Playing Offense vs. Defense: The Effects of Team Strategic Orientation on Team Process in Competitive Environments

Anita Williams Woolley ()
Additional contact information
Anita Williams Woolley: Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

Organization Science, 2011, vol. 22, issue 6, 1384-1398

Abstract: Organizations increasingly rely on teams to formulate plans and respond in critical situations. However, current models of team process are insensitive to the effects of team strategic orientation. This paper expands existing work on team process and strategic orientation to introduce and explicate the constructs of offensive and defensive strategic orientations in teams. It takes advantage of a rare opportunity to observe eight counterterrorism teams in the intelligence community that explicitly adopted an offensive or defensive strategic orientation in evaluating terrorist threats. The resulting inductive model suggests that the strength of a team's strategic orientation was enhanced or inhibited by its perception of oppositional strength and the problem scope it assumed in confronting the adversary. This in turn had effects on the work strategy the teams adopted, the extent to which they relied on internal versus external knowledge, and the norms for effort that evolved within the teams. The observations suggest broader theoretical implications for research on teams, as the “offense” and “defense” strategic orientations influence fundamental team processes related to effort, performance strategy, and use of member knowledge and skill.

Keywords: team strategic orientation; outcome focus; process focus; collective information processing; team process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0617 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:22:y:2011:i:6:p:1384-1398

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().