ABSTRACT
Historically speaking, the focus on organizational teams has ebbed and flowed in synchronicity with ongoing changes in our world. When needed by organizations or society in general, research on teams and the phenomena that surround them are the focus of frantic observation and exploration. However, when attention is once again redirected toward societies’ latest pressing problems, concern for teams is minimal at best. This pattern has played itself out time and again over the last century as team research has been driven by highly publicized tragic events (e.g., World War II, Florida airlines crash into the Potomac River, the September 11 tragedy, Columbia Shuttle disaster), organizational changes (e.g., flattened hierarchies, distributed human resources, self-managing work teams), and technological innovations (e.g., computers, collaboration software, networks) but is, by comparison, relatively dormant the rest of the time.
