Team Coordination and Dynamics

Abstract

When people coordinate as a team, they accomplish more than they would working alone. These team-coordination effects give new meaning to Aristotle’s famous phrase, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In this article, I consider two central issues confronting team-coordination research: Do the causes of team coordination reside within individual minds or between them, and at what levels of analysis (e.g., physiological, cognitive) do team-coordination effects occur? These issues are viewed in light of specific lines of coordination research, and some features of a general theory of team coordination are offered.