Team Membership Change “Events”: A Review and Reconceptualization

Abstract

Driven by views of teams as dynamic systems with permeable boundaries, scholars are increasingly seeking to better understand how team membership changes (i.e., team members joining and/or leaving) shape the functioning and performance of organizational teams. However, empirical studies of team membership change appear to be progressing in three largely independent directions as researchers consider: (a) how newcomers impact and are impacted by the teams they join; (b) how teams adapt to member departures; or (c) how teams function under conditions of high membership fluidity, with little theoretical integration or consensus across these three areas. To accelerate an integrative stream of research on team membership change, we advance a conceptual framework which depicts each team membership change as a discrete team-level “event” which shapes team functioning to the extent to which it is “novel,” “disruptive,” and “critical” for the team. We use this framework to guide our review and synthesis of empirical studies of team membership change published over the past 20 years. Our review reveals numerous factors, across conceptual levels of the organization, that determine the strength (i.e., novelty, disruptiveness, criticality) of a team membership change event and, consequently, its impact on team functioning and performance. In closing, we provide propositions for future research that integrate a multilevel, event-based perspective of team membership change and demonstrate how team membership change events may impact organizational systems over time and across levels of observation.

Keywords

turnover or turnover intentions group or team composition or diversity group or team dynamics/processes group or team structure

Research on team effectiveness has traditionally depicted teams as stable entities that maintain static team memberships across time (see Mathieu et al., 2017, for a review). Yet, many modern organizations are comprised of fluid teams in which team membership shifts dynamically over time as team members join and leave teams (Bell et al., 2018; Mathieu et al., 2014, 2018; Mortensen & Haas, 2018; Wimmer et al., 2019). Indeed, “much that is interesting about groups develops over time, and with time comes changes in members, projects, technology, and context” (McGrath et al., 2000, p. 103). Thus, scholars have called repeatedly for research that reveals how teams adapt to changes in their team memberships (see Table 1), and in response to these calls, a growing body of research is beginning to uncover the myriad ways in team membership changes impact team functioning and performance (e.g., Argote et al., 2018; Li & Gevers, 2018; Summers et al., 2012).

Table 1.

Exemplar Quotations Illustrating the Need for Research Examining Team Membership Change.

Authors	Exemplar quotation
Arrow & McGrath (1995)	“When the membership of a group changes—whether the change involves the arrival of new members, temporary absences, permanent departures, turnover and replacement, or the occasional participation of irregular members, such as guests—other aspects of the group’s functioning are bound to change as well. Yet the impact of changes in small group membership has not been systematically studied.”
Bell et al. (2018)	“Research tends to examine teams with relatively stable membership, yet membership change, blurred boundaries regarding who is a team member, and multiple team membership is increasingly the reality in organizations.”
Hollenbeck et al. (2015)	“Groups are increasingly conceptualized as self-regulating, adaptive social systems, where time and history play central explanatory roles.”
Humphrey & Aime (2014)	“It is important to note that research on team member structure and composition has rarely incorporated change into theoretical or empirical models.”
Ilgen (1999)	“If a person does leave the team, she or he is often replaced, and the team-performance pattern continues with the replacement member, but the interpersonal dynamics in the team are not necessarily the same. Both the replacement member and the team itself adapt to the new member. In sum, organizations represent environments in which teams with stable and unstable memberships react to conditions that often require complex and rapid coordinated responses over time.”
Kozlowski & Bell (2013)	“How long does it take for a team to develop? How long does it take for an experienced team to adapt to a new member or a new leader? The simple answer is that we do not know because the research literature cannot inform us and, importantly, it is not primarily a theoretical issue. Rather, it is a descriptive issue. The field needs good, solid, basic descriptive research on important temporal phenomena so that we can begin to establish temporal benchmarks that can inform theory and research.”
Mathieu et al. (2017)	“We know surprisingly little about issues associated with membership churn, such as the reason(s) for members leaving (e.g., voluntary vs. involuntary turnover), whether or not they are replaced, the similarity between new and departing members, or the number or rate of members leaving over time.”
Mathieu et al. (2014)	“Most team composition research indexes members’ characteristics and models their influence on later team process or effectiveness criteria. In effect, they treat team membership as though it is a static variable. However, in many, if not most, modern-day organizations, members move in and out of teams altering the mix of individuals’ histories of working together and member characteristics. Team memberships are rarely constant over even modest periods of time.”
McGrath et al. (2000)	“Future research on small groups would profit if scholars in that area were to . . . [1] take into account that much that is interesting about groups develops over time, and with time comes changes in members, projects, technology, and context . . . [2] develop both conceptual and methodological tools to study systems that are undergoing change. Recognize the importance both of the past and of the future on group structure and behavior and learn to study groups that are not static and unchanging systems.”
Mortensen & Haas (2018)	“As teams have become more fluid, overlapping, and dispersed, team membership boundaries have become less clear. This has substantial implications for how scholars conceptualize, theorize about, and empirically study work teams, as well as for managerial understanding of how such teams should be designed and supported. It is time to update our understanding of teams to take these implications into account.”
Tannenbaum et al. (2012)	“Past researchers have typically assumed that factors such as team membership, structure, roles, goals, and level of interdependence would remain consistent and universally applicable throughout the team during a study. These factors have typically been treated as stable, independent variables, or measured once and used as correlates, rather than viewed as dynamic variables that might change over time or manifest themselves differently throughout a team.”

Despite the increasing attention paid to team membership change, the empirical literature in this domain appears to be moving in divergent directions with little theoretical integration or consensus. For instance, research investigating different types of team membership changes (e.g., team members joining, Chen, 2005; team members departing, Christian et al., 2014) has tended to leverage different sets of terminologies (e.g., newcomer acceptance, Rink & Ellemers, 2009; team fluidity, Bushe & Chu, 2011; collective turnover, Hausknecht, 2017) and have focused on phenomena at different conceptual levels. Research on team member entry, for example, has focused primarily on the role of individual-level attributes of newcomers (e.g., proactive personality, Li et al., 2011; creativity, Choi & Thompson, 2005; prior experience, Beus et al., 2014), whereas studies of team member departure have focused primarily on team-level attributes that support adaptation after the loss of a team member (e.g., leadership structures, DeRue et al., 2008; communication structures, Christian et al., 2014; transactive memory, Argote et al., 2018). These divergent approaches have yielded little consensus regarding the circumstances under which team membership changes will have positive, negative, and/or neutral effects for teams.

To advance integrative research on team membership change, we begin by suggesting that a common feature which ties the disparate streams of research on team membership change together is a conceptualization of a team membership change as a significant event in the life cycle of a team that can alter the course of team functioning. Extending recent theoretical work (i.e., Event Systems Theory; Morgeson et al., 2015), which argues that all events do not produce equivalent degrees of change within organizations and specifies the characteristics of events with the strongest impact, we advance an integrative conceptual framework depicted in Figure 1. Our framework positions each team membership change as a discrete team-level event that alters team functioning and can be characterized along the dimensions of novelty, disruptiveness, and/or criticality. A highly novel team membership change event involves new and/or unexpected changes to team processes, states, leadership, or resource; a highly disruptive membership change event requires a team to change its ongoing team processes and adjust its norms and mental models; and highly critical team membership change events involve the loss or gain of key resources, a change in team goals and pursuits, or a change in leadership. Each of these dimensions contributes to the strength (i.e., overall impact) of the event on team functioning. Thus, our work extends Event System Theory by proposing that the degree to which a team membership change event is experienced as novel, disruptive, and/or critical (i.e., a strong event) is constrained by a variety of stable and/or dynamic factors across individual, team, and organizational conceptual levels (e.g., newcomer personality, frequency of past membership change events, team norms, dynamism of embedding environments).

Figure 1.

Conceptual framework depicting the impact of individual-, team-, and organizational-level characteristics on team membership change event strength and team effectiveness.

Accordingly, we use our conceptual framework to guide a review of the literature on team membership change to uncover the stable and/or dynamic factors across organizational levels that likely shape the novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality of team membership change events. Our review is organized by three primary “categories” of team membership change research: (a) team member entry, (b) team member departure, or (c) team membership fluidity. However, we find that within each of the three categories of research on team membership change, scholars have identified a wide variety of characteristics—across the individual, team, and organizational conceptual levels—that shape the novelty, disruptiveness, and/or criticality of team membership change events. By bridging across these three streams of research, we provide an integrative foundation for the future study of team membership change and the factors influencing the strength and outcomes of membership change events across a variety of team contexts.

Review Approach

Our article search and coding aimed to uncover the stable and/or dynamic factors identified in the extant empirical literature on team membership change that determine the strength of team membership change events. To compile empirical studies of team membership change, we began by searching the Business Source Complete and PsycINFO databases (via the EBSCOhost research databases) for peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1999 and August 2019 using the following search terms: “team fluidity,” “team turnover,” “collective turnover,” “dynamic team composition,” “team membership change,” “newcomer entry OR socialization,” “team member replacement,” and “team adaptation.” We identified additional articles manually by searching the reference sections of key conceptual and review papers (e.g., Baard et al., 2014; Maynard et al., 2015). The initial database search yielded a total of 1,589 potentially relevant articles, and an additional four articles were identified from the manual search.

Next, we scanned the title and abstract of each article as part of the prescreening process with the following inclusion criteria: (a) the article’s membership change was in the context of a team (e.g., team member joining, leaving, or both); (b) the research examined team membership change as a predictor or intermediary variable rather than as an outcome variable; (c) the research was conducted using real-world teams and/or a laboratory team simulation; and (d) the journal’s impact factor was equal to or higher than 1.0 (based on the Journal Citation Reports 2018). The majority of articles excluded as this stage (n = 1432 articles) were excluded from our review based on the second criterion, particularly those resulting from the search terms “team turnover,” “collective turnover,” and “team adaptation.” Although these search terms were highly relevant to our topic of interest, many studies resulting from these searches examined team membership change as an outcome—which is not the focus of the present review—and were, therefore, excluded. Finally, we examined each of the remaining 91 articles carefully to ensure that the articles (a) represented an empirical (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods) study and (b) examined one or more outcomes associated with team membership change (e.g., individual well-being, newcomer socialization, team performance). This screening process resulted in a final list of 83 articles.

After the final list of articles was identified, the first three authors coded each of the 83 articles to identify the category of team membership change research depicted in the article. Studies varied substantially in the degree to which they described specific instances of team membership change. Some studies examined specific instances of team member entry (e.g., Rink & Ellemers, 2009) or departure (e.g., Hale et al., 2016), whereas others examined aggregate levels of “collective turnover” (e.g., Shaw et al., 2005) or the degree to which teams were “fluid” versus “stable” (e.g., Dineen & Noe, 2003). In general, however, team membership change was described as occurring in three primary ways: (a) a new team member joining, (b) a team member leaving, or (c) both happening simultaneously and in quick succession (Bedwell et al., 2012; Benishek & Lazzara, 2019). Therefore, we categorized the articles in our review into one of three overarching categories based on the nature of the membership change(s) under investigation: team member entry (Category 1), team member departure (Category 2), or team membership fluidity (Category 3). We placed articles into Category 1 if they examined the addition of one or more new team members to an intact team; into Category 2 if they examined the loss or departure of one or more team members from an intact team; and into Category 3 if they examined successive departures and additions of team members over time.

Finally, the first three authors coded the research setting (i.e., lab, field) and identified the main study findings, the key characteristics of the team membership change events, and the outcomes examined (e.g., team performance) for each article. As a quality check, every article was reviewed by at least two authors. Any inconsistencies in coding were discussed until consensus was reached.

Review and Synthesis of Extant Research on Team Membership Change

With regard to the three categories of team membership change research, we identified 39 articles that investigated the impact of team member entry (Category 1), 14 articles that investigated the impact of team member departure (Category 2), and 30 articles that investigated the impact of team membership fluidity (Category 3). Supplemental Appendix A provides a list of all articles included in our review which examined team member entry, team member departure, and team membership fluidity, respectively, as well as their key findings. In addition, Table 2 summarizes key elements of the research designs used across these three areas.

Table 2.

Summary of Methodological Choices Across the Three Team Membership Change Research Categories.

Study characteristics	Research Category 1 newcomer joining	Research Category 2 veteran departing	Research Category 3 team fluidity	Overall
No. of studies	39	14	32	83
Analytic approach
Qualitative	0%	7.1%	17%	7.2%
Quantitative	92.3%	85.7%	77%	86%
Mixed methods	7.7%	7.1%	6.7%	7.2%
Sample type
Working adults	64.1%	85.7%	63.3%	69.9%
Students	23%	14.3%	33.3%	25.3%
Other	12.8%	0%	3.3%	7.2%
Study design
Experiment	25.6%	14.3%	33.3%	26.5%
Field study	61.5%	78.6%	66.7%	68.7%
Case study	2.6%	0%	0%	1.2%
Other	10.3%	7.1%	0%	6%
Temporal design
Cross-sectional	59%	71.4%	50%	59%
Longitudinal	41%	28.6%	50%	43.4%
Outcome level of analysis
Individual	41%	7.1%	36.7%	34.9%
Team	46.2%	85.7%	43.3%	53%
Both	7.7%	0%	13.3%	8.4%
Other	5.1%	7.1%	6.7%	6%

Within each of these three research categories, we find that scholars are applying distinct theoretical perspectives, using different terminology, and focusing on a variety of phenomena across conceptual levels of the organization. However, we also find that a common theme uniting these separate streams of research is their emphasis on how the “event” of team membership change alters team functioning and performance. Thus, we can leverage event-based theories of organizations such as Event System Theory (Morgeson et al., 2015) to more accurately and precisely describe the nature of team membership change events. Event System Theory builds on classic thinking about organizations as dynamic systems (e.g., Katz & Kahn, 1966; Morel & Ramanujam, 1999) by specifying that organizational events do not all produce equivalent degrees of change in organizational entities; rather, an event’s strength is determined by the dimensions of novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality.

In general, highly “novel” events vary substantially from previous states and events and, therefore, are perceived as unexpected by organizational entities. Events that are highly “disruptive” involve a discontinuity and require organizational entities to adjust and adapt their ongoing routines. Finally, “critical” events are important and salient, requiring high levels of attention and action on the part of organizational entities. Event System Theory argues highly novel, disruptive, and/or critical events tend to produce more substantial changes in organizations across conceptual levels, as compared with events that are lower on these dimensions. Therefore, predicting the extent to which a particular team membership change event will impact team functioning requires an accounting of the factors that increase the novelty, disruptiveness, and/or criticality (and, therefore, the strength) of the event.

Our review of the literature on team membership change demonstrates that researchers have identified a wide variety of factors across conceptual levels that appear to shape the strength of a team membership change event. The vast majority of articles included in our review did not specify the novelty, criticality, or disruptiveness (nor the overall “strength”) of the team membership change events depicted within their studies; therefore, we could not code articles along these dimensions. However, our review revealed many instances across the three research categories where these features were implied or could be extrapolated from the findings and/or study design. As an illustration, Table 3 defines the dimensions of novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality in the context of team membership change and identifies exemplar characteristics across conceptual levels which prior research suggests might impact the novelty, disruptiveness, and/or criticality of a team membership change event.

Table 3.

Examples of Novelty, Criticality, and Disruptiveness Appearing in Prior Research on Team Membership Change Events.

Conceptual Level	Novelty	Criticality	Disruptiveness
	Novel team events involve changes that had not been previously experienced or were not otherwise expected.	Critical team events involve the loss or gain of key resources, a change in team goals, or a change in leadership.	Disruptive team events require adjustments to ongoing team processes, relationships, norms and/or mental models.
Individual	Newcomers’ level of relevant work experience (i.e., lower newcomer novelty) facilitates newcomer adjustment (Beus et al., 2014).	Teams require more time to recover after the loss of a manager (more critical) than a nonmanager (less critical) (Hale et al., 2016).	Proactive engagement in socialization efforts by team newcomers reduces the disruptiveness of their introduction into a team (Ashforth et al., 2007).
Team	Planned (i.e., expected) turnover of temporary workers has an inverted U-shaped relationship with unit performance (De Stefano, et al., 2019).	The effect of losing a highly central (i.e., critical) team member in a communication network is stronger when the overall turnover rate is low (Shaw et al., 2005).	Disruptions to a communication network within a team resulting from turnover events contribute to errors and reductions in team performance (Argote et al., 2018).
Organization	Turnover events are likely to be less novel and impactful for teams that are embedded in organizations operating in dynamic or uncertain environments (Chandler et al., 2005).	Changing team membership is more critical for teams embedded in collectivistic cultures than teams in individualistic cultures (Harrison et al., 2000).	Institutionalized socialization tactics may reduce the disruptiveness of newcomers into teams (Bauer et al., 2007).

In the following sections, we organize our synthesis of prior research around the three categories of team membership change (i.e., team member entry, team member departure, team membership fluidity) and identify key factors across conceptual levels (i.e., individual, team, organizational) that are likely to determine the novelty, disruptiveness, and/or criticality of a team membership change event. We recognize that distinctions between levels of analysis are not always clear. For example, newcomer proactive personality describes an individual-level trait; however, the entry of a new team member who is highly proactive can also be conceptualized as a team-level experience. In addition, scholars within the turnover literature have specified that “individual turnover” (i.e., measured and modeled at the individual level) and “collective turnover” (i.e., aggregated to the team or organizational levels) produce differential effects on organizational functioning and should not be used interchangeably (Dess & Shaw, 2001; Hausknect & Trevor, 2011; Nyberg & Ployhart, 2013). Therefore, for the purposes of this review, we categorize phenomena at the individual, team, or organizational level, respectively, according to the conceptual level at which they originate, as opposed to the level at which they were statistically modeled. Specifically, we categorize phenomena at the individual conceptual level if they originate within individuals (e.g., individual traits, roles, abilities, outcomes); we categorize phenomena at the team conceptual level if they originate within the team (e.g., team processes, experiences, states, outcomes); and we categorize phenomena at they originate at the organizational level (e.g., organizational strategy, practices, outcomes).

Research Category 1: Team Member Entry

The first category of team membership change research focuses on a new team member joining a team. The entry of a new team member is often conceptualized as a challenging event for both “newcomers” (i.e., individuals joining the team) and “incumbent team members” (i.e., individuals whose membership in the team precedes that of the newcomer), yet, the broader literature on newcomer entry into organizations has primarily focused on the experience of the newcomer, rather than the perspective of team incumbents (e.g., newcomer knowledge acquisition, Ashforth et al., 2007, newcomer performance, Saks, 1995). However, recent work (n = 41 articles identified in this review) emphasizes that the entry of new members can substantially impact team functioning above and beyond its impact on the newcomer. Focusing on these team-relevant outcomes, the following sections describe factors originating at individual, team, and organizational conceptual levels that shape the strength of team member entry events on team functioning.

Characteristics of individuals shaping the strength of team member entry

Research on team newcomers has examined the impact of a wide variety of attributes that facilitate a newcomer’s entry into an intact team. Studies have shown that newcomer traits including proactive personality (Li et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2017), motivation to learn (Tan et al., 2016), and the “Big Five” traits of openness, extraversion, and conscientiousness (Major et al., 2006) are associated with newcomer proactive behaviors during newcomer entry, which may reduce the disruptiveness of a newcomer entry event. Furthermore, newcomers’ creative abilities may increase the criticality of their entry into a team by positively impacting not only the team’s overall creative output but also the creativity of the incumbent team members (Choi & Thompson, 2005), perhaps by stimulating creative idea generation within the team (Nemeth & Ormiston, 2007). Moreover, evidence suggests that the entry of newcomers who are more culturally (Joardar et al., 2007), demographically (Kammeyer-Mueller et al., 2011), and socially (Phillips et al., 2009) distinct from incumbent team members is challenging for teams, suggesting that newcomers whose traits are particularly unexpected (and, therefore, novel) are more challenging than those whose traits more closely resemble the team’s prior composition.

The ways in which newcomers interact with incumbent team members have also been shown to affect how newcomers are integrated into their new teams. Although a wide variety of proactive behaviors have been identified (Cooper-Thomas et al., 2012), research suggests the most important behaviors for reducing the potential challenges associated with newcomer entry are information seeking, feedback seeking, and relationship building (Kammeyer-Mueller et al., 2013; Wanberg & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2000). These behaviors may improve team functioning by reducing the burden on incumbent team members to provide informational and social support to the newcomer (Tan et al., 2016). In addition, teams are more likely to adopt the unique knowledge of newcomers who use integrating (i.e., “we,” “our”) as opposed to differentiating (i.e., “I,” “my”) language during task completion (Kane & Rink, 2015). Newcomers who behave assertively are also likely to be perceived as competent and likable by their teammates, making it more likely for them to be able to influence team decision-making (Hansen & Levine, 2009).

Newcomers’ prior team experiences, expectations for future team experiences, and motivational states also appear to impact their entry into a new team. For example, in a sample of NBA teams, Beus and colleagues (2014) found the quality of newcomers’ prior team experiences and the quantity of previous team transition events were both positively related to the newcomer’s adjustment to and performance within a new team. Newcomers’ feelings of empowerment (Chen, 2005) and obligation to the organization (Delobbe et al., 2016) impact their motivation to develop strong intrateam relationships and contribute to team performance, which may further decrease the disruptiveness of their entry. In addition, newcomers’ assumptions and beliefs about the organization impact newcomers’ experience in the team, particularly if those assumptions are misaligned with their actual experience (Smith et al., 2017).

Characteristics of teams shaping the strength of team member entry

The team context is increasingly recognized as an important source of socialization for newcomers (Chen, 2005; Cooper et al., in press). Team norms that are fully developed and communicated to the newcomer provide information about what to expect and how to behave within the team, thereby easing the disruptiveness of the transition process and improving team outcomes (Rink & Ellemers, 2009). Teams that maintain cooperative (as opposed to competitive or independent) climates tend to promote better relationships and higher quality interactions among incumbent team members and newcomers (Chen et al., 2008). Prior team experiences have been shown to “set the tone” for newcomer behaviors; for example, high prior team performance may incentivize newcomers to improve their own individual performance (Chen, 2005). In addition, Wang and colleagues (2017) demonstrated that the composition of incumbent team members (i.e., high team proactive personality composition) can compensate for unfavorable newcomer attributes (i.e., low proactive personality). Together, these findings suggest that team norms and prior experiences provide newcomers with standards of behavior that shape newcomers’ motivation and performance, and thus, can mitigate (or exacerbate) the disruptive consequences of newcomer entry on team functioning.

Incumbent team members’ impressions of and expectations for newcomers also impact both newcomer and team outcomes. Immediately after (or even before) meeting a newcomer for the first time, incumbent team members form initial impressions that can substantially impact subsequent beliefs about and expectations for the newcomer (Pagliaro et al., 2013) and subsequent team performance outcomes (Rink et al., 2013). Chen and Klimoski (2003) found that team expectations for the newcomer impacted the type of work they assigned the newcomer, such that teams with higher expectations for the newcomer’s performance assigned the newcomer more complex and variable tasks. The team’s expectations of a newcomer’s permanence as a team member also affects their reactions to newcomer entry, with teams experiencing higher conflict and lower team identification after the entry of a temporary member (Rink & Ellemers, 2009).

Team reflection during a team member entry event also appears to positively impact team functioning. Teams that actively reflect on their prior performance, goals, and processes may be better able to take advantage of the new skills, ideas, and experiences of the new team member, decreasing the disruptiveness and increasing the criticality of the team member entry event. Supporting these ideas, Lewis et al. (2007) found that teams that reflected on their group’s cognitive structures after a newcomer entry were more likely to shift their cognitive structures to accommodate those of the newcomer, resulting in improved team performance. Rink and colleagues (2013) also note the importance of team reflection, suggesting that team receptivity to the newcomer will only produce positive team outcomes if the team is reflective and willing to integrate newcomers’ ideas into their prior knowledge structures.

Characteristics of organizations shaping the strength of team member entry

Some scholars have suggested that organizational tactics likely have little impact on newcomer socialization in teams (Moreland & Levine, 2002, 2014). However, others have suggested that organizations are “strong situations” that substantially impact the team experience of newcomer entry (Ellis et al., 2015; Saks & Ashforth, 2000). The empirical literature has tended to support the latter, demonstrating positive effects of standardized organizational socialization tactics on newcomer role clarity, integration into team activities, and understanding of social influence relationships in the team (Kammeyer-Mueller & Wanberg, 2003; Smith et al., 2012). Organizational socialization tactics may serve to homogenize the behaviors of team newcomers, thereby decreasing the novelty of the team member entry event. Indeed, macro-level organizational socialization tactics that are standardized across the organization (i.e., institutionalized) tend to be more beneficial for newcomer socialization than informal, individualized socialization tactics within specific teams or units (Ashforth et al., 2007; Saks et al., 2007).

Summary and integration

Research examining the entry of a new team member has primarily emerged from the organizational socialization literature and, therefore, has tended to focus on the experience of the newcomer. The literature suggests that attributes of the newcomer (e.g., proactivity, creativity) are important for successful team adaptation following the entry of a new team member. In terms of team-level attributes, team norms regarding communication, climate, prior experiences, team expectations for the newcomer, and team reflexivity are all related to successful new team member entry. There is relatively little research examining the role of organizational-level factors on newcomer entry into a team; however, the extant literature suggests that socialization tactics that are institutionalized across the entire organization are positively associated with outcomes for newcomers and teams following newcomer entry.

Research Category 2: Team Member Departure Events

The second category of team membership change events investigated in prior work reflects the departure of a team member, which may be due to team reassignment or turnover from the organization. Although turnover has primarily been studied as an aggregate phenomenon (Hom et al., 2017), our review revealed a growing interest in understanding individual turnover events and their effects for individuals and teams (Kacmar et al., 2006). Indeed, when examined within the team context, the departure of a team member can be highly disruptive to team cognition, social integration, and performance (van der Vegt et al., 2010). Therefore, a growing stream of research focusing on turnover within teams has examined the characteristics of team member departure events on team functioning across the individual, team, and organizational conceptual levels.

Characteristics of individuals shaping the strength of team member departure

Although relatively scarce, a few studies have examined the impact of departing team members’ knowledge, skills, and abilities on team functioning after their departure. For example, departing team members may possess important and nonredundant information that they (purposely or accidentally) take with them when they leave the team (Holtom et al., 2008; Parise et al., 2006; Summers et al., 2012). The magnitude of the knowledge possessed by a team member is likely to be directly related to the criticality of their departure from the team (Droege & Hoobler, 2003; Messersmith et al., 2013). Similarly, the loss of a disproportionately high-performing or “star” team member is particularly damaging for team cognition and performance, as star team members often possess a greater quantity and quality of tacit knowledge that is essential for team success (Groysberg et al., 2008).

However, the knowledge, skills, and abilities of a team member make up only part of what is lost during their departure; the structural position of the departing team member is also highly relevant for team outcomes. For instance, Christian and colleagues (2014) found that the loss of a team member who was highly central (and, therefore, critical) to the team’s transactive memory communication network impeded the team’s ability to plan effectively. Highly central team members may not only take with them technical expertise but also social capital (Joe et al., 2013; Parise et al., 2006), which can reduce team productivity (Shaw et al., 2005). Indeed, teams are less likely to engage in effective adaptation processes following the loss of a central team member, as compared with the loss of a less central team member (Stuart, 2017). Together, these results suggest that the typical compositional variables used to characterize team members (e.g., age, gender, skills, roles) may be insufficient; we must also account for the structure of the team and the position of departing team members within that structure to more fully understand the criticality of a specific team member departure event.

Similarly, the loss of a team leader may be more critical and disruptive to ongoing team processes than the loss of a team member who does not occupy a leadership position. Hale et al. (2016) illustrated that teams required more time to recover after the loss of a manager than a nonmanager. Furthermore, the rate of turnover among team leaders is positively related to turnover among nonleader team members (Kacmar et al., 2006), suggesting that leader turnover can have a reverberating impact on team turnover and functioning beyond the loss of their individual contributions to the team.

However, there is conflicting evidence as to the effect of losing a team leader on the team’s adaptability. Whereas DeRue and colleagues (2008) found the loss of a team leader prompted team members to engage in more adaptive behavior, thereby minimizing the disruptiveness of the event, Christian and colleagues (2014) found the loss of a team leader negatively impacted the team’s ability to carry out plan formulation processes and, consequently, the team’s adaptation to change. As noted by Christian and colleagues (2014), this discrepancy may be due to the examination of a formal leader departure in DeRue and colleagues (2008), on one hand, and the departure of an informal but highly central team member in Christian and colleagues (2014), on the other. To determine if this is the case, future studies should examine whether and how team adaptation is impacted differentially by the loss of a formal (or external) versus an informal (or internal) leader.

Characteristics of teams shaping the strength of team member departure

A more extensive body of research has investigated the characteristics of the team as a whole that facilitate and/or hinder a team’s ability to adapt to the loss of a team member. For example, the nature of the team’s team cognitive structures appears to have a substantial impact on team outcomes following team member departure. Knowledge within teams is often managed through emergent states such as mental models or transactive memory systems (i.e., shared encoding, storage, and retrieval of information; Wegner, 1987). For transactive memory systems in particular, team members rely on distributed cognition in which individual team members have unique, nonshared information that can be vital for task accomplishment (Choi et al., 2010; Lewis, 2004). As such, teams that experience team member loss may have weaker transactive memory systems, disrupting their ability to perform effectively (Akgün et al., 2005). Exacerbating this loss, teams often attempt to maintain prior cognitive structures even after they are no longer effective following a team member’s departure, further contributing to decrements in team performance (Lewis et al., 2007).

There is some preliminary evidence to suggest that shared characteristics and experiences among team members may decrease the criticality of team member turnover. Teams with more collective experience tend to exhibit less task conflict following the loss of a team member (Kuypers et al., 2018). This may be one reason why cross-training, which involves team members training in the duties of their teammates, is often proposed as a preventive measure when turnover in the team is expected (e.g., Guthrie, 2001; Mowday, 1984). However, the literature suggests that although cross-training may improve the accuracy of team shared mental models (Marks et al., 2002), it does not appear to mitigate the negative effects of team member loss on team knowledge retention (Pee et al., 2014), suggesting that the development and maintenance of shared team mental models may not sufficiently protect teams from knowledge lost through human capital turnover.

Characteristics of organizations shaping the strength of team member departure

Surprisingly few empirical studies have examined the role of the organizational context on teams’ experience of team member departure. One study found that organizations can mitigate the negative impact of team member loss on team performance through the implementation of succession planning and electronic knowledge repositories (Pee et al., 2014), which may decrease the criticality of team member loss. To address the criticality of team turnover events in organizations with high interdependence, Hale and colleagues (2016) suggest the use of cross-training so that team members can take on different responsibilities in response to team turnover. Kacmar and colleagues (2006) suggest that turnover of employees that are more relevant to the organization’s strategic core (i.e., managers) is likely to produce more negative consequences for team functioning.

Summary and integration

Studies examining team member departure have primarily emerged from the organizational turnover literature. Among the relatively few studies that have examined the effect of individual factors on the impact of team member departure, the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the departing team member appears to be of primary importance. However, studies have begun to focus on how the departing team member relates to others in the team, for example, the departing team member’s centrality in the team communication network or their position as a team leader. In terms of the team-level attributes affecting the strength of a team member departure, teams that attempt to maintain prior transactive memory systems following team member departures, and teams with fewer shared experiences and characteristics, are more likely to experience the negative effects of team member departure. Finally, although very little research has examined the role of the organization during team member departure, preliminary evidence suggests that organizational cross-training may mitigate the negative impact of team member loss on team functioning.

Research Category 3: Team Membership Fluidity

The third category of research on team membership change focuses on teams experiencing high levels of both newcomer entry and team member departure. Typically, researchers refer to research on teams experiencing both team member entry and exit concurrently (or in rapid succession) as “team member replacement,” “team fluidity,” or “collective turnover.” In general, high levels of team fluidity are thought to present a risk to ongoing team processes due their disruptive effects on team learning, task flexibility, and task efficiency (Kacmar et al., 2006; Savelsbergh et al., 2015; van der Vegt et al., 2010), particularly when the task is highly interdependent (Davis et al., 2014; Stuart, 2017). Furthermore, high levels of team fluidity may impede the development of effective team communication and coordination (Gillespie et al., 2013), hindering team performance.

However, team fluidity can also be beneficial for team functioning, perhaps by making each subsequent team membership change event less novel and/or critical. Ahmed et al. (2019) found that although closed teams (i.e., no membership change) have greater team performance overall, teams with open membership (i.e., that experience membership change) are able to sustain their performance for a longer period of time. In addition, Gorman et al. (2010) found that reassigning team members into new teams enhanced teams’ capacity to adaptively coordinate in response to disturbances in the task environment. Fluidity can stimulate dissent and discussion within the team, leading to more divergent thinking and creative production (Nemeth & Ormiston, 2007), and turnover itself can also be an adaptive response to changing organizational demands (Chandler et al., 2005), suggesting that maintaining stable team membership may actually hinder team goal attainment as the task environment shifts over time.

Characteristics of individuals shaping the strength of team membership fluidity

As suggested by studies focused solely on newcomers or solely on departing team members, the attributes of the individuals joining and leaving the team can impact a team’s experience of membership change over time. Fluid teams may have more difficulty coordinating and, subsequently, performing effectively if individual team members fail to express when they are uncertain about a task (Gillespie et al., 2013). In the case of member replacement, the similarity between the joining and leaving team members is likely to reduce the novelty and disruptiveness of the event (Li et al., 2016). Incoming and outgoing team members with similar task knowledge (Levine & Choi, 2004; Li et al., 2016), functional backgrounds (Li & Gevers, 2018), superordinate identities (Kane, 2010; Kane et al., 2005), and cognitive ability (Summers et al., 2012) are more likely to produce favorable team outcomes following the replacement event. Interestingly, even if the incoming and departing team members are not similar, the replacement event may lead them to be perceived as more similar by the team. Indeed, Bunderson et al. (2014) found that newcomers tend to acquire the status of the team member he or she is replacing in role-differentiated teams.

Characteristics of teams shaping the strength of team membership fluidity

Theoretical work has suggested that “properties that apply only at higher levels . . . become critical to explaining when and why turnover affects [team] performance” (Hausknecht & Holwerda, 2013, p. 33). Empirical studies examining the role of team-level factors on the strength of team membership change events have supported this conjecture. For example, a well-defined and stable role structure can improve outcomes for highly fluid teams, as newcomers are able to easily assume prior roles and the team’s cognitive structure does not need to be updated with each membership change event (e.g., Valentine & Edmondson, 2014). In addition, fluid teams that are more homogeneous in terms of team member age tend to promote more equal participation among team members (Paletz & Schunn, 2011), and teams with more centralized communication patterns tend to also experience better performance following the replacement of a team member than those with fully connected communication patterns, seemingly due to the robustness of transactive memory systems (Argote et al., 2018).

Variability in the length of individuals’ membership in the team and their prior experience working with one another are also related to fluid teams’ success. Huckman et al. (2009) found that teams in which members had worked together over a greater number of performance episodes and had greater role experience demonstrated better team performance. However, the variability in individuals’ length of membership also matters, as teams with higher variability in role experience appear to experience worse performance (Huckman & Staats, 2011). Similarly, high degree of turnover in top management teams is associated with increased environmental scanning behavior among remaining team members, particularly within teams with higher demographic diversity (Cho, 2006). Finally, some preliminary evidence suggests that team membership change may be beneficial for teams in early stages of development but may become more disruptive to teams in later stages (Hirst, 2009). Together, these articles suggest that teams with extensive prior experience are more resilient to changes in team membership, but variability among team members in terms of that experience may be detrimental to team functioning, particularly in longer standing teams.

Characteristics of organizations shaping the strength of team membership fluidity

Particularly for teams with high levels of fluidity that lack a stable internal structure, the organizational context in which the team is situated can have a substantial impact on the extent to which team membership changes are perceived as highly disruptive to team success. For example, Chandler and colleagues (2005) found that highly fluid teams in organizations at a more advanced stage of development perform better than teams in less developed (and, therefore, less stable) organizations. In addition, the embedding cultural context can affect individuals’ preference for and ability to cope with high levels of team fluidity. In particular, teams that operate within collectivistic cultures appear to have more difficulty working in highly fluid teams (Harrison et al., 2000).

The impact of team membership fluidity may also be determined by organizational strategy. For example, organizations often implement temporary worker arrangements to improve organizational flexibility and reduce costs (Foote, 2004; Plomp et al., 2019), and although this type of structure can benefit the team when roles are bounded and stable (Valentine & Edmondson, 2014), individuals tend to perceive their temporary teammates as less likely to engage in extra-role behavior (Ang & Slaughter, 2001). Furthermore, high levels of temporary teammate turnover can reduce team performance, particularly when temporary teammates are replaced by novice organizational members (De Stefano et al., 2019). Thus, temporary turnover arrangements appear to do more harm than good, particularly for teams with less stable and bounded team roles.

Summary and integration

Studies of concurrent team member entry and departure have demonstrated that, over time, team membership change can have both positive and negative effects on team functioning. As this category of research involves multiple distinct team membership change “events,” research examining individual-level factors has focused on the similarity between entering and departing team members. Specifically, studies in this category have found that teams in which entering and departing team members are more similar experience better outcomes following membership change. In teams that experience high levels of team fluidity, team characteristics including stable and well-defined team roles, team demographic homogeneity, centralized team communication, and shared prior team experience are all positively related to team functioning. The embedding organizational context also shapes teams’ experience of concurrent team member entry and departure; teams operating in organizations that are at earlier stages of development are situated in more collectivistic (vs. individualistic) cultures, and implement temporary worker arrangements are all more likely to experience negative outcomes following team member entry and departure.

Advancing Future Research on Team Membership Change “Events”

Our review and synthesis of empirical research on team membership change leaves little room to doubt the importance of such changes for team functioning. In many ways, these streams of research reflect a “new era for team research” (Mathieu et al., 2014, p. 460) characterized by an integration of the fundamentally dynamic nature of teams. However, we also observed that studies of team membership change are progressing in three relatively independent directions with researchers studying team member entry, team member departure, and team membership fluidity, with little integration across areas. In reality, these streams of research are examining a similar phenomenon (i.e., team membership change) and, thus, could benefit from the use of a common framework with which to reconcile the somewhat mixed findings related to the benefits (e.g., Choi & Thompson, 2005; Nemeth & Ormiston, 2007) and drawbacks (e.g., Groysberg et al., 2008; Parise et al., 2006) of team membership change events. Toward these ends, we suggest five key advancements for future research on team membership change.

First, to build a more integrated stream of research on team membership change, we suggest that future studies leverage the terminology offered by event-based perspectives by articulating the factors that determine the “novelty,” “disruptiveness,” and/or “criticality” of team membership change events. Although these terms are not prevalent within the extant literature, a careful examination of prior work reveals that many of the factors under investigation (e.g., newcomer proactive personality, socialization practices, departing team member expertise) are, in fact, shaping team membership change event strength through these three dimensions. In addition, we observed that across the different streams of research, similar types of factors are related to each of the dimensions of event strength. Therefore, in the following paragraphs, we integrate across the three categories of research on team membership change to develop exemplar propositions about the factors that appear to shape the novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality of team membership change events.

Novel team membership change events involve new and/or unexpected changes. Across the three areas of research, we identified a number of factors that appear to shape the novelty of team membership change events. For example, teams may grow accustomed to functioning with a particular trait configuration, making the entry of a new team member with distinctive traits a highly novel event (Joardar et al., 2007; Kammeyer-Mueller et al., 2011; Phillips et al., 2009). However, when teams are given information about an incoming team member’s traits in advance, they tend to perform better (Levine et al., 2005), suggesting that providing team members with information about what to expect can reduce the novelty of a team membership change event. Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest prior experience with team membership change can improve team performance by reducing the novelty of additional membership change events (Ahmed et al., 2019; Huckman & Staats, 2011; Huckman et al., 2009). Together, these findings suggest that team membership change events are appraised as more novel when factors at the individual, team, and organization levels reduce team members’ awareness of or openness to alternative membership arrangements.

Proposition 1: Factors that enhance a team’s familiarity with and openness toward a team membership change event can decrease the novelty of the event.

Disruptive team membership change events require adjustments to ongoing team processes, relationships, norms, and/or mental models. Team membership change events are inherently disruptive, requiring that teams adapt to some extent (Lewis et al., 2007). However, across the three areas of research, we observed commonalities with regard to the factors that diminish the disruptiveness of a team membership change event. For example, the entry of a new team member who is proactive (Li et al., 2011), has prior experience working in teams (Beus et al., 2014), and feels empowered (Chen, 2005) requires less direct attention and instruction from incumbent team members and reduces the need for the team to alter their own ongoing processes. Likewise, organizations that implement knowledge repositories and succession planning tactics reduce the need for teams to ensure that knowledge loss is minimized during a team departure event (Pee et al., 2014), allowing teams to continue leveraging accumulated team knowledge. In fluid teams, the organizational tenure of team members can reduce the disruptiveness of team membership change events by expanding the team’s access to resources and improving their ability to effectively adapt their team strategy (Kuypers et al., 2018). Taken together, research suggests that factors allowing teams to continue pursuing goals and capitalizing on accumulated experience reduce the disruptiveness of team membership change events.

Proposition 2: Factors that allow teams to capitalize on prior experiences after a team membership change event can decrease the disruptiveness of the event.

Critical team membership change events involve the loss or gain of key resources, a change in team goals and pursuits, or a change in leadership. Across research areas, we find factors at the individual and team levels producing an over-reliance on individual team member contributions appear to increase the criticality of team membership change events. For example, the entry of a new team member who is highly skilled in a task-critical domain (e.g., creativity and innovation) contributes substantially to the team’s human resources but, consequently, may drive team members to rely heavily on their abilities (e.g., Choi & Thompson, 2005; Nemeth & Ormiston, 2007). Similarly, teams composed of members with highly differentiated and/or nonredundant skills or knowledge (e.g., Droege & Hoobler, 2003; Summers et al., 2012), social capital (e.g., Christian et al., 2014; Joe et al., 2013; Shaw et al., 2005), and/or leadership responsibilities (e.g., Hale et al., 2016; Kacmar et al., 2006) are prone to experience highly critical team membership change events if the departing team member is particularly important in any of these domains. In the same vein, teams that maintain centralized communication structures (Argote et al., 2018), stable role structures (Valentine & Edmondson, 2014), and low interdependence (Davis et al., 2014) are less affected by the idiosyncrasies of entering or departing team members, thereby decreasing criticality of a team membership change events. In combination, these findings suggest that factors at individual (e.g., personality, skills, responsibilities) and collective (e.g., communication and role structures) levels that create an unbalanced reliance on individual team member contributions appear to increase the criticality of certain team membership change events.

Proposition 3: Factors that create unbalanced reliance on individual team members can increase the criticality of a team membership change event.

Second, we recommend that researchers consider the ways in which event novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality may interact with one another to shape team functioning. For example, a new team member may possess important task-relevant skills and abilities, but that same newcomer may also have low motivation to learn. Leveraging our framework, we could characterize this newcomer entry event as both highly critical (due to the newcomer’s skills and abilities) and highly disruptive (due to the newcomer’s lack of motivation). Our review also revealed that a single factor (e.g., organizational socialization tactics) can impact more than one dimension of event strength (e.g., novelty and disruptiveness). Indeed, Morgeson and colleagues (2015) recognize that far from being mutually exclusive, the dimensions of novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality are “all . . . present in varying amounts in every event” (p. 522). Therefore, future researchers should seek to clarify how multilevel factors impact team membership change event strength overall by considering how the dimensions of novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality may interact additively, compensatorily, or multiplicatively.

Proposition 4: The dimensions of novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality each contribute to the strength of a particular team membership change event; thus, interactions between these dimensions will have a more extreme impact on membership change events than these effects in isolation.

Finally, we recommend that researchers model the downstream effects of team membership change events over time and across conceptual levels of the organization. As demonstrated throughout our review, researchers often consider the implications of team membership change for individuals (e.g., Ashforth et al., 2007) and teams (e.g., Gillespie et al., 2013). However, most of the research we reviewed did not consider the outcomes of team membership change events at multiple levels of observation, particularly organization-level outcomes. In reality, changes in team membership not only impact team functioning but may also have downstream effects on individuals and the organization as a whole. For instance, a team member departure event may precipitate changes in the team’s transactive memory system, which may be costly for individual task performance in the short-term but may improve team performance (and, perhaps, organizational performance) in the long-term. Thus, we suggest that future research would benefit from specifying the ramifications of team membership change events across conceptual levels of the organization.

Proposition 5: Team membership change events not only impact team functioning but may also have downstream effects for individuals and organizations.

Conclusion

Changes in team membership are prevalent and often inevitable in teams. As we illustrate in this review, approaching the study of team membership change through an event-based perspective supports a common lexicon and theoretical framework through which different areas of research on team membership change can be integrated. We hope this conceptual review serves as a foundation for future research that uncovers the crucial factors across individual, team, and organizational levels that shape the impact of team membership change on team functioning.

Supplemental Material

GOM_Supp_material – Supplemental material for Team Membership Change “Events”: A Review and Reconceptualization

Supplemental material, GOM_Supp_material for Team Membership Change “Events”: A Review and Reconceptualization by Hayley M. Trainer, Justin M. Jones, Jacob G. Pendergraft, Cynthia K. Maupin and Dorothy R. Carter in Group & Organization Management

Footnotes

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) #80NSSC18K0511 and U.S. Army Research Institute (ARI) Contract #W911NF1920173.

ORCID iDs

Hayley M. Trainer

Cynthia K. Maupin

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Associate Editor: Lucy L. Gilson

Author Biographies

Hayley M. Trainer, M.S. is a PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia. Hayley received her B.A. in Psychology at Duke University and her M.S. in Social and Organizational Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include dynamic team membership and composition, multiteam systems, and social network approaches to studying teams.

Justin M. Jones, M.S. is a PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia. Justin received his B.A. in Psychology at Quinnipiac University and his M.S. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at Western Kentucky University. His research interests include quantitative teams research methodology, temporal dynamics, and team cognition.

Jacob G. Pendergraft is a PhD student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Georgia. Jacob received his B.A. in Psychology at the University of Georgia. His research interests include the drivers of success in high reliability teams and multiteam systems, and strategies to foster adaptability in those systems.

Cynthia K. Maupin, PhD is an assistant professor of Organizational Behavior and Leadership and Fellow for the Bernard M. & Ruth R. Bass Center for Leadership Studies at Binghamton University. Cynthia received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Missouri and her M.S. and PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Georgia. Her research leverages a network-based perspective to explore effective team and leadership processes within complex systems.

Dorothy R. Carter, PhD is an assistant professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at The University of Georgia. Dr. Carter’s research focuses on the antecedents and outcomes of leadership and teamwork processes in complex organizational systems. Her current research program is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Army Research Institute (ARI). Dr. Carter earned her B.S. in Psychology from Wright State University in Dayton OH and her M.S. and PhD in Psychology from The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA.

References

Ahmed

Poole

M. S.

Pilny

(2019). Stability of membership and persistence in teams: Impacts on performance. Group Dynamics Theory, Research, and Practice, 23, 156–169.

Akgün

A. E.

Byrne

Keskin

Lynn

G. S.

Imamoglu

S. Z.

(2005). Knowledge networks in new product development projects: A transactive memory perspective. Information & Management, 42, 1105–1120.

Ang

Slaughter

S. A.

(2001). Work outcomes and job design for contract versus permanent information systems professionals on software development teams. MIS Quarterly, 25, 321–350.

Argote

Aven

B. L.

Kush

(2018). The effects of communication networks and turnover on transactive memory and group performance. Organization Science, 29, 191–206.

Arrow

McGrath

J. E.

(1995). Membership dynamics in groups at work: A theoretical framework. Research in Organizational Behavior, 17, 373–373.

Ashforth

B. E.

Sluss

D. M.

Saks

A. M.

(2007). Socialization tactics, proactive behavior, and newcomer learning: Integrating socialization models. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 70, 447–462.

Baard

S. K.

Rench

T. A.

Kozlowski

S. W.

(2014). Performance adaptation: A theoretical integration and review. Journal of Management, 40, 48–99.

Bauer

T. N.

Bodner

Erdogan

Truxillo

D. M.

Tucker

J. S.

(2007). Newcomer adjustment during organizational socialization: A meta-analytic review of antecedents, outcomes, and methods. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92, 707–721.

Bedwell

W. L.

Wildman

J. L.

DiazGranados

Salazar

Kramer

W. S.

Salas

(2012). Collaboration at work: An integrative multilevel conceptualization. Human Resource Management Review, 22(2), 128–145.

10.

Bell

S. T.

Brown

S. G.

Colaneri

Outland

(2018). Team composition and the ABCs of teamwork. American Psychologist, 73(4), 349–362.

11.

Benishek

L. E.

Lazzara

E. H.

(2019). Teams in a new era: Some considerations and implications. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1006.

12.

Beus

J. M.

Jarrett

S. M.

Taylor

A. B.

Wiese

C. W.

(2014). Adjusting to new work teams: Testing work experience as a multidimensional resource for newcomers. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35, 489–506.

13.

Bunderson

J. S.

van der Vegt

Sparrowe

R. T.

(2014). Status inertia and member replacement in role-differentiated teams. Organization Science, 25, 57–72.

14.

Bushe

G. R.

Chu

(2011). Fluid teams: Solutions to the problems of unstable team membership. Organizational Dynamics, 40(3), 181–188.

15.

Chandler

G. N.

Honig

Wiklund

(2005). Antecedents, moderators, and performance consequences of membership change in new venture teams. Journal of Business Venturing, 20, 705–725.

16.

Chen

(2005). Newcomer adaptation in teams: Multilevel antecedents and outcomes. Academy of Management Journal, 48, 101–116.

17.

Chen

Klimoski

R. J.

(2003). The impact of expectations on newcomer performance in teams as mediated by work characteristics, social exchanges, and empowerment. Academy of Management Journal, 46, 591–607.

18.

Chen

N. Y. F.

J. F.

Tjosvold

Lin

(2008). Effects of team goal interdependence on newcomer socialization: An experiment in China. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38, 198–214.

19.

Cho

T. S.

(2006). The effects of executive turnover on top management team’s environmental scanning behavior after an environmental change. Journal of Business Research, 59, 1142–1150.

20.

Choi

H. S.

Thompson

(2005). Old wine in a new bottle: Impact of membership change on group creativity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 98, 121–132.

21.

Choi

Lee

Yoo

(2010). The impact of information technology and transactive memory systems on knowledge sharing, application, and team performance: A field study. MIS Quarterly, 34, 855–870.

22.

Christian

J. S.

Pearsall

M. J.

Christian

M. S.

Ellis

A. P.

(2014). Exploring the benefits and boundaries of transactive memory systems in adapting to team member loss. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 18, 69–86.

23.

Cooper-Thomas

Anderson

Cash

(2012). Investigating organizational socialization: A fresh look at newcomer adjustment strategies. Personnel Review, 41, 41–55.

24.

Cooper

Rockmann

K. W.

Moteabbed

Thatcher

S. M. B.

(in press). Integrator or gremlin? Identity partnerships and team newcomer socialization. Academy of Management Review. https://journals.aom.org/doi/pdf/10.5465/amr.2018.0014

25.

Davis

Fodor

A. E.

Pfahl

Stoner

(2014). Team interdependence and turnover: Evidence from the NFL. American Journal of Business, 29, 276–292.

26.

Delobbe

Cooper-Thomas

H. D.

De Hoe

(2016). A new look at the psychological contract during organizational socialization: The role of newcomers’ obligations at entry. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37, 845–867.

27.

DeRue

D. S.

Hollenbeck

J. R.

Johnson

M. D.

Ilgen

D. R.

Jundt

D. K.

(2008). How different team downsizing approaches influence team-level adaptation and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 51, 182–196.

28.

Dess

G. G.

Shaw

J. D.

(2001). Voluntary turnover, social capital, and organizational performance. Academy of Management Review, 26(3), 446–456.

29.

De Stefano

Bonet

Camuffo

. (2019). Does losing temporary workers matter? The effects of planned turnover on replacements and unit performance. Academy of Management Journal, 62, 979–1102.

30.

Dineen

B. R.

Noe

R. A.

(2003). The impact of team fluidity and its implications for human resource management research and practice. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management, 22, 1–38.

31.

Droege

S. B.

Hoobler

J. M.

(2003). Employee turnover and tacit knowledge diffusion: A network perspective. Journal of Managerial Issues, 15, 50–64.

32.

Ellis

A. M.

Bauer

T. N.

Mansfield

L. R.

Erdogan

Truxillo

D. M.

Simon

L. S.

(2015). Navigating uncharted waters: Newcomer socialization through the lens of stress theory. Journal of Management, 41, 203–235.

33.

Foote

D. A.

(2004). Temporary workers: Managing the problem of unscheduled turnover. Management Decision, 42, 963–973.

34.

Gillespie

B. M.

Gwinner

Chaboyer

Fairweather

(2013). Team communications in surgery—Creating a culture of safety. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 27, 387–393.

35.

Gorman

J. C.

Amazeen

P. G.

Cooke

N. J.

(2010). Team coordination dynamics. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, 14, 265–289.

36.

Groysberg

Lee

L. E.

Nanda

(2008). Can they take it with them? The portability of star knowledge workers’ performance. Management Science, 54, 1213–1230.

37.

Guthrie

J. P.

(2001). High-involvement work practices, turnover, and productivity: Evidence from New Zealand. Academy of Management Journal, 44(1), 180–190.

38.

Hale

Ployhart

Shepherd

(2016). A two-phase longitudinal model of a turnover event: Disruption, recovery rates, and moderators of collective performance. Academy of Management Journal, 59(3), 906–929.

39.

Hansen

Levine

J. M.

(2009). Newcomers as change agents: Effects of newcomers’ behavioral style and teams’ performance optimism. Social Influence, 4(1), 46–61.

40.

Harrison

G. L.

McKinnon

J. L.

Chow

C. W.

(2000). Cultural influences on adaptation to fluid workgroups and teams. Journal of International Business Studies, 31, 489–505.

41.

Hausknecht

J. P.

(2017). Collective turnover. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 527–544.

42.

Hausknecht

J. P.

Holwerda

J. A.

(2013). When does employee turnover matter? Dynamic member configurations, productive capacity, and collective performance. Organization Science, 24, 210–225.

43.

Hausknecht

J. P.

Trevor

C. O.

(2011). Collective turnover at the group, unit, and organizational levels: Evidence, issues, and implications. Journal of Management, 37, 352–388.

44.

Hirst

(2009). Effects of membership change on open discussion and team performance: The moderating role of team tenure. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 18, 231–249.

45.

Hollenbeck

J. R.

DeRue

D. S.

Nahrgang

J. D.

(2015). The opponent process theory of leadership succession. Organizational Psychology Review, 5, 333–363.

46.

Holtom

B. C.

Mitchell

T. R.

Lee

T. W.

Eberly

M. B.

(2008). 5 turnover and retention research: A glance at the past, a closer review of the present, and a venture into the future. The Academy of Management Annals, 2, 231–274.

47.

Hom

P. W.

Lee

T. W.

Shaw

J. D.

Hausknecht

J. P.

(2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102, 530–545.

48.

Huckman

R. S.

Staats

B. R.

(2011). Fluid tasks and fluid teams: The impact of diversity in experience and team familiarity on team performance. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 13, 310–328.

49.

Huckman

R. S.

Staats

B. R.

Upton

D. M.

(2009). Team familiarity, role experience, and performance: Evidence from Indian software services. Management Science, 55, 85–100.

50.

Humphrey

S. E.

Aime

(2014). Team microdynamics: Toward an organizing approach to teamwork. The Academy of Management Annals, 8, 443–503.

51.

Ilgen

D. R.

(1999). Teams embedded in organizations: Some implications. American Psychologist, 54, 129.

52.

Joardar

Kostova

Ravlin

E. C.

(2007). An experimental study of the acceptance of a foreign newcomer into a workgroup. Journal of International Management, 13, 513–537.

53.

Joe

Yoong

Patel

(2013). Knowledge loss when older experts leave knowledge-intensive organisations. Journal of Knowledge Management, 17, 913–927.

54.

Kacmar

M. K.

Andrews

M. C.

Van Rooy

D. L.

Chris Steilberg

Cerrone

(2006). Sure everyone can be replaced . . . but at what cost? Turnover as a predictor of unit-level performance. Academy of Management Journal, 49, 133–144.

55.

Kammeyer-Mueller

Wanberg

Rubenstein

Song

(2013). Support, undermining, and newcomer socialization: Fitting in during the first 90 days. Academy of Management Journal, 56, 1104–1124.

56.

Kammeyer-Mueller

J. D.

Livingston

B. A.

Liao

(2011). Perceived similarity, proactive adjustment, and organizational socialization. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 78, 225–236.

57.

Kammeyer-Mueller

J. D.

Wanberg

C. R.

(2003). Unwrapping the organizational entry process: Disentangling multiple antecedents and their pathways to adjustment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 779–794.

58.

Kane

A. A.

(2010). Unlocking knowledge transfer potential: Knowledge demonstrability and superordinate social identity. Organization Science, 21, 643–660.

59.

Kane

A. A.

Argote

Levine

J. M.

(2005). Knowledge transfer between groups via personnel rotation: Effects of social identity and knowledge quality. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 96, 56–71.

60.

Kane

A. A.

Rink

(2015). How newcomers influence group utilization of their knowledge: Integrating versus differentiating strategies. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 19, 91–105.

61.

Katz

Kahn

(1966). The social psychology of organizations. John Wiley & Sons.

62.

Kozlowski

Bell

(2013). Work groups and teams in organizations. In Schmitt

Highhouse

(Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Industrial and organizational psychology (Vol. 12, pp. 412–469). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

63.

Kuypers

Guenter

van Emmerik

(2018). Team turnover and task conflict: A longitudinal study on the moderating effects of collective experience. Journal of Management, 4, 1287–1311.

64.

Levine

J. M.

Choi

H. S.

(2004). Impact of personnel turnover on team performance and cognition. In Salas

Fiore

S. M.

(Eds.), Team cognition: Understanding the factors that drive process and performance (pp. 153–176). American Psychological Association.

65.

Levine

J. M.

Moreland

Argote

Carley

K. M.

(2005). Personnel turnover and team performance. United States Army Research Institute for the Behavioral Sciences.

66.

Lewis

(2004). Knowledge and performance in knowledge-worker teams: A longitudinal study of transactive memory systems. Management Science, 50, 1519–1533.

67.

Lewis

Belliveau

Herndon

Keller

(2007). Group cognition, membership change, and performance: Investigating the benefits and detriments of collective knowledge. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103, 159–178.

68.

Gevers

J. M.

(2018). Dynamics between member replacement and team performance: The role of members’ relative attributes. Applied Psychology, 67, 61–90.

69.

Liang

Q. Z.

Zhang

Z. Z.

(2016). The effect of humble leader behavior, leader expertise, and organizational identification on employee turnover intention. Journal of Applied Business Research, 32, 1145–1156.

70.

Tong

Cao

Ehrlich

Lin

Y. R.

Buchler

(2015, May). Replacing the irreplaceable: Fast algorithms for team member recommendation. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 636–646). ACM.

71.

Harris

T. B.

Boswell

W. R.

Xie

(2011). The role of organizational insiders’ developmental feedback and proactive personality on newcomers’ performance: An interactionist perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96, 1317–1327.

72.

Major

D. A.

Turner

J. E.

Fletcher

T. D.

(2006). Linking proactive personality and the Big Five to motivation to learn and development activity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 927–935.

73.

Marks

M. A.

Sabella

M. J.

Burke

C. S.

Zaccaro

S. J.

(2002). The impact of cross-training on team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 3–13.

74.

Mathieu

J. E.

Hollenbeck

J. R.

van Knippenberg

Ilgen

D. R.

(2017). A century of work teams in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102, 452–467.

75.

Mathieu

J. E.

Tannenbaum

S. I.

Donsbach

J. S.

Alliger

G. M.

(2014). A review and integration of team composition models: Moving toward a dynamic and temporal framework. Journal of Management, 40, 130–160.

76.

Mathieu

J. E.

Wolfson

M. A.

Park

(2018). The evolution of work team research since Hawthorne. American Psychologist, 73, 308–321.

77.

Maynard

M. T.

Kennedy

D. M.

Sommer

S. A.

(2015). Team adaptation: A fifteen-year synthesis (1998–2013) and framework for how this literature needs to “adapt” going forward. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 24, 652–677.

78.

McGrath

J. E.

Arrow

Berdahl

J. L.

(2000). The study of groups: Past, present, and future. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4, 95–105.

79.

Messersmith

Lee

Guthrie

J. P.

(2013). Turnover at the top: Executive team departures and firm performance. Organization Science, 25, 776–793.

80.

Morel

Ramanujam

(1999). Through the looking glass of complexity: The dynamics of organizations as adaptive and evolving systems. Organization Science, 10(3), 278–293.

81.

Moreland

R. L.

Levine

J. M.

(2002). Socialization and trust in work groups. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 5, 185–201.

82.

Moreland

R. L.

Levine

J. M.

(2014). Socialization in organizations and work groups. In Turner

M. E.

(Ed.), Groups at work (pp. 83–126). Psychology Press.

83.

Morgeson

F. P.

Mitchell

T. R.

Liu

(2015). Event system theory: An event-oriented approach to the organizational sciences. Academy of Management Review, 40, 515–537.

84.

Mortensen

Haas

M. R.

(2018). Perspective—Rethinking teams: From bounded membership to dynamic participation. Organization Science, 29, 341–355.

85.

Mowday

R. T.

(1984). Strategies for adapting to high rates of employee turnover. Human Resource Management, 23, 365–380.

86.

Nemeth

C. J.

Ormiston

(2007). Creative idea generation: Harmony versus stimulation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 524–535.

87.

Nyberg

A. J.

Ployhart

R. E.

(2013). Context-emergent turnover (CET) theory: A theory of collective turnover. Academy of Management Review, 38(1), 109–131.

88.

Pagliaro

Brambilla

Sacchi

D’Angelo

Ellemers

(2013). Initial impressions determine behaviours: Morality predicts the willingness to help newcomers. Journal of Business Ethics, 117, 37–44.

89.

Paletz

S. B.

Schunn

C. D.

(2011). Assessing group-level participation in fluid teams: Testing a new metric. Behavior Research Methods, 43(2), 522–536.

90.

Parise

Cross

Davenport

T. H.

(2006). Strategies for preventing a knowledge-loss crisis. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47, 31–38.

91.

Pee

L. G.

Kankanhalli

Tan

G. W.

Tham

G. Z.

(2014). Mitigating the impact of member turnover in information systems development projects. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 61, 702–716.

92.

Phillips

K. W.

Liljenquist

K. A.

Neale

M. A.

(2009). Is the pain worth the gain? The advantages and liabilities of agreeing with socially distinct newcomers. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 336–350.

93.

Plomp

Tims

Khapova

S. N.

Jansen

Bakker

(2019). Psychological safety, job crafting, and employability. A comparison between permanent and temporary workers. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 974.

94.

Rink

Kane

A. A.

Ellemers

van der Vegt

(2013). Team receptivity to newcomers: Five decades of evidence and future research themes. Academy of Management Annals, 7, 247–293.

95.

Rink

F. A.

Ellemers

(2009). Temporary versus permanent group membership: How the future prospects of newcomers affect newcomer acceptance and newcomer influence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 764–775.

96.

Saks

A. M.

(1995). Longitudinal field investigation of the moderating and mediating effects of self-efficacy on the relationship between training and newcomer adjustment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 80, 211–225.

97.

Saks

A. M.

Ashforth

B. E.

(2000). Change in job search behaviors and employment outcomes. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 56(2), 277–287.

98.

Saks

A. M.

Uggerslev

K. L.

Fassina

N. E.

(2007). Socialization tactics and newcomer adjustment: A meta-analytic review and test of a model. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 70, 413–446.

99.

Savelsbergh

C. M.

Poell

R. F.

van der Heijden

B. I.

(2015). Does team stability mediate the relationship between leadership and team learning? An empirical study among Dutch project teams. International Journal of Project Management, 33, 406–418.

100.

Shaw

J. D.

Duffy

M. K.

Johnson

J. L.

Lockhart

D. E.

(2005). Turnover, social capital losses, and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 48, 594–606.

101.

Smith

L. G.

Amiot

C. E.

Callan

V. J.

Terry

D. J.

Smith

J. R.

(2012). Getting new staff to stay: The mediating role of organizational identification. British Journal of Management, 23, 45–64.

102.

Smith

L. G.

Gillespie

Callan

V. J.

Fitzsimmons

T. W.

Paulsen

(2017). Injunctive and descriptive logics during newcomer socialization: The impact on organizational identification, trustworthiness, and self-efficacy. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38, 487–511.

103.

Stuart

H. C.

(2017). Structural disruption, relational experimentation, and performance in professional hockey teams: A network perspective on member change. Organization Science, 28(2), 283–300.

104.

Summers

J. K.

Humphrey

S. E.

Ferris

G. R.

(2012). Team member change, flux in coordination, and performance: Effects of strategic core roles, information transfer, and cognitive ability. Academy of Management Journal, 55, 314–338.

105.

Tan

K. W.

A. K.

Cooper-Thomas

H. D.

S. S.

(2016). The effect of learning goal orientation and communal goal strivings on newcomer proactive behaviours and learning. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89, 420–445.

106.

Tannenbaum

S. I.

Mathieu

J. E.

Salas

Cohen

(2012). Teams are changing: Are research and practice evolving fast enough? Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 5, 2–24.

107.

Valentine

M. A.

Edmondson

A. C.

(2014). Team scaffolds: How meso-level structures enable role-based coordination in temporary groups. Organization Science, 26, 405–422.

108.

van Der Vegt

Bunderson

Kuipers

. (2010). Why turnover matters in self-managing work teams: Learning, social integration, and task flexibility. Journal of Management, 36, 1168–1191.

109.

Wanberg

C. R.

Kammeyer-Mueller

J. D.

(2000). Predictors and outcomes of proactivity in the socialization process. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 373–385.

110.

Wang

Zhang

Thomas

C. L.

Spitzmueller

(2017). Explaining benefits of employee proactive personality: The role of engagement, team proactivity composition and perceived organizational support. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 101, 90–103.

111.

Wegner

D. M.

(1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In Mullen

Goethals

G. R.

(Eds.), Theories of group behavior (pp. 185–208). Springer-Verlag.

112.

Wimmer

Backmann

Hoegl

(2019). In or out? Exploring the inconsistency and permeability of team boundaries. Small Group Research, 50, 699–727.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.20 MB