TEAM CHANGE ADAPTATION: EFFECTS OF PLANNED AND IMPROVISED TEAM PROCESSES

Abstract

Despite considerable scholarly efforts to understand how teams effectively adapt to a change event, most prior studies have focused on factors predicting short-term performance after change and have rarely examined team adaptation processes in a longitudinal setting. In this research, I explore important team characteristics (i.e., team goal orientations) that influence team performance during both the immediate and recovery phases of team change adaptation. To develop a richer theory of team adaptation, I pay particular attention to two types of adaptation processes - team planned and improvised processes - and theorize how they uniquely and complementarily influence team adaptive performance. The theoretical model was tested in two research setting – a field survey (Study 1) and a laboratory experiment (Study 2). Findings suggest that team learning orientation promotes both types of adaptation processes, whereas team performance-prove orientation only leads to planned adaptation processes. As predicted, teams with high performance-avoid orientation are less likely to engage in any adaptation processes. Moreover, this study demonstrates that the two adaptation processes have differential effects on team performance after a team change: improvised adaptation processes disrupt team performance immediately after a team change, whereas planned adaptation increases team performance only in the long term. I discuss contributions of this study to the team adaptation and goal orientation literatures.