Group Accountability: A Review and Extension of Existing Research

Abstract

The group accountability literature over the past two decades is reviewed in this article. Results are organized according to the theoretical accountability framework proposed by London, Smither, and Adsit (1997). The reviewed literature suggests that group accountability is more dynamic than current conceptualizations allow, and that the priority of accountability demands shifts over time. Building on these insights, the authors extend London et al.’s model to accommodate group accountability as a dynamic interpersonal process. Specifically, they propose that group accountability is an emergent state that derives from group interactions as well as from external sources of accountability expectations. In this extended model, both the person within the group who is held accountable as well as other group members play key roles in transforming individual accountability up to the group level. Based on the combined results of the empirical review and expanded conceptual model, the authors identify directions for studies of group accountability.

Keywords

accountability dynamics group performance role adaptation

This study reviews accountability at the group level. According to Hall, Zinko, Perryman, and Ferris (2009), there is “perhaps no more foundational element of organizations than accountability,” as without it, “individuals would be able to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. The result would be chaos and the breakdown of organizations” (p. 381). By group, we mean a collective of individuals brought together to perform organizational tasks and whose workflow is characterized by interdependency (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003). As such, we view the term group as being interchangeable with team. Definitions of group accountability build on those of individual accountability (e.g., Ferris, Mitchell, Canavan, Frink, & Hopper, 1995; Frink & Klimoski, 1998; Hall, Blass, Ferris, & Massengale, 2004; Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). Here we define group accountability as the implicit or explicit expectation that a group’s collective actions will be justified to, and evaluated by, an external audience with the ability to mete out consequences. As such, group accountability is rooted in group members’ expectations that they will be held accountable as a unit, and can be described as a state in which group members collectively feel accountable for team behaviors and performance (e.g., De Cremer & van Dijk, 2009; Gardner, 2012; Liu & McLeod, 2014; Valentine & Edmondson, 2015). This view of group accountability closely parallels Wallace, Johnson, Mathe, and Paul’s (2011) definition of group accountability as a “collective expectation” that behaviors and decisions will be “subject to evaluation and justification by a salient organizational agent” (p. 843).

The literature reflects the pervasiveness of accountability in organizational life, with accountability studies having been conducted in the fields of human-resource management (e.g., Ferris et al., 1995), management (e.g., Hales, 2005), and public administration (e.g., Mulgan, 2000). However, the existing body of research is less clear about the conditions under which accountability may be beneficial or harmful to collectives. On one hand, scholars have shown that group accountability benefits groups by optimizing resources, improving performance by limiting self-interested behavior (Mackinger & Jonas, 2012), increasing individuals’ motivation to acquire and process information (Liu & McLeod, 2014), and triggering group members’ displays of socially responsible behaviors (De Cremer & van Dijk, 2009). On the other hand, groups by their interdependent nature may obscure the link between accountability behaviors and outcomes. For example, individual actions by group members who are not actually held accountable individually may result in accountable actions at the group level (Frink & Klimoski, 2004). Moreover, it is well documented that individuals may exert less effort when they work in a group. When individual members of a collective juggle multiple tasks, it can distract their attention from thinking critically or permit a reduction in individual effort within the group setting (Karau & Williams, 1993; Latané, Williams, & Harkins, 1979; Williams, Nida, Baca, & Latane, 1989).

As such, group accountability acts as a double-edged sword that produces positive and negative effects in tandem. Effective management of accountability therefore implies a fine balance between its benefits and challenges. How to encourage positive accountability outcomes while curbing adverse consequences remains an unanswered question in the accountability literature (Hall, Frink, & Buckley, 2015). Negative implications of accountability at the individual level that we expect are also applicable to groups including feelings that excessive monitoring is intrusive (Ferris et al., 1995), declines in intrinsic motivation (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999), and counterproductive behaviors (Ferris et al., 1995). Group accountabilities may also create serious differences of opinion across group members (Brown, 1999) or narrow their work scope in times of uncertainty or threat (Staw & Boettger, 1990). However, when focal tasks are vague, accountability may facilitate making of collective agreements (Cronin & Reicher, 2006) and improve group members’ bonds and willingness to help each other (Valentine & Edmondson, 2015). Systematically reviewing accountability at the group level should help clarify how to capitalize on accountability gains while limiting disturbances to group dynamics.

The phenomenon of group accountability is also worthy of further investigation in its own right: in particular, how sets of expectations and demands operate in forging group members’ accountability perceptions. A recent review of individual-level accountability research points out that the downward influence of supervisors on group members is the primary focus of the relatively small number of studies involving groups and that few studies touch upon the influence of peers within the collective (Hall et al., 2015). Given that accountability consists of an expectation of being evaluated by others, individuals must process information about and form judgments on the linkage between group accountability and outcomes (Schlenker, Britt, Pennington, Murphy, & Doherty, 1994). Group provides an ideal ground to explore these influences on the emergence of group accountability.

To appraise and extend current group accountability research, we systematically searched the literature for empirical studies of group accountability published during the previous 20 years. We then organized the results according to the accountability framework proposed by London, Smither, and Adsit (1997). The results of this review made it apparent that accountability within a group is not static: Demands on members change over time, as do members’ responses to these demands, including their role perceptions and coordination patterns. We therefore extended London and colleagues’ (1997) accountability framework to enable it to address these dynamic qualities. In particular, we introduce role-boundary adaptation, a process whereby group members adjust their roles based on the perceptions they form during social interactions. We argue that interactions among group members form within-group connections, and that these connections in turn shape the initial role of group members. This more dynamic framework should help to elucidate the processes by which group members manage accountability demands.

Review Method and Framework

To ensure an inclusive review process, we searched the literature from the period 1995 through 2015 that was published in any of the 28 influential management journals listed by Podsakoff, Mackenzie, Bachrach, and Podsakoff (2005). We conducted electronic and manual searches within the listed journals for the terms accountability, accountable, and account. To allay our concern that strictly adhering to a single list of publications would exclude relevant empirical work, we conducted a secondary search within specialist outlets in organizational psychology, social psychology, human resources, and group dynamics. We further relaxed our date restrictions to facilitate the inclusion of several relevant and important empirical papers that predated 1995.

We narrowed our preliminary results to include only those articles that met one or more of the following criteria. First, a study had to explicitly examine accountability in a group setting. We included articles whose authors defined group accountability as a shared property across group members, as well as those that examined situations in which one person is held accountable for the overall group outcome. However, we ruled out investigations that focused solely on the individual level, as they have been exhaustively reviewed elsewhere (e.g., Hall et al., 2015; Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). Second, we included studies of leaders and managers being held accountable for group tasks. Third, we included studies of perceptions of accountability at the organizational level, as they contained vital information on how large collectives react to the various entities that hold them accountable, which in turn might identify parallel patterns of relationships at the small group level. For instance, the ways that organizations respond to multiple stakeholders and conflicting goals may illuminate how smaller groups react when facing conflicting demands from individual members, factions of members, or external accountability monitors such as supervisors, senior management, customers, or the public.

This process yielded 44 articles that concentrate on explaining group accountability. We opted to use London and colleagues’ (1997) preexisting accountability framework to organize our empirical findings because we felt that it was especially suited to thinking about accountability for performance feedback processes and outcomes. This framework consists of four building blocks: the objective for which an actor is held accountable, the attributes of the actor, the sources that impose accountability on the actor, and forces and mechanisms (or reasons) an actor feels accountable. As such, the framework comprehensively considers this multiple facets of the phenomenon and goes beyond who is accountable, for what, and to whom, to consider the reasons why actors might feel accountable. Moreover, the framework is flexible enough to accommodate future directions in accountability research at different levels of enquiry. Figure 1 shows how the results of our empirical review of fit into this conceptual model of accountability. For convenience, accountability in the remainder of this article refers to group accountability unless stated otherwise.

Figure 1.

Organizing framework for group accountability research.

Current State of Research on Group Accountability

Outcomes of Group Accountability

This literature review uncovered a wide variety of outcomes linked to accountability. When a group is held collectively accountable for the quality of its decision-making processes, its members are more motivated to focus on shared outcomes, to cooperate, to systematically exchange more information, and to produce more task solutions than they would be if accountability were implemented at the individual level (Liu & McLeod, 2014). Accountability improves task performance (e.g., sales in Mero, Guidice, & Werner, 2014) and promotes coordinating behaviors, such as team adaptation (Pinter et al., 2007; Unger-Aviram & Erez, 2016; van Kleef, Steinel, van Knippenberg, Hogg, & Svensson, 2007), communication with out-group members (van Kleef et al., 2007), and usage of information known by group members (Scholten, van Knippenberg, Nijstad, & De Dreu, 2007). However, accountability regimes can also inadvertently prompt groups to engage in unintentional counterproductive behaviors due to performance pressure. Studies also uncovered the potential of accountability to trigger an obsessive focus on finding common ground within the team (Gardner, 2012) or for holding overly long discussions aimed at reaching consensus (Liu & McLeod, 2014). Although London et al. (1997) noted that accountability can itself be the emergent outcome of accountability processes, this idea has rarely been tested empirically. We next review the mechanics of group accountability before exploring the gaps in the group accountability literature.

Objectives

Clear objectives help a group understand others’ expectations regarding its collective actions and make the group more likely to focus its attention on meeting such expectations. Examples of clear accountability objectives include those presented in experimental manipulations of expectations to account to an external audience for performance or quality of decision-making processes (e.g., Liu & McLeod, 2014; Scholten et al., 2007) as well as performance metrics in various fields, such as reaching sales targets for a restaurant (Wallace et al., 2011), or maintaining health and safety standards in hotel management and catering (Hales, 2005).

Accountability objectives in the real world are often more open to interpretation than clear-cut goals. Interestingly, objectives that are ambiguous or complex have been found to promote group members’ communication about their tasks and to encourage them to work to understand their roles. Innovation (Criscuolo, Salter, & Ter Wal, 2014; Mero et al., 2014) and the prevention of casualties (Cronin & Reicher, 2006, 2009; Valentine & Edmondson, 2015) are examples of ambiguous or complex objectives. For professional service providers such as consultancy companies (Gardner, 2012), the typical collective accountability objective is to accomplish a complicated task to a high standard that requires expertise and the sharing of knowledge. Scholars have also deemed objectives to be ambiguous if they require accountable actors’ handling of nonroutine tasks and unexpected accidents (Jensen, 2006; Morris & Moore, 2000; Naquin & Kurtzberg, 2004), threats to legitimacy (Arthaud-Day, Certo, Dalton, & Dalton, 2006), or the managing of concerns expressed by external stakeholders and the public (Cornelissen, 2012; Cronin & Reicher, 2006; Jensen & Roy, 2008).

Actors

In London and colleagues’ (1997) framework, the concept of the actor is bound up with individuals’ sensitivity to accountability forces, as well as the influence of such forces on their subsequent accountability behaviors. In our review framework, we use the term actors to refer to those individuals or the group who expect to account for group tasks. In theory, fulfilling accountability objectives leads actors to enact their role responsibilities and commitments. Although this seems to suggest that accountability and role are closely related, specifying role responsibilities for each member is only a part of forming shared accountability expectations. Group accountability expectations depend on much more than objectives and role assignments, no matter how clearly formulated. Relational and socializing views of organizational and professional accountability dynamics (e.g., Johansen, 2008; Painter-Morland, 2011; Robinson, 2009) posit that accountability goes beyond contractual thinking regarding liability for objectives and attributability for role assignments. Collective accountability depends in large part on personal awareness and integrity, mutual dialogue, in-person interactions, and responsiveness to stakeholders and the social context.

The literature we reviewed indicates that actors vary considerably in how much they exert themselves to fulfill their roles. The perception of information sufficiency influences actors’ willingness to acquire the information needed to complete their tasks (Scholten et al., 2007). In other words, when an actor feels he or she lacks sufficient information to make an important task decision correctly, he or she tries harder to uncover information that has not been shared with him or her. However, when only one individual is held accountable for the group’s decisions, the actor may spend more time seeking consensus about what information will be exchanged, and less time in sharing unique information (Liu & McLeod, 2014).

The influence of accountability on the actor also depends on the process by which groups diagnose their problems, discuss counterfactual scenarios, and consider what group accountability means for them, before reacting accordingly (Cornelissen, 2012; Newheiser, Sawaoka, & Dovidio, 2012; Pereira, Berent, Falomir-Pichastor, Staerklé, & Butera, 2014; Roberts, 2001; Tetlock, 2000; Wildschut, Van Horen, & Hart, 2015). This process is especially intensive when the accountability objective cannot be fully comprehended. Research on individual responses to organizational accountability requirements sheds some light on how group members react to group accountability through retrospective sense making. For example, Morris and Moore (2000) studied how pilots responded to organizational accountability requirements in near-accident simulations, and found that these personnel were more likely to make sense of negative team feedback if they thought they were being monitored by authority figures. Although this study was about individual responses to collective accountability demands, we expect that group members are also likely to compare themselves to others in the group, and to estimate the impact of negative team feedback on their identities as competent professionals and as teammates, through processes of retrospective self-validation.

Like individuals, groups want to maintain a positive identity and desire positive evaluations from others so they can strategically choose how to respond to accountability demands (Cronin & Reicher, 2009; De Cremer, Snyder, & Dewitte, 2001; Hoffman & Ocasio, 2001; Roberts, 2001; Smith, Terry, & Hogg, 2007; van Kleef et al., 2007). Our literature review indicates that accountability demands depend on the phase of the group task which further helps groups prioritize strategic behaviors. For example, Cronin and Reicher (2006) found that despite facing public pressures, police officers managing events with large crowds were initially focused on gaining acceptance and being positively evaluated as group members of the police force. Therefore, they initially paid more attention to peer-originated accountability demands than to external stakeholder–originated accountability expectations but switched their focus from internal to external accountability expectation as crowd event developed.

Sources

Sources of accountability are whatever entities, rules, and processes hold the actor responsible. Conceptually, accountability sources may be formal and external (e.g., group supervisors, task regulations, professional codes), or internal or self-imposed. Nevertheless, our review finds that empirical studies mostly conceive of accountability as being externally imposed. For example, studies examine the effects of supervisors or managers imposing accountability downward on the collective (Brown, 1999; Mero et al., 2014; Staw & Boettger, 1990), the use of supporting organizational structures (Valentine & Edmondson, 2015), and formal expectations of accounting to fellow group members and other work peers (De Cremer et al., 2001; De Cremer & van Dijk, 2009; Liu & McLeod, 2014; Newheiser et al., 2012; Paolini, Crisp, & McIntyre, 2009; Smith et al., 2007; Unger-Aviram & Erez, 2016; Wildschut et al., 2015). Sources of group accountability can also include the expectations of stakeholders (Castilla, 2015; Herzlinger, 2006) and the general public (Cronin & Reicher, 2006, 2009; van Kleef et al., 2007).

Forces

The fourth essential component of group accountability relates to why an actor actually feels accountable in a particular accountability context. Given that accountability is, by definition, a process of being evaluated by external audiences, it is not surprising that the reviewed articles tend to regard the reasons people feel accountable as externally induced (Goold & Campbell, 2002; Hales, 2005), either through normative pressures (Pereira et al., 2014; Wildschut et al., 2015) or performance pressures (e.g., Arthaud-Day et al., 2006; Cronin & Reicher, 2006, 2009; De Cremer et al., 2001; Goold & Campbell, 2002; Liu & McLeod, 2014; Paolini et al., 2009; Pinter et al., 2007; Smith et al., 2007; Unger-Aviram & Erez, 2016; van Kleef et al., 2007). Even in studies that ascribed groups’ accountability to their need for recognition, this internal force tended to fade away when new dilemmas appeared (e.g., Cronin & Reicher, 2006). However, scholars have seldom explored why people feel internally accountable through self-control, motivation to achieve, or their desire to be affiliated with other group members.

Discussion

Existing research strongly supports the idea that accountability is externally imposed and induced, but largely ignores the question of how a group’s management of complex accountability demands nests within its understandings of accountability objectives and its collective capacity to complete its tasks. The literature thus implies that the underlying interactions within groups are crucial to a full understanding of how groups choose their behaviors. Based on this insight, we identify several areas that warrant careful treatment. These areas of warning include (a) shifting conceptualizations and definitions of accountability at the level of the group, (b) a narrow focus on external accountability forces, and (c) a tendency to view group accountability as static rather than dynamic.

Even when group accountability is the target of enquiry, it is often operationalized at a different level, for example, through individual reports with individual accountability as the scale referent (for exceptions, see White, Currie, & Lockett, 2014). Among the relatively few studies that have targeted group accountability specifically, most have been designed to manipulate individual rather than collective accountability expectations (e.g., Brtek & Motowidlo, 2002; De Cremer, 2003; De Dreu & van Knippenberg, 2005; de Langhe, van Osselaer, & Wieranga, 2011; Mero, Guidice, & Brownlee, 2007; Pinter et al., 2007; Pitesa & Thau, 2013; Quinn & Schlenker, 2002; Sedikides, Herbst, Hardin, & Dardis, 2002). However, even in an apparently simple situation where an individual is held accountable by a group, the relationship between individual contributions and accountability responses depends on the individual’s perception of the other group members’ expectations. As such, merely summing individuals’ accountability views within a team may fail as an indicator of group accountability, as it may not adequately explain shared perceptions. Rather, we may want to consider the nature of accountability in terms of not only the individuals within a group who are held accountable but also the reactions from the rest of the groups to which they belong. For instance, under what condition would nonaccountable individuals shift their assigned responsibilities, and start to feel accountable to the collective? Focusing on the whole group may uncover ways to foster the positive influences of accountability in groups. For instance, peers may adapt their role as a task developed, starting to hold each other accountable (e.g., Valentine & Edmondson, 2015), while avoiding the motivational slumps, anxiety, and resentment that can be trigged by excessive external accountability pressures on individuals (Brehm, 1966; Frink & Klimoski, 1998; Hall et al., 2006).

We also note that the reviewed literature emphasizes normative accountability pressures driven by external audiences. This observation is consistent with Royle, Hochwarter, and Hall’s (2008) finding that the preponderance of empirical accountability research has treated the phenomenon as an objective, external condition. External conditions certainly help shape such perceptions, but it is noteworthy that how they are interpreted, responded to, and acted upon are matters largely internal to the group. For example, when the expectations of a group task are ambiguous, collectives propose new internal processes in response to the external force (e.g., Castilla, 2015). The question of how group members become internally motivated in response to externally imposed group-accountability requirements is therefore an important area for clarification and extension.

In addition to concerns about shifting conceptualizations of group accountability, measurement inconsistencies, and a narrow focus on external controls, the multicomponent nature of group accountability means each individual’s web of expectations can be hard to decipher. Some theoretical work suggests that accountability can also be conceptualized as a network of social relations between actor and stakeholders (Bovens, 2010; Dubnick, 2005; Gelfand, Lim, & Raver, 2004), but this idea remains underexplored empirically. Group members often approach a range of accountability demands and select just one to which they will actually respond (Cronin & Reicher, 2006, 2009), which suggests that other forces, such as the expectations of fellow group members, may induce or impede the emergence of collective accountability.

Although the empirical research we reviewed advances scholarly understanding of group accountability, several areas deserve increased attention. As noted previously, the conceptualization and measurement of group accountability are often inconsistent and the majority of the reviewed literature presumes that accountability operates through the expectation of being evaluated by nongroup authority figures, and neglects the relevance of within-group dynamics. We also identified a lack of attention to the finer details of how a group can derive its own sense of accountability from internal relationship dynamics and to the role of embeddedness in accountability networks. In other words, neither the conditions under nor the means by which a group itself becomes a source of accountability are fully understood. The question of whom to hold accountable for group outcomes may engender a sense of internal values (Mulgan, 2000), in which light the social relationships between group members could become a critical source of internally derived accountability. Based on the literature reviewed, we suggest paying deeper attention to how and to what degree groups develop a sense of collective accountability via internal relationships.

Expanding the Existing Accountability Framework

To address the limitations of existing group accountability research that our review brought to light, we propose that shared group accountability perceptions should be treated as a product of group members’ interactions. This conceptualization of group accountability as a dynamic system of relationships that evolves through within-group social interactions is depicted as an Expanded Model of Group Accountability in Figure 2. As such, we suggest that group accountability is the emergent shared sense of anticipation and responsibility that results from interactions between the individuals accountable for group actions and the remaining group members. In cases where accountability is formally assigned to the collective, we expect to observe a similar developmental process. Even when accountability is assigned to a group as a whole, that group is still likely to initially delegate certain tasks to members according to their particular expertise.

Figure 2.

Expanded model of group accountability.

Three assumptions underlie our extended framework. First, we assume that the nature of today’s group work is complex, that success requires each group’s collective contributions (Brown, 1999; Long-Lingo & O’Mahony, 2010; Wageman, Gardner, & Mortensen, 2012), and that due to the inherently dynamic nature of tasks, initial accountability assignments may not remain constant. Second, we regard group accountability as an evolving shared perception, and actors and the rest of their teams as mutually reinforcing it. Third, we assume that group tasks create a shared context for group members, which includes some initial set of accountability objectives and allows time to reflect on whether the objectives are likely to be achieved.

In taking this iterative view of group accountability, our framework extends existing accountability research in several ways. First, the contemporary workplace often requires group members to define and self-manage their tasks. An iterative view of accountability enables insights into how accountability evolves as group members develop opinions on their roles within the task, and how these roles are associated with one another (Grant & Hofmann, 2011; Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; Staw & Boettger, 1990). As Wageman et al. (2012) write,

a team member’s choices of what to do and how closely to work with others on the team may . . . reflect a personal reluctance to work toward a collective goal that is not in line with his or her own priorities. (p. 307)

Second, our model provides a more dynamic view of group accountability by viewing it as a product of the actors’ efforts to balance the various pressures arising from the focal task and from their in-group peers’ gradually changing levels and types of involvement. Third, our approach implies that group accountability derives from social processes within groups. This perspective could provide new explanations of how the positive influences of accountability arise, an area that is currently underexplored (Hall et al., 2015). In sum, our extended framework could be a means of shifting the understanding of the nature of group accountability from an external imposition toward a more intrinsic and organic form.

Actors’ Responses to Accountability Objectives

Accountability objectives and sources serve as parallel functions as in the baseline model, but in our expanded model, we explicitly situate the accountability actor within the group context. Being held answerable for group performance and decisions encourages individual team members and collectives to consider where to focus efforts. Per Figure 3, our review of existing research identified two underlying accountability dimensions that shape actors’ behaviors: clarity of accountability objective and accountability and perceived time pressure.

Figure 3.

Group accountability responses matrix.

The first spectrum relates to the clarity of task objectives, and it influences the degree to which groups fully understand their focal tasks. A clearly defined objective—such as achieving sales figures—is concrete for the group. A less clear objective, such as asking the group to resolve a conflict or innovate, may lead to group uncertainty about how to best respond. The clearer the objective, the easier it is for a group to focus on delivering it. The second spectrum is time pressure to act, which reflects the temporal aspect of the focal task accountability objective. Groups may face an immediate demand (e.g., task completion or achieving a particular sales figure), or a distant, longer term demand, which places a stronger emphasis on collective outcomes such as learning and innovation. Drawing on these two dimensions of accountability objectives, we anticipate there are three potential ways in which actors respond to accountability.

In a situation where a group operates under time pressure and expects to be accountable for a clear task outcome, we propose the group will adopt an upwardly focused strategy. A clear link between group behavior and outcomes induces group members to contribute to the best of their ability, to avoid social loafing and group-think (Kroon, Van Kreveld, & Rabbie, 1992), and to reduce their self-serving biases (Mackinger & Jonas, 2012; Sedikides et al., 2002). On the other end of the spectrum are situations where groups are answerable for more distant and unclear group-level outcomes, such as managing the impact of accidents and crises, refreshing workflow, or designing new processes. In such cases, actors may adopt a mapping strategy, leading group members to gather information that might help them unravel how to achieve the goal. The lack of task clarity may reduce group performance, because the group is more likely to engage in image-protecting behaviors (e.g., Hoffman & Ocasio, 2001; van Kleef et al., 2007), and accountability requirements themselves may also lead to pressures that negatively affect performance (e.g., Gardner, 2012).

When a group is accountable for either an unclear short-term or a clear long-term objective, we expect actors to reorient the group toward a coordination strategy that aims to align contributions across group members. This is because both unclear short-term and clear long-term accountability objectives lead to an ambiguous relationship between action and outcome, thus requiring groups to manage distributed inputs from members. For a group to perform well in a scenario where they are accountable for unclear short-term outcomes, the question of how to align distributed expertise within the group can be puzzling. Achievement of a clear long-term objective also requires actors to coordinate. Distance from the accountability task’s completion-date diminishes the perceived connection between task and effort, because people tend to apply more effort toward immediate objectives and less toward future ones (Trope & Liberman, 2000).

In response to an ambiguous goal, an actor can facilitate group coordination by informally dividing the group into multiple smaller subsets, allowing the negotiation of different perspectives across group members (Carlile, 2004) and temporarily helping create conditions for other opportunities such as career progression (Bechky, 2006). We expect that such subgrouping could also create opportunities for individuals to learn from each other’s expertise, experiences, and needs, and to develop a mutual awareness of the collective.

Peers’ Role-Boundary Adaptation

More deeply considering within-group responses to accountability also entails examining peers’ role responsibilities. Peers’ initial role perception is based on accountability objectives and group members’ specialized roles in the task. This forms expectations regarding each member’s contributions to the task. In complex tasks, members’ task roles cannot all be specified in advance, and accomplishing complex tasks thus often requires group members who were not initially held answerable for group work to make contributions beyond the scope of their original roles, especially when the task objective is ambiguous. We refer to the shifting of role responsibilities as role-boundary adaptation. Positive discretionary behaviors such as offering to help teammates or participating in the leadership of the unit are of considerable value, and group members are more likely to engage in such extra-role behaviors when they perceive that they are being treated justly (Coyle-Shapiro, Kessler, & Purcell, 2004; Kamdar, McAllister, & Turban, 2006; Morrison, 1994).

We propose that when tasks cannot be fully defined, group members’ roles are not static but shift naturally. For instance, when initial accountability objectives are ambiguous vis-a-vis individuals’ roles or task responsibilities, there is scope for group members to reinterpret their roles flexibly. Conversely, it should be expected that a clear, unambiguous link between individual efforts and expected outcomes may depress collective goodwill and reduce the value assigned to collective payoffs (De Cremer & van Dijk, 2002). In other words, if group members view accountability at the group level rather than at the individual level, it should encourage broader role-making as opposed to narrow role-taking (Frink et al., 2008).

Role-boundary adaptation occurs when actors establish connections with their fellow group members in pursuit of task completion. As a given task evolves and unfolds, it provides opportunities for these nonactor group members to redefine their roles. Groups are more likely to understand their tasks well when actors and other group members freely exchange information, including their respective ideas about the meaning of group accountability. Moreover, even if the task itself does not change, expectations of what is at stake might. For example, in managing riots, police officers face contradictory objectives imposed by internal accountability demands (e.g., concerns the safety of police officers) and external ones (e.g., concerns about public safety; Cronin & Reicher, 2006, 2009). As crowd events unfold, police officers shift their response strategy from preventing injuries among their fellow officers, to the prevention of injuries among the general public. Alternatively, a group may call on its membership to shift between roles to make more efficient use of available resources (Hales, 2005). At different stages, individuals may be expected to alter their contributions to address changes in the task. Research on teams also provides some insights: For instance, groups’ collective responses to unexpected events require their members to engage in bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005) or plug-and-play teaming (Faraj & Xiao, 2006). Bechky and Okhuysen (2011) found that SWAT teams and film crews could readily shift both their roles and their task structures in response to task changes because of their shared task knowledge.

Group members may also change their views of their roles due to affect. Within-group interactions both give rise to emotions and transmit them between and among actors and other group members. Emotional reactions can affect the level of meaning assigned by individuals to role-boundary changes. For instance, experiencing positive emotions builds commitment to the tasks at hand, whereas experiencing negative ones weakens commitment, making role boundaries more permeable (Ashforth, Kreiner, & Fugate, 2000). Emotion may trigger a particular response strategy (Forgas, 1995), but this process is a two-way street. For example, when group members are proactive in accomplishing their task, they may feel more in control and therefore more confident, whereas a passive strategy might create the opposite experience. Emotion reflects the quality of relationships. For example, research in groups found that when teams report feeling good about working together to overcome their challenges, this often indicates that they are a close team (Metiu & Rothbard, 2013). Conversely, when group members experience negative emotions—for example, when they receive feedback that they are underperforming—it often indicates that their relationships are strained, and that actors and other group members will be more likely to behave confrontationally and/or maintain or reduce their role boundaries. In addition, group members’ involvement in a task may provide them with more accurate information about its actual nature, and the more deeply engaged in the task they become, the more likely they are to experience it as meaningful (Grant & Ashford, 2008; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). As such, people are more likely to feel accountable as they become more willing to extend their roles to encompass more of the task.

The stickiness of initial role boundaries may depend on group members’ prior relationships. The closer and longer the relationship between group members is, the more inclined they will be to expand their role boundaries, whereas a short relationship history is more likely to lead their role boundaries to shrink (Grant & Hofmann, 2011). Similarly, research on social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) and social categorization (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) suggests that psychological attachment to subgroups may result in uncooperative behavior toward out-group members. If group members view themselves as being in a different subgroup from an actor, they are less likely to process the actor’s messages rationally or to accept them—further accentuating the differences between subgroups that already exist (van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008). In this sense, the transfer of meaning may proceed more smoothly when all group members (including actors) identify themselves as a single group.

In sum, role-boundary adaptation occurs when tasks evolve and when group-level accountability is assigned. The ability to make use of members’ skills and knowledge is essential in group settings, but role-boundary adaptation transforms their involvement in the task during different phases of its execution. Role-boundary adaptation may be most helpful when tasks are so ambiguous that they cannot be fully comprehended in the first instance.

Group Accountability and Task Outcome

There are three variants of the locus of team accountability: (a) actors only, (b) actors and some peers, and (e) all individuals on the team. In an actors-only accountability situation, where actors are held accountable for the whole team, research has identified strong causal links between actors’ accountability behavior and team outcomes. Tasks require connecting group members’ consequences to team ones: for example, by establishing expectations regarding contribution and evaluation at the team level, providing team-level performance feedback, or rewarding or punishing members based on team-performance indicators, without either evaluating individual behaviors or linking them to team consequences. However, such an approach leaves group members’ contributions unspecified. As a result, this type of group accountability is more likely to be positively linked to performance when the team faces routine tasks in which members’ roles fall within group norms and have little variation.

In its second and third variants, group accountability is augmented by nonactors’ self-accountability. This increases the need for identifiability of individual contributions to the team. When some members expand their role boundaries and make themselves jointly accountable for the task, individual responsibility is partitioned from team accountability, opening up a space in which an individual team member can reflect on how his or her individual contributions have supported or undermined the collective. As the locus of accountability shifts from some group members to all of them, individual accountability increases, due to tightening of the link between individual behaviors and consequences. However, we expect this link between individual behavior and consequences to be on the cognitive level only: that is, that group members will have a shared understanding of the implications of the task, and of how individuals’ contributions may enhance the task outcome. We also expect that as the number of group members who have self-selected for task accountability increases, more effort will be exerted in pursuit of the task, and the better the actors’ views of the task will correspond to the views of other group members.

Our conceptualization of group accountability differs from prevailing theorizations primarily in its focus on adaptation. Traditionally, accountability comprises a tightening of the link between the visibility of individual contributions and performance expectations. Yet, if taken to an extreme, highlighting individuals’ roles within a team could backfire, by detracting from joint task commitment. For instance, a perception that their organization and/or clients are fixated on accountability might provoke performance anxiety in team members and lead to team tension and conflict, thus decreasing motivation, increasing resentments that arise from perceptions of being overly controlled (Brehm, 1966), and promoting the use of unhelpful influence tactics (Ferris et al., 1997). An adaptation perspective on accountability, on the other hand, fosters opportunities to learn and make sense of the task, one’s role within it, and one’s relationships with other relevant parties. Even when tasks are clearly defined, individuals may have flexibility in the way that they interpret and perform their role (Cohen, 2013). In addition to fulfilling basic human needs for meaning and connectedness with others (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), role adaptation can result simply from the need to accomplish one’s work, and/or from efforts to make sense of one’s own task and its role in the wider group task.

Implications for Future Research on Group Accountability

Our synthesis of two decades’ worth of relevant empirical literature indicates that group-level accountability is both more dynamic and more internally induced than current conceptualizations allow. Taken together, empirical studies of group accountabilities published between 1995 and 2015 suggest that the phenomenon emerges not only from explicit, formal, or external forces but also develops from within. In particular, the emergence and the specific properties of group accountability depend in large part on social processes among group members. Our expanded framework further suggests that group members’ role-boundary adaptations in response to expectations of group accountability are particularly relevant. Given the importance of social interactions within a group, it is important to note that groups’ accountability perceptions are constantly evolving rather than static and fixed.

Review of existing research reveals areas for further investigation. One area for future development is to compare the networks of relationships at the group level against those at the organizational and individual levels. This can be expected to yield further insight into parallels and areas of nonequivalence across levels, and to make research findings from different levels easier to relate to each other. For example, which sources of accountability exert the same influences on groups as they do on individuals, and which sources exert novel effects? What are the benefits of a lack of accountability at different levels (e.g., innovation, risk-taking, altruistic behaviors)? And does optimal accountability vary in magnitude across levels? By pursuing these lines of enquiry, researchers would be able to clearly situate group accountability within existing streams of research at the individual and group levels, and thereby answer both general and specific calls for more integrative theory building. Our review also reveals that we know very little about the nuances of how accountability develops over time in groups. For example, how long does it take for accountability expectations to transition from individual cognition to an emergent group state? It would also be beneficial to know more about the convergence of accountability perceptions within groups, as well as about the consequences of divergent accountability perceptions.

Building on insights from our review, the extended model addresses limitations of existing group accountability research by proposing accountability as a cause and consequence of dynamic social processes. This opens avenues for conceptual and empirical enquiry in group accountability research. One could consider group accountability not merely as a direct mechanism for improving processes or performance but also as a means of describing social relationships within and by teams. One promising direction involves exploring the conditions under which group members extend the boundaries of their roles, such as when groups face problems or ambiguous situations. Psychological research suggests that people in groups are likely to react differently depending on when problems occur (Simons & Peterson, 2000), and group accountability may be more likely to develop when its individuals share an expectation that they will each be evaluated harshly by the group as a whole (De Cremer & van Dijk, 2009). Some members of a collective may only begin to feel accountability pressures after a problem develops: a phenomenon that could limit self-critical reflection, encourage defensive behaviors, or even increase a person’s commitment to his previous actions (Ebrahim, 2005; Janis & Mann, 1977; Staw & Ross, 1980). As such, we call for new research that explains the conditions under which group members seek out or avoid accountability, as well as the tightness of the linkage between emergent feelings of accountability and formal mechanisms intended to create group accountability. These ideas can be explored by examining teams operating in uncertain environments, working on novel or risky tasks, or experiencing initial or repeated success or failure, and using such cases to identify when and how internal accountability controls are tightened based on performance lapses or relaxed following group successes.

Our extended framework also provides a potential explanation on how do groups accomplish tasks when facing unusual tasks. When group members work together, they are adapting and learning about the task context as well as the knowledge that each other group member holds. Once a member’s role has expanded or contracted in response to a collective problem, he or she might tend to respond in the same way when subsequent problems are encountered, thereby triggering a virtuous or vicious learning circle (e.g., Garud & Kumaraswamy, 2005). It would be useful to learn more about the feed-forward process through which individual learning transfers up to the collectives. If effective adaptations in role responsibilities occur due to shared accountability expectations, we also see merit in studying the conditions under which groups formalize or even reverse role-boundary changes. A related line of enquiry could investigate the accountability environments that encourage feed-forward learning in groups and intrinsic motivations to engage in extra-role behaviors. Research on role boundaries and adaptation within groups would not only advance scholarly understanding of group accountability but also support the development of learning across levels.

Role adaptations also imply the possibility that it may be a substitute for formal leadership. Per Hales (2005), when senior managers distrust work teams, front-line managers’ workload and monitoring responsibilities increase, and they are less able to share additional work with their group. We recommend further investigating the role of critical external leaders in fostering team accountability dynamics. In addition, the leaders and managers who are tasked with holding groups accountable are likely to be influenced by organizational constraints and pressures (Hales, 2005; Hall et al., 2004; Jhun, Bae, & Rhee, 2012; Pinter et al., 2007; Wallace et al., 2011). Studying group accountability therefore offers a unique viewpoint into organizational dynamics and the conditions under which expectations indeed permeate the group or where group membership or leadership serves as a buffer.

Conclusion

The purpose of this review has been to summarize in a meaningful way the incredibly diverse body of recent research on group accountability conducted in various disciplines and using a plethora of methodologies. One strength of the existing empirical research is its variety. A topic approached from such a wide array of perspectives and using so many different tools stands a better chance of being accurately understood. Such variety can also be a weakness, however. We find that the diversity in approaches to this topic has created a situation in which knowledge is often fractured or difficult to compare across studies, in large part due to the uniqueness of the respective authors’ conceptualizations and/or measurements of group accountability. Our extension of London et al.’s (1997) framework to the organization and explanation of key relationships in group accountability research is intended to move this critical topic forward, primarily by integrating hitherto disparate strands of empirical research, and also by identifying numerous avenues for future exploration. Accountability in groups and by groups is at the heart of group life and a clear and comprehensive understanding of its dynamics and processes is critical to accurately describing, explaining, and predicting group behaviors.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors like to thank three anonymous reviewers and the editor of Small Group Research, Joann Keyton, for their advice and comments on earlier versions of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Chia-Yu Kou is an assistant professor at the School of Business, University College Dublin. She has a PhD degree in organizational behavior from the UCL School of Management, University College London, UK. Her research focuses on workplace interactions and cross-team dynamics by examining how multidisciplinary teams accomplish their daily task.

Virginia R. Stewart is an assistant professor at the Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, University College Dublin. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and previously lectured at Southern Methodist University. She studies team dynamics, shared accountabilities, and employee engagement.

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