ABSTRACT
Judging from the increased reliance on teams in the workplace as well as the considerable theoretical and methodological progress being made in research, “it is the time for teams” (Harrison, Mohammed, McGrath, Florey, & Vanderstoep, 2003, p. 634, italics added). Yet team research has not given time the attention it deserves, as evidenced by virtually every major review of the team literature pointing to the need for more research on temporal issues in groups (e.g., Argote & McGrath, 1993; Cohen & Bailey, 1997; Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005; Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp & Gibson, 2008). For example, McGrath and Argote (2001) stated that one of the “major limitations of earlier work on groups, by scholars with both basic and applied interests is that groups have been studied as relatively static entities” (pp. 621-622). Even the popular input-process-output (IPO) framework that underlies much of the research on teams has frequently been criticized as being static, although it clearly implies a temporal progression as teams move from inputs to processes to outcomes (e.g., Ilgen et al., 2005; Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). Furthermore, time has been referred to as “perhaps the most neglected critical issue” in team research (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003, p. 364). Given that time in groups has been simultaneously regarded as ubiquitous, fundamental, and often ignored, it is worth considering how to reverse the “vicious cycle of neglect of temporal effects in substantive, conceptual, and methodological domains” (Kelly & McGrath, 1988, p. 86).
