Momentum and friction in team interactions
Authors:   , Twemlow Melissa 
Published: January 2023

Many organizations are reorganizing themselves around teams, often self-managing teams, as the benefits are indispensable. These self-managing teams are obliged to collectively take responsibility for activities, such as monitoring goal progress, coordinating tasks, and proactively improving the team’s performance as well as the quality of their work. Yet, organizational scholars have largely disregarded how self-managing teams, such as agile teams, deal with this increased responsibility. This dissertation takes a profound look within teams by examining how they effectively engage in and interact around behavioral processes that are presumed to keep up the team’s performance. Central is the notion that peers and the way they react play a unique role in shaping the team’s functioning. Building on observational research of agile teams and their work, this dissertation offers insights into the momentum and friction caused by peer reactions over time. Throughout the dissertation, peer reactions are scrutinized when team members discuss team processes, communicate their proactive initiatives, and control their behavior or performance during team interactions.
In Chapter 2, I build on a five-month field study at an energy network company in the Netherlands. During this period, I explored how the members of three agile teams from the IT department responded to each other’s proactive initiatives intended to benefit the team. Shadowing their meetings and work in the office allowed me to show that peers formed cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions to the proactive initiatives of their team members based on their first judgements. Specifically, peers directed their response towards (1) belittling or (2) admiring the proactive team member, or (3) criticizing or (4) supporting the proactive initiative. In Chapter 3, I aimed to grasp which team processes are most important for teams to engage in during their daily coordination meetings. Based on the observation, recording, and coding of daily ‘stand-up’ meetings for 30 weeks, I captured the temporal dynamics of the processes discussed by two agile teams working at a large Dutch insurance company. These meetings appeared to be crucial moments for the team to interact about collectively working towards achieving their team goals. The findings revealed that transition processes were only positively associated with a higher meeting effectiveness during the early phases of performance episodes. However, in contrast to current theorizing, action processes appeared to negatively impact meeting effectiveness during late phases of performance episodes. Moreover, peers tend to agree with their fellow team member's remarks about coordination and monitoring but avoid disagreeing with them when they discuss planning and strategizing the team’s work. Chapter 4 continues to build on the 18-month field study at the Dutch insurance company, thereby focusing my attention on how peer control takes place during the interactions of the IT department’s five agile teams. Shadowing the teams and their (meeting) interactions allowed me to uncover three direct control tactics that members used to monitor each other’s performance and behaviors for the team. Studying the micro-dynamic peer control interactions revealed that Product Owners (1) confronted peers to quickly finish high-quality work for the customer, (2) provided peers unsolicited advice about how they should execute their work, and (3) directed peers. They legitimized their coercive control as they enjoyed information advantages and profited from the ambiguity of their role. Unexpectedly, peers responded perceptively to being controlled. They responded by taking conditional responsibility for the task at hand; when peers received unsolicited advice or instructions, they tended to agree; and directive statements were (sarcastically) laughed away. Overall, this dissertation stresses the need for studying how peers perceive and respond to their team members’ behavioral processes, as this will have considerable repercussions for how well the team performs.