the chosen team sizes, which students are on which team. For example, if gruepr is partitioning ten students into three teams with team sizes of three, three, and four students, then the array [3,9,0,4,5,1,8,7,6,2] would represent that the first team consists of the students with ID numbers 3, 9, and 0; the second team consists of the students with ID numbers 4, 5, and 1; and the third team consists of the students with ID numbers 8, 7, 6, and 2.…”

“…There is significant redundancy in this permutation-of-teammate-ID method of encoding the genome. For example, the array [1,5,4,0,3,9,2,7,8,6] is a different genome from the previous example, but it represents an identical partitioning of students into teams, since the order of the teams and the order of the students within a team does not matter. This redundancy suggests a future means to improve the genetic algorithm's efficiency.…”

“…At the core of this pedagogy is the creation of effective teams to exploit the benefits of peer-topeer interaction and instruction. Team formation is a complex task that has been extensively studied in psychology [4], management [5], and related fields [6]. In these studies, several characteristics including prior knowledge, student's skills, motivation, competence, homophily [4], diversity, familiarity with other students, personality, and scheduling, have been suggested to significantly influence the effectiveness of the team and its members.…”