Conceptualizing Team Disruption Through an Event-System Framework

Abstract

The success of work teams is often contingent on how they handle disruption. Although research has examined how teams respond to disruptive events, there is surprisingly little clarity about the nature of team disruption as a construct. Through an integration of Event-System Theory (EST) with team-based theories and frameworks, we define team disruption in terms of misalignment of team member coordination relative to task demands due to shifts in coordination, task demands, or both. We describe how event novelty and criticality create team disruption, and explore the temporal and spatial conditions under which team disruption is promoted or mitigated. The proposed conceptualization of team disruption offers a unifying definition of the construct that complements existing research on team adaptability, membership change, team interventions, and related approaches. The framework offers a way to understand past research in new ways, provides specific directions for future research, and contributes actionable guidance for practice.