The challenges of working with “real” teams: Introduction to the second installment

Abstract

We introduce the next two papers in our running special section on the challenges studying modern teams—those that may not have identifiable boundaries, stable membership, or members who belong only to that single team. Our perspective is that many of the assumptions about teams themselves are no longer correct, so rather than further exploiting our traditional approaches, the field should explore new or different ways to analyze the team experience. Thus, in these special sections, we present theoretical arguments made based on disciplined imagination and actual experience for why such new approaches are credible. This installment presents two papers that should enrich researchers’ sophistication in their ontological assumptions about teams. They are excellent complements to each other, as both are about questions of meaning and both have clear methodological implications for research design, but one zooms in to the nature of teams and the other zooms out to the nature of knowledge itself.