Team Adaptation to Discontinuous Task Change: Equity and Equality as Facilitators of Individual and Collective Task Capabilities Redevelopment

Alex Ning Li (), Elad N. Sherf () and Subrahmaniam Tangirala ()
Additional contact information
Alex Ning Li: Department of Management & Leadership, Neeley School of Business, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas 76129
Elad N. Sherf: Organizational Behavior Area, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599
Subrahmaniam Tangirala: Department of Management and Organization, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742

Organization Science, 2023, vol. 34, issue 3, 1287-1314

Abstract: Teams often need to adapt to planned discontinuous task change or fundamental alteration of tasks, tools, and work systems. Although team adaptation theories have made substantive progress in explaining how teams can respond to change, they have not adequately considered the unique impact that discontinuous task change can have on teams. Such change can render not only collective but also individual task capabilities obsolete and necessitate a multilevel task relearning process. Drawing on the team compilation model, we suggest that adaptation to discontinuous task change is akin to team (re)development. We posit that teams are more effective when they approach discontinuous task change by first focusing on the rebuilding of individual task capabilities and only later shifting their attention to the rebuilding of team-level task capabilities. Moreover, we argue that the uncertainty caused by discontinuous task change makes reward fairness salient such that equity and equality in rewards are particularly useful in motivating members to (re)develop individual and collective task capabilities, respectively. We provide support for these arguments using survey, qualitative, and archival data from 115 manufacturing teams and discuss the implications of our findings for both research and practice.

Keywords: team adaptation; resilience; task change; justice; temporal dynamics; equity; equality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1621 (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:34:y:2023:i:3:p:1287-1314

Access Statistics for this article

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