Conceptualizing Team Disruption Through an Event-System Framework

Perspectives on Team Disruption

Although the term disruption is widely discussed in the team literature, it is conceptualized in a number of different ways. Table 1 provides a summary of definitions prior research has used to discuss team disruption. The table shows there is no consensus among the definitions about what constitutes team disruption. Perhaps more surprisingly, in no instance is team disruption precisely defined as a construct in its own right. For example, disruption has been described as flux—“the team’s ability to convert inputs to outcomes via variation in coordination mechanisms” (Summers et al., 2012, p. 317), even though such a capacity covers aspects of team effectiveness that extend beyond just disruption (Mathieu et al., 2008). Disruption has been compared to interruption—“actual or perceived ‘time outs’ from normal activity” (Zellmer-Bruhn, 2003, p. 516), even though interruptions to normal activity may not necessarily interfere with the team’s task. Disruption has been discussed as a consequence of change that teams adapt to, without the content of disruption being specified (Lepine, 2003, 2005). Disruption has also been identified in response to team membership change or transitions (e.g., Li & Van Knippenberg, 2021). For example, Hale et al. (2016) identify disruption as a team-level consequence of individual-level turnover events, and consider disruption to represent a sudden and negative change in collective knowledge, routines, and relationships. Disruption has been considered to constitute alterations to the performance environment (Sanchez-Manzanares et al., 2020), even though change in and of itself does not necessarily constitute disruption. Disruption has also been operationalized as the degree of change in the “team’s ability to get its work done” (Morgeson & DeRue, 2006, p. 278). Finally, as we have noted, disruption has been posited as a “change in usual activities” (Morgeson et al., 2015).

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Table 1.

Representative Samples of Team Disruption Definitions.

Date	Authors	Definition
2006	Morgeson & DeRue	Degree of change in “the team’s ability to get its work done” and “the team’s normal way of responding.” (278)
2012	Summers et al.	“Flux in coordination does not describe converting inputs to outcomes, but rather, a team’s ability to convert inputs to outcomes via variation in coordination mechanisms.” (317)
2015	Morgeson et al.	“Disruption reflects a discontinuity in the environment, where the external situation has somehow changed.” (521)
2016	Hale et al.	“A turnover event depletes or disrupts the unit’s capacity for action; thus, it typically produces lower collective performance.” (907)
2020	Sanchez-Manzanares et al.	“We define the magnitude of the disruption as the extent to which the characteristics of a team’s performance environment are altered over time” (843)
2021	Li & Van Knippenberg	“Membership change initially disrupts team cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal processes and states (e.g., transactive memory systems, coordination) and lowers team performance as a consequence of such disruption.” (584)
2023	Li et al.	“The more intense the discontinuous task change, the greater the likelihood that teams’ existing capabilities will be mismatched with the new task demands” (1290)

Thus, despite its widespread usage, the literature has yet to provide a clear understanding of what is actually being disrupted in teams. First, many studies do not define what is meant by disruption. Second, many studies do not operationalize precisely what is being disrupted. Third, many studies do not measure disruption, but rather infer disruption took place based on changes (usually reductions) to team performance (e.g., Hale et al., 2016). Overall, as Table 1 illustrates, prior conceptualizations of disruption have frequently invoked the construct of disruption without defining its nature, relationships, or measurement. Development of a consistent yet generalizable understanding of team disruption is important for theory and practice. Theoretically, unspecified use of the term “disruption” contributes to the jingle-jangle fallacy, which means that current conceptualizations of disruption apply different meanings to the construct, and a handful of constructs get at disruption without actually identifying it as such (see Raetze et al., 2022). Practically, unspecified use of the term “disruption” prohibits making clear evidence-based recommendations to best adapt to nonroutine events. In the following section we address these issues by introducing a definition of team disruption.

Defining Team Disruption

Our definition of team disruption—the misalignment of team member coordination relative to task demands due to shifts in coordination, task demands, or both—addresses the above issues by capturing aspects of disruption that are both generalizable and team-specific. First, we emphasize that team disruption is understood in terms of misalignment between team coordination relative to the team’s task. Misalignment implies that the manner in which team members coordinate is a “mismatch” with the team’s task and purpose (Gokpinar et al., 2010; Li et al., 2023, p. 1290). Misalignment is central to the concept of team disruption because the balance and stability of a team’s functioning relies on team processes being coordinated around accurate information about task demands (Arrow et al., 2000; Summers et al., 2012). For instance, shared mental models would cease to be useful towards task accomplishment if they converged around inaccurate depictions of important systems and processes (Mohammed et al., 2010; Santos et al., 2021). Likewise, team communication would lose its usefulness if the information being shared no longer applied to the criteria for accomplishing the team’s goals (Butchibabu et al., 2016; Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009; Salas et al., 2005). These instances of misalignment are the direct result of an event-based change—within the team or within the environment around the team—and show that team disruption represents the imprint on team coordination left by that event.

To appreciate the generalizability of the proposed definition of team disruption, it is instructive to consider commonplace definitions. Merriam-Webster define disruption as “the act or process of disrupting something; a break or interruption in the normal course or continuation of some activity, process, etc.” (Disruption, n.d.., Merriam-Webster). Cambridge Dictionary defines disruption as “the action of preventing something, especially a system, process, or event, from continuing as usual or as expected.” (Disruption, n.d., Cambridge Dictionary). A consistent feature of these definitions is that the “normal” process is no longer appropriate due to the introduction of some event. Such an understanding assumes that the process was reasonably aligned beforehand and became misaligned after an event. Likewise, the generation of appropriate team outputs is only possible when team processes stem from an accurate understanding of the team task (Ilgen et al., 2005). This is why aspects of teamwork regarding planning (Fisher, 2014) and charters (Courtright et al., 2017; Mathieu & Rapp, 2009) are critical to a team’s success—aligning the task environment with a team’s actions is a necessity for actualizing team goals.

Second, we identify coordination as the focal within-team construct of team disruption. Coordination is the process of “orchestrating the sequence and timing of interdependent actions” (Marks et al., 2001, p. 367). The role of coordination in teams is to allow different team members’ actions to converge around a common set of goals (Salas et al., 2007). Teams coordinate by synchronizing both their thoughts and actions through tacitly shared experience and purposeful episodes of communication (Rico et al., 2008). The end result of effective coordination is the interconnecting of multiple team processes (Salas et al., 2005). Our explicit emphasis on coordination is perhaps the most powerful insight from the proposed definition. It is well-recognized that teams represent a confluence of different factors, such as composition, emergent states and processes, behavioral routines, subgrouping, diversity, and structural design features (Mathieu et al., 2019). While all of these factors are important, their contributions to task completion all intersect at team coordination (Okhuysen & Bechky, 2009; Salas et al., 2005). Team coordination is what allows the different aspects of teams to operate in tandem at a collective level to produce task-related outcomes that could not have been produced at the individual level. Thus, major theories of teams recognize that coordination is central to team effectiveness and performance (e.g., Arrow et al., 2000; Kozlowski & Chao, 2012; Marks et al., 2001; Mathieu et al., 2008; Salas et al., 2005).

Because coordination involves the interconnectedness of so many processes, when a team faces problems with even a single process (e.g., planning or conflict management; Fisher, 2014), disruption to team coordination is often the immediate consequence (Summers et al., 2012). For instance, when a mission goes terribly wrong in a short span of time, police teams have been shown to swiftly lose their ability to communicate information accurately, causing their coordination to buckle under the immense pressure of the changing situation (Schakel et al., 2016). Similarly, Weick (1988) depicts how crisis situations undermine cognitive processing and subsequently harm the functionality of team coordination mechanisms.

Team coordination is both highly sensitive to change and highly impactful for team outcomes, making disruptions to team coordination a pivotal concept when discussing team performance (LePine et al., 2008). Team coordination often acts as a critical mechanism through which different team inputs (e.g., team structure; Johnson et al., 2006) lead to better team performance (Moon et al., 2004). Coordination also allows for better performance during periods of heightened stress (Entin & Serfaty, 1999), and is the difference between success and failure for teams tasked with utilizing exceptional levels of knowledge (Reagans et al., 2016). Thus, we argue that coordination is the team characteristic needed to conceptualize team disruption.

Third, the definition of team disruption generalizes across many different types of teams and task environments. No matter the differentiation of skills, authority, or temporal stability (Hollenbeck et al., 2012), coordination will be at the heart of orchestrating a team’s interdependent processes. Across different types of structural interdependencies (i.e., task vs. outcome interdependence; Courtright et al., 2015) and different forms of team composition (Mathieu et al., 2014), coordination remains a central mechanism through which teams must function effectively. Therefore, when significant changes occur, no matter the type of team, disruption will consist of misalignment involving coordination relative to the team’s task demands.

Fourth, the definition of team disruption applies regardless of the type of event (novel, critical), the spatial features of the event (i.e., internal, external), or the temporal features of the event (Morgeson et al., 2015). The misalignment inherent to team disruption can emerge when changes to the team are unprecedented, or they can emerge when change is of a high priority (Morgeson & DeRue, 2006). Misalignment can also occur due to change in either the external task environment, the internal facets of the team itself, or both (Christian et al., 2017). Also, even if change occurs over a particularly long or short period of time (Waller, 1999), or happens at a particularly convenient or inconvenient point in time (LePine, 2005), misalignment is still possible. However, while the definition of team disruption stays consistent across different types of events, the magnitude of team disruption varies greatly based on the novelty and criticality of events—topics we consider next.

Proposition 1

Team disruption occurs to the extent that an event creates misalignment between team coordination and the team’s task demands.

Events and Misalignment

Team disruption is created when novel and/or critical events cause misalignment between the team’s coordination and task demands. The more critical and/or novel the event, the greater the magnitude of team disruption. Critical and/or novel events create significant changes for teams that alter the information and resources relevant to how teams coordinate around task demands (Li & Van Knippenberg, 2021; Liu et al., 2023a). Highly novel events create change that is unprecedented to team members while critical events create change that induces a sense of priority for team members (Morgeson, 2005; Morgeson & DeRue, 2006; Morgeson et al., 2015). Team coordination is based on mechanisms that are impacted by the effects of novel and critical events. For instance, shared mental models will become outdated due to the unprecedented information introduced into the task environment by novel events (Marks et al., 2000). Alternatively, leader directives that often guide coordination will be potentially ineffective following a change in priorities due to a critical event (Edmondson, 2003). Although novel and critical events influence misalignment through different mechanisms, it will be shown that both event criticality and event novelty increase the magnitude of misalignment, thereby creating team disruption (see Figure 1).OPEN IN VIEWER

Event Timing

Teams must be able to take actions toward goals and dynamically change course towards those goals when needed (Burke et al., 2006). As such, the path towards goal achievement consists of recurring episodes aimed at understanding the team context, and then actually performing as a team (LePine et al., 2008; Schmutz et al., 2018). Marks et al. (2001) taxonomize this episodic timeline by dividing it into two distinct phases—action and transition. During the action phase, team members monitor different requirements for task completion, and coordinate their interdependent actions around task demands (Klein et al., 2006). As such, action phases are best fit for handling real-time, anticipated changes involving critical components of the task environment (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). During the transition phase, teams specify goals, analyze their mission, and formulate strategy (Fisher, 2014; Mathieu & Rapp, 2009). Transition phases are thus best fit for acquiring and processing new information about changes that may occur in the team and their task environment (Kennedy & McComb, 2014).

Since different phases of team processes involve distinct foci (i.e., transition phases focus on preparation, while action phases focus on task completion), the way in which events influence a team will depend on the phase that team is in (LePine, 2005). As such, transition and action phases make teams sensitive to different types of events. Thus, the timing of events is central to team disruption because the misalignment between coordination and task demands can be much greater depending on when the event occurs. Coordination is a process that primarily occurs during the action phase, because coordination involves the orchestration of the different team behaviors aimed at task completion (Marks et al., 2001). For example, surgical teams spend an extraordinary amount of time within an action phase, and are able to do so because of their extensive ability to seamlessly coordinate (see Luciano et al., 2018). However, the capacity for coordination is, in part, driven by the information and knowledge gleaned from the transition phase (Okhuysen & Waller, 2002). Thus, when a strong event occurs, team disruption will be dependent on whether coordination is underway during an action phase, or being planned during a transition phase. This means the impact of critical and/or novel events on team disruption will vary based on whether an event occurs during an action or transition phase. These conditional relationships are explained below and illustrated in Figure 2.OPEN IN VIEWER

The Rate of Event Change

Although we have discussed the temporal aspect of events in terms of their timing, such an approach does not fully account for the dynamic nature that many events exhibit. Events often create disruption because their impact is not static but, rather, changes rapidly (Liu et al., 2023a). EST accounts for the dynamism of events by describing how “as they unfold upon their inception, events may become more or less novel, disruptive, and critical...their overall strength can change over time” (Morgeson et al., 2015, p. 528).

Although not situated within a team-specific context, one might consider the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001 to be an event that escalated profoundly within a matter of minutes, as the situation shifted dramatically between the first plane hitting the twin towers and the second. This type of event left U.S. employees in a state of disbelief and panic (Stein & Cropanzano, 2011; Wade-Benzoni, 2002). Two temporal features lie at the core of why an event like the 9/11 terrorist attacks were so disruptive. First, the attack and the subsequent fatalities happened over a relatively short period of time. Second, there was an extremely large degree of change in both novelty and criticality upon the second plane hitting. Combined, large changes to the rapidity and magnitude of novelty and criticality make for an event prone to blindsiding the system and people that it impacts.

Within teams specifically, the rate at which an event changes can increase the misalignment between coordination and task demands. As we have established, misalignment occurs when a novel and/or critical event impacts a team. Since events can be dynamic (Morgeson et al., 2015), we would expect misalignment to be dynamic as well. While we have already posited that event novelty and criticality contribute to misalignment, the rate of change in novelty and criticality contributes in its own unique way, parallel to how the duration of an event has its own separate effect on disruption (Morgeson & DeRue, 2006). For instance, teams in high-stakes environments often deal with events that emerge rapidly and change unpredictably (Klein et al., 2006). Success in these settings is often reliant on whether the team’s coordination can keep up with such dynamic events (Faraj & Xiao, 2006). Indeed, while team effectiveness relies on the capacity for teams to coordinate around critical and novel events, coordinating around dynamism is in and of itself an important indicator of effectiveness (e.g., Grote et al., 2018; Larson et al., 2020; Schecter et al., 2018; Uitdewilligen et al., 2018). In terms of team disruption, this means that not only do criticality and novelty influence misalignment, but the rate of change in those characteristics also influences misalignment.

Perhaps the most seminal example of the influence of the rate of event change comes from Weick (1993), who illustrates for readers the stark change in pace of the Mann Gulch fire disaster. The event—a forest fire—changed so rapidly and unexpectedly for the fire responders that Weick (1993) describes it as a “sudden loss in meaning” (633). Ultimately, the situation progressed at a rate too high for the coordinated efforts of the responders to react properly. Importantly, the misalignment that proved fatal for the team was not a product of simply the criticality of the forest fire or its novelty, but the swiftness in which the situation changed. Thus, the rate of change had a unique effect distinct from simply the magnitude of event novelty and criticality. In this way, it’s entirely possible that events with low magnitudes of criticality or novelty can be disruptive if the magnitudes are changing quickly (cf., Chen et al., 2011, for a similar argument about job attitudes). What matters, as far as the rate of change is concerned, is that the team is unable to keep up with the change in novelty and/or criticality, creating misalignment.

It is also worth noting that rapid change in event criticality or novelty can be increasing or decreasing, and both forms can be disruptive. A critical or novel event may manifest a rapid decline, and such change (while negative) may nevertheless introduce disruptions for the same reasons noted above. Therefore, both positive or negative rapid changes can be disruptive, with the relative importance of increases versus decreases likely dependent on the nature of the phenomenon and event. Thus, we posit the following:

Proposition 5

Higher rates of change in event criticality and/or novelty increase team disruption more than lower rates of change.

In developing Proposition 5, we focus on change in a singular event. However, events like 9/11 or the Mann-Gulch fire could also be considered a series of events occurring in rapid succession leading up to eventual disruption. Indeed, Morgeson et al. (2015) acknowledge that, although EST treats events as “discrete occurrences,” many events can “occur closely within space and time” (531). Thus, events like 9/11 or the Mann-Gulch disaster can appear as either one continuous event or a swift series of discrete events; the structure of events ultimately relies on the idiosyncratic lens of the people perceiving them (Allport, 1954). In other words, events are defined by the meaning given to them (Morgeson et al., 2015). For instance, while turnover is often considered a single event, the unfolding model of turnover fractalizes the turnover event into many different discrete events (Lee & Mitchell, 1994). However, regardless of whether a single event ebbs and flows or there are a number of interconnected discrete events, the proposed framework and propositions developed above should still hold because in both cases the event(s) are introducing change at a higher rate. No matter how team members view events (a singular event or many events in quick succession), the misalignment remains the same. On the other hand, differences in conceptualizing events across time will indeed impact the statistical modeling of their relationship with disruption and other outcomes—a point we revisit in the discussion section.

Team Disruption from Internal Origins

Events that have internal origins occur “within the team.” The internal event creates disruption such that the team’s coordination is misaligned with the team’s task. That is, a hallmark of an event that originates internally is that the team’s task does not change; there is only change to the team’s coordination. ¹ The effect on coordination is due to the event’s influence on team composition, structure, and/or emergent states and processes.

First, an internal event may originate due to changes in team composition. For example, the team may experience a turnover event from one of its members. When a team member leaves the team, it can create important gaps in the team’s mental models (Laulié & Morgeson, 2021; Li & Van Knippenberg, 2021). Both team member turnover and leader turnover can disrupt coordination, and the more central the person to the team’s coordination, the greater the disruption (Hale et al., 2016; Hausknecht & Holwerda, 2013; Summers et al., 2012). Alternatively, adding new members can affect coordination even if there is no turnover (Rink et al., 2013; Pinto, 2017). New members require assimilation into the team and must learn existing member roles, KSAOs, and tasks. Simultaneously, incumbent members need to assimilate new members, teach them their tasks, and learn their KSAOs. Li and Van Knippenberg (2021) provide a review and conceptual model of team membership change that clarifies how the loss or acquisition of team members can ultimately influence team coordination.

Second, an internal event may originate due to changes in team structure. For example, a turnover event will often impact the work distribution of those who remain (Reilly et al., 2014), thus requiring the team to coordinate in different ways (DeRue et al., 2008). Alternatively, even in the absence of turnover, acquiring new team members may result in new ways of transferring knowledge and affect the manner in which the team coordinates member inputs (Kane et al., 2005). Thus, structural changes in terms of numbers of team members, or their specific workloads or roles, can affect coordination and hence be disruptive (Humphrey & Aime, 2014). Internal events may also occur in the form of change to a team’s structural interdependence (Courtright et al., 2015). For example, Johnson et al. (2006) show that alterations to a team’s reward structure can impact a team’s capacity to share information. Additionally, Moon et al. (2004) find that changes in the way members are expected to work on tasks impacts team coordination and downstream performance.

Third, an internal event may originate due to changes in team emergent states and processes. For example, team members may engage in episodes of relational conflict that inhibit the coordinative benefits of transactive memory systems (Leenders et al., 2016; Todorova, 2021). Teams may also exhibit affective episodes that have downstream consequences for how the team functions (Liu et al., 2023a). Additionally, deviant actions enacted by members can end up impacting the team’s ability to operate effectively (Baur et al., 2022). Thus, changes in the collective cognition, affect, and behavior of a team (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006) can be disruptive via the influence on coordination.

Importantly, all three of these factors—team composition, team structure, and team states and processes—are related to changes in each other, but we theorize that any combination of these factors will ultimately influence team coordination and make it misaligned to the team task. For instance, events that impact employee withdrawal will likely also impact turnover (Hom & Kinicki, 2001). Similarly, membership changes may influence workload for other team members (Armstrong-Stassen et al., 2004) but also influence emergent states and processes. All such mediated relationships are theoretically interesting and worthy of investigation, but beyond the scope of this study. Rather, here we emphasize a broadly important insight: that any such event-based internal influence, no matter its pattern or complexity, will ultimately affect the team’s coordination such that it is misaligned from the team’s task. The team may then revise the task in response to the internal event, but task revisions are a consequence of coordination becoming misaligned.

Proposition 6

Events that originate internal to a team create disruption by impacting team composition, structure, or emergent states and processes, such that these factors cause the team’s coordination to change and become misaligned to the team’s task.

Team Disruption From External Event Origins

Events that have external origins are events whose novelty and/or criticality come from “outside the team.” In their ETC model, Ployhart et al. (2022) define the external team context as, “the resources, stimuli, elements, and features that are part of a broader multilevel system but exist outside the team’s boundaries, and that influence (and are influenced by) the team in temporally dynamic ways.” (1052). This external team context consists of resource munificence, temporal dynamism (i.e., how resources are changing), and spatial variability (i.e., where resources are located), which together comprise the complexity of the external task context (Ployhart et al., 2022). In contrast to events that originate internally, external events influence the team’s task. ²

Events in the external team context can change the team’s task and result in it being misaligned to the team’s coordination. In this situation the team’s coordination does not change but the team’s task has changed as a result of the event, thereby contributing to disruption. The team’s task is in large part shaped by the external team context (Mathieu et al., 2017). The task may be defined as a “network of required actions and information cues” (Haerem et al., 2015: 446) and for teams specifically, taskwork is often interdependent, meaning that “members depend upon one another for access to critical resources and to create workflows that require coordinated action” (Courtright et al., 2015, p. 4). Mathieu et al. (2017) emphasize that team tasks are a function of their scope and complexity. Much of the work on team adaptation has taken this perspective. For example, experimental research will often abruptly change the task (or task constraints), which requires the team to learn and respond in new ways (e.g., LePine, 2003, 2005). More generally, it is recognized that the external team context is a strong influence on the nature and complexity of the team task (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Mathieu et al., 2017; Ployhart et al., 2022). Drawing from Ployhart et al. (2022), we theorize that any combination of changes in munificence, temporal dynamism, and spatial variability will ultimately misalign the team’s task to the team’s coordination, and thus be disruptive.

Proposition 7

Events that originate external to a team create disruption by impacting the munificence, temporal dynamism, or spatial variability of the task environment, such that these factors cause the team’s task(s) to change and become misaligned to the team’s coordination.

Note that we have not made predictions about the relative magnitude of disruption created by internal versus external events. We have also not made predictions about the relationships between external and internal factors. We recognize events that originate external to the team can eventually impact internal factors, and vice versa. Additionally, external events and top-down effects are often theorized to be stronger than internal events and bottom-up effects (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000; Morgeson et al., 2015). Indeed, the multilevel influence of events is a primary focus of EST, and it’s widely understood that events can enact influence both bottom-up and top-down (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). The central point of Propositions 6 and 7, however, is to recognize that where the event originates dictates the process by which misalignment forms and disruption is created. Events that originate internally primarily impact coordination, while events that originate externally primarily impact the team’s task. While it is beyond the scope of this manuscript, there are opportunities in future research to better understand the multilevel process by which disruptive events span across internal and external team factors, and the relative impact of top-down and bottom-up processes.

Theoretical Implications

The conceptualization of team disruption offers a number of potentially important and broad-ranging theoretical implications. First, it provides focus and clarity around what specifically is meant by disruption in team contexts. While many existing theories and frameworks note that events cause disruption (Liu et al., 2023a), the treatment of disruption differs considerably in terms of content, theoretical development, and specificity. Indeed, Table 1 shows that disruption has been discussed in many different ways while eluding explicit definition within the context of teams. In contrast, by defining team disruption in terms of the misalignment between team coordination and the team’s task, this manuscript provides a means to understand the diverse ways in which prior research conceptualizes team disruption, and integrates the variety of prior terms into a more parsimonious and holistic understanding. Thus, the proposed conceptualization clarifies why and how team disruption differs from events or responses to events. In doing so, the definition offers a means to advance a new understanding of team disruption. For example, research that examines membership change (e.g., Li & Van Knippenberg, 2021) and responses to task changes (e.g., LePine, 2005) now have a common definition and conceptualization to reference each other’s work. Similarly, the concept of misalignment contributes to theories of team resilience by distinguishing what exactly leads to adversity as experienced at the team level (Stoverink et al., 2020). This conceptualization of team disruption therefore enables researchers to integrate and generalize their work to new areas, and may also promote meta-analyses to broaden their inclusion criteria.

Second, the proposed conceptualization asserts that coordination is the central process for understanding team disruption. We take the strong position that nearly all changes in team composition, emergent states and processes, or structure, only “matter” for team disruption to the extent they influence coordination. Such an assertion does not trivialize or diminish research that seeks to understand team composition, emergent states and processes, or structure. Research on these other team characteristics is important, and adds nuance and depth of understanding. For example, the model of team membership change offered by Li and Van Knippenberg (2021) adds nuance in the sense that membership change may create team disruption because of the impact on team cognition, affect, and behavior. Similarly, Summers et al. (2012) emphasize that membership change creates flux in coordination. They note that membership change disrupts team cognition, behavioral routines, and interpersonal processes. These insights are important. However, our broader point is that all such processes impact team coordination, and thus coordination is the means through which team disruption is understood. The benefit of this approach lies in its parsimony and generalizability. Team research will struggle to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of team disruption if one must consider dozens of potential states and processes. In contrast, our approach synthesizes the more distal causes of disruption and thus enables researchers who study different team phenomena to understand each other’s work. Of course, a challenge for future research is to determine whether team coordination is, by itself, a necessary and sufficient condition for understanding team disruption. Addressing this challenge will require both laboratory and field research, and should stimulate an active program of research.

Third, the proposed framework offers precision in terms of understanding how team disruption is affected by the types, timing, rate of change, and origin of events. The Propositions offer specific direction for future research, and the development of the Propositions offers guidance for generating testable hypotheses. Research should compare and contrast the effects of event type and event change. For example, a less novel event could produce greater disruption if it is changing rapidly, compared to a more novel event that is static. Similarly, an event could produce greater disruption if novelty emerges during an action phase versus during a transition phase. The Propositions thus stimulate a number of novel research questions that are united by a common dependent variable: team disruption defined in terms of misalignment between team coordination and the team’s task. Note that such an agenda offers a means to unite theories in new ways, including EST (Morgeson et al., 2015), or team membership (Li & Van Knippenberg, 2021), with the transition-action framework of Marks et al. (2001); as just some examples.

Directions for Future Research

Altogether, the team disruption framework presents a number of clear directions for future research, and the propositions can be developed into more specific and testable hypotheses, which we outline in Table 2. For example, the differences between the consequences of critical and novel events should be examined further. While criticality and novelty are considered theoretically distinct (Morgeson et al., 2015), many disruptive events tend to involve both characteristics to a significant degree. Thus, understanding the conditions under which criticality and novelty have isolated effects will further develop our understanding of event-based theory and team disruption. Additionally, research should theorize and test the relative differences in disruption caused by a single event changing versus a quick succession of multiple events. Even though observers may not distinguish between singular and multiple events (e.g., most people refer to “September 11th” rather than “when the first tower was hit”), the statistical modeling of such events can differ and may lead to unique insights. Indeed, one can use the discontinuous growth curve approach proposed by Bliese et al. (2017) and compare the effects of single versus multiple events. Similarly, research should examine whether events that are increasing have different consequences than events that are decreasing. We suspect the consequences of positive versus negative change will be highly dependent on the nature of the phenomenon and type of event. Another important direction for future research is to compare the relative consequences of events that originate internally versus externally. Multilevel theory suggests that effects should be stronger when they originate at higher levels (i.e., top-down) (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000), but such predictions may not hold when recognizing that external and internal events impact different processes (tasks and coordination; respectively). Thus, the team disruption framework can be used to generate many specific moderated and mediated hypotheses.

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Table 2.

Future Research Directions.

Research Direction	Examples	Entry Points
Distinguish between the effects of critical and novel events	• Explore the relative importance of critical versus novel events, in terms of creating misalignment. • Explore how event criticality and novelty interact in the creation of misalignment.	Summers et al., 2012; Hale et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2021
Examine consequences of events that increase in criticality/novelty and events that decrease in criticality/novelty	• Do events that have increasing novelty versus criticality produce different magnitudes of disruption? • What is more disruptive, the rate of event change or the direction of event change? • How might rate and direction of event change interact, to lead to different magnitudes of disruption?	Morgeson, 2005; Morgeson & DeRue, 2006; Kozlowski & Chao, 2012; Morgeson et al., 2015
Investigate the relative impact between a single event versus a quick succession of multiple events	• Are multiple successive events more or less disruptive than a single event? • Are multiple successive events of lesser criticality/novelty, more disruptive than a single event that is of greater criticality/novelty? • How do team members perceive, interpret, and make sense of multiple successive versus single events?	Bliese and Lang, 2016; Bliese et al., 2017
Consider the conditions under which the consequences of external and internal events differ	• Do internal or external events cause greater disruption? • Does the origin of the event interact with criticality or novelty, to create different magnitudes of disruption? • What analytical approaches can be used to statistically model bottom-up disruption from internal events?	Kozlowski & Klein, 2000; Hollenbeck et al., 2012; Ployhart et al., 2022
Measure misalignment between coordination and task demands	• Create self-report measures that capture team member perceptions of event novelty & criticality. • Create self-report measures that capture misalignment, coordination shifts, and/or task shifts following an event. • Examine whether measures of disruption provide greater prediction of team performance than event characteristics (i.e., the effects of event novelty and criticality scores on team performance are mediated by disruption scores).	Russel, 1982; Gokpinar et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2023b

The team disruption framework also suggests new measurement approaches. Rather than relying on changes to task performance, as is typical in team adaptability research (e.g., LePine, 2003), the framework suggests that team disruption can be more directly measured. For example, survey questions can be written to assess the degree to which team members believe (a) the task is changing, (b) team coordination is misaligned to the task, or (c) a combination of the two (i.e., perceived misalignment). Similarly, research on the Causal Dimension Scale (Russell, 1982) that is widely used in attribution research may prove a useful example for measuring events. In such an approach, respondents may be asked to report the event that they feel is causing the disruption, and then rate with Likert items the extent to which the event is perceived as critical and novel (as well as static or changing). With a framework for conceptualizing team disruption, it is possible to create such measures, assess the validity of their scores, and integrate them into existing analytical approaches (e.g., Bliese et al., 2017). In this manner, disruption is a construct that is measured, and the scores can be used to predict performance (rather than equating disruption with declines in performance).

Practical Implications

The team disruption framework we propose has potential implications for practice. First, recognizing what team disruption is enables leaders to better diagnose when it is happening, why, and how to respond. For example, of the wide variety of team composition, state, and process variables, leaders should prioritize the monitoring of team coordination relative to the task. Should team members leave or new members be added, the first priority for the team leader is to understand how coordination is changed. The leader may later consider how KSAOs, cohesion, and related constructs have changed, but the first priority is to understand the impact on coordination. Alternatively, if changes in the environment occur, then the first priority of the leader is to determine whether the team task has changed. Thus, the framework offers a means for leaders to prioritize their attention—specifically, on monitoring and ensuring alignment between task demands and coordination.

Second, the framework contributes to understanding when events are likely to be more disruptive. Novel events are particularly likely to be disruptive when the team is in the action phase, and critical events are particularly likely to be disruptive when the team is in the transition phase. Armed with such knowledge, team members and leaders can anticipate responses to disruption that are tailored to their particular phase.

Limitations and Boundary Conditions

This study has largely considered team disruption with the assumptions that teams are already formed, that team coordination and the task are reasonably aligned, that the team is reasonably well functioning, and that only a single event is disrupting the team. Each of these assumptions may be reconsidered, and to the extent the theorizing is conditional on the assumption, the Propositions may not hold. For example, in newly formed teams that have not yet aligned their coordination with the task, events may disrupt teams in ways different than proposed here. Likewise, a dysfunctional team may be disrupted for other reasons than those we develop. Finally, multiple events may occur at different times and interact with each other, and such interactions could distort the theorizing we present. We see all of these possibilities as interesting and deserving of future research. Therefore, future research should relax the assumptions and boundary conditions we adopt to determine the support and generalizability of the propositions.

Conclusion

Understanding the nature, causes, and consequences of team disruption is critical for research and practice. Prior research has not precisely defined or conceptualized the nature of team disruption, and thus leaves many important questions unaddressed. This study seeks to advance the team literature by proposing a conceptualization of team disruption that is parsimonious, yet reasonably comprehensive and generalizable. Our hope is that this new conceptualization leads to a more integrated understanding of team disruption and sheds light on an experience that so many team members share.