LAUSR

Teams play a central role in the most innovative (Ahmadpoor and Jones, 2019), safety critical (Salas et al., 2020), and economically impactful work (Duhigg, 2016). They pervademodern organizations and drive performance outcomes (LePine et al., 2008; Hughes et al., 2016) and worker well-being (Welp and Manser, 2016; Mathieu et al., 2017). Consequently, researchers across a broad array of disciplines have focused on teams as an object of inquiry. Understanding and improving team functioning is a complex multi-level scientific problem, and, over the decades, much has been learned (Salas et al., 2018). The science of teams comprises a broad and deep knowledge base of both theory and empirical evidence, including topics such as structural inputs to team performance (e.g., team member composition, organizational context, effects of technology) and team interaction processes and emergent states (e.g., leadership, communication, mutual trust, collective efficacy). However, while the science of teams is strong, much remains to be discovered–especially from a temporal perspective. Calls for dynamic views of teams are not new (Cronin et al., 2011), but the field is shifting in numerous theoretical and methodological ways. The confluence of driving forces magnifying in intensity (i.e., modern work becoming more collaborative) and restraining forces reducing in intensity (i.e., traditional, resource-intensive measurement methods giving way to new unobtrusive, embedded metrics) allows for the science of teams to explore new directions in the dynamics of teams. This new phase of team science is concerned with the temporality of teams: how teams evolve and mature, and how team dynamics play out over time. Accordingly, the purpose of this special issue is to offer current theory and research that describes the state of temporality in team science thus far, identifies future research needs, and highlight impactful insights for practice. The articles in this special issue represent work across the broad spectrum of research incorporating time in new ways. In this commentary, we identify eight themes in dynamic approaches to teams, and highlight how articles in this special issue exemplify these trends in the field (See Table 1). More specifically, we note that dynamics are impacting the fundamental theory and methods of the science of teams (Themes 1–4), the types of team phenomena being investigated (Themes 5–6), and application of team science in context (Theme 7) and to interventions that promote team effectiveness (Theme 8).