A Research Of Team Intentionality And Its Influence On Team Adaptation

Organizations are embedded in the environment with fierce competition and constant change.In order to responde to the environmental changes in time to gain competitive advantages,organizations have to rely on flexible and efficient structures.Therefore,teams are widely used as the basic work unit in modern organizations to complete tasks,and accordingly,team adaptation to dynamic environment has become one of the most important topics in the new century.This problem is usually treated as the same with the problem "what can team members do to maintain team function in dynamic environment".That means most of the existing studies on team adaptation were not discussing about "team adaptation" but "individual adaptation".This research is an effort to bring it back to team itself,and discuss what team will do to respond to changes so that the function can meet the requirement of novel environment.Therefore,this research built on the theory of collective intentionality and proposed an agent-based team adaptation model to provide a potential influential framework to understand the problem.To specify it,this research included four sub-studies to make argument and to examine the above idea.The first study analyzed team adaptation based on the argument of team intentionality.The second study discussed the characteristics and observable instances of team intentionality.The third study examined relationship between team intentionality and shared cognition mechanism for achiving team adaptation.The last study examined relationship between team intentionality and distributed cognition mechanism for achieving team adaptation.Study 1 proposed the construct of team intentionality based on theory of collective intentionality,and argued that team was the constructed social reality instead of workplace where individual members do their jobs.Theory of collective intentionality is the frontier theory for interpreting collective actions.The main argument of collective intentionality theory is that collective action cannot be explained by individual intentionality,but intentionality should be ascribed to collectives in order to explain collective actions.Accordingly,Study 1 proposed the construct of team intentionality based on clarifying its reference and function as well as its role in construction of adaptive teams.Besides,Study 1 also discussed the relationship between team intentionality and team adaptation.Based on Study 1's theoretical analysis,Study 2 further demonstrated the facts of team intentionality and developed the measurement for it accordingly.With the data of ten software development teams,results showed that the referent of "team" both in daily language and during the task execution was not a workplace but a socially constructed reality that had certain functions."Team" is built based on team intentionality that manifests as shared intention,interactive relationship,and goal directedness.In teams with high intentionality,members view themselves as part of the whole team,holding consensus on team target,task,action plans and standards,having good private relationship and work relationship with each other,emphasizing on key points so that team can integrate limited resources to solve the problem when confronting with changes.The measurement of team intentionality was developed based on the above argument and observable manifestations with the suggested procedures for scale development.On the basis of proposing and argument of the team intentionality construct,this research further discussed the relationship between team intentionality and team adaptation with two main team cognition mechanisms.Study 3 was an experiment study.This study examined the adaption of shared mental model when task changed,and the relationship between team intentionality and adaptation of shared mental model with a two-phase experiment.Results showed that shared mental model updating was the mediator of team intentionality and team adaptive strategy.Study 4 examined the role of distributed cognition mechanism.Production teams that experienced equipment replacement were selected as the target sample.This study adopted a field study design to prove the mediation effect of transactive memory system.Besides,the relationship was found to be more significant for highly interdependent tasks.These four sub-studies covered both theoretical analysis and empirical examinations with both qualitative and quantitative methods,and examined the agent-based view of team adaptation with multiple samples.Theoretically,this research described the nature of team agent through proposing the team intentionality construct,thus providing a theoretical perspective which was more suitable for analyzing team adaptation or even team behavior.Secondly,this research integrated and developed previous studies on team adaptation,and discussed different situations with different tasks.Lastly,this research examined the dynamic change of team cognition through empirical studies.Practically,this research provided suggestions for team managers on training content,knowledge integration approaches and task-based resource allocations.