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Team Work Design

Background

“A definition and structure of a team’s tasks, goals, and members’ roles; and the creation of organizational support for the team and link to the broader organizational context” (Morgeson & Humprhey, 2008, p. 46).

Team work design involves deliberately structuring team tasks and allocating responsibilities to improve how individuals interact and collaborate.

Signs that indicate a team might benefit from a team work design intervention include passivity, lack of innovation, task uncertainty, and/or role ambiguity. This is especially true if there is high task interdependence in the work.

Relevant Readings

  • Handke, L., Klonek, F. E., Parker, S. K., & Kauffeld, S. (2020). Interactive effects of team virtuality and work design on team functioning. Small Group Research, 51(1), 3–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496419863490
    • Handke et al. (2019) review 48 studies on virtual teams to investigate how team work design influences the impact of members being remote on team functioning.
  • Morgeson, F. P., & Humphrey, S. E. (2008). Job and team design: Toward a more integrative conceptualization of work design. In Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management (Vol. 27, pp. 39–91). Emerald (MCB UP). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-7301(08)27002-7
    • Morgeson and Humphrey (2008) review literature on work design, integrating job and team design research. They define work design, identify outcomes, and discuss their integrative model, which involves task, social, and contextual characteristics.
  • Williams, H. M., Parker, S. K., & Turner, N. (2010). Proactively performing teams: The role of work design, transformational leadership, and team composition. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 83(2), 301–324. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317910X502494
    • Williams, Parker, and Turner (2010) investigate team proactive performance in a UK chemical processing plant. They find that teams with higher self-management, transformational leaders, and proactive personalities were the most proactive.