Call for papers Organizational Psychology Review

The Challenges of Working With “Real” Teams: Challenges, Needs, and Opportunities
Special Issue Call for Papers
 

Dr. Marissa L. Shuffler & Dr. Matthew Cronin
Special Issue Co-Editors

Prospective authors are encouraged to first submit an abstract (consisting of a maximum of 1000
words) to determine fit, relevance, and potential for inclusion. Abstracts will be received and
reviewed up to July 31, 2018.
Manuscript submissions are due November 15, 2018.

The prevalence of teams in organizations has continued to rise in order to leverage the power of many to achieve goals beyond what an individual can accomplish alone (Hackman, 2011). At the same time, increasing contextual complexities make it that much harder to understand how such teams work effectively. While having identifiable boundaries, stable membership, single team membership, and the ability to verify through agreement statistics that team level factors are valid and reliable are all desirable, that is rarely the world in which real teams work. Factors such as technology, globalization, and “grand challenges” intentionally or accidentally create new structures, skill requirements, and forms of interactions that may be changing the nature of teamwork as we know it (Shuffler, Jimenez, & Kramer, 2015). For example, there is growing interest in streamlining team development interventions for specialized teams and multiteam systems, such as long duration spaceflight, that are limited in sample size and in high demand (Bell, Fisher, Brown, & Mann, 2016). Futhermore, increased fluidity of teams may make it difficult to even know who is on a team being studied at a given time (Bushe & Chu, 2011). Given changing organizational dynamics in response to real world demands, teamwork research itself must continue to adapt (Bienefeld & Grote, 2013). Thus teams researchers continue to face a fundamental challenge: how to best balance the tradeoffs of helping “real” teams while also conducting sound research (Kozlowski, 2015).

Purpose of Special Issue
New contexts for teamwork demand new and legitimate ways to study them. We thus invite proposals for new and innovative ways with which to study teams when we cannot rely on the traditional methods. 

The full call is available here