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Abstract: In the modern digitized business environment, organizations are facing continual transformation in response to threats and opportunities. Team-an essential component of organizations-has evolved from an intact social system characterised by clear boundaries and differentiated roles to an emergent social system with fluidity in various aspects. To better understand fluidity in the team context, we review the previous literature and reconstruct the meaning of team fluidity. We define team fluidity as a team state characterized by team membership change, shorter team member tenure, unclear team boundary, and emergent team structure. We hope that an integrated understanding of team fluidity can shed light on both management theories and practices.
Keywords: Team fluidity, Agility, Organisational structure, Construct development
1Introduction
In a recent survey of over 1,300 CEOs from the world's leading organizations, forty-one percent of CEOs anticipate that their organization will be substantially transformed over the next three years in response to threats and opportunities arising from new technologies, sophisticated customer needs, and constantly emerging competitors (KPMG, 2016). They consider fostering innovation as the top strategic priority. To address the needs of innovation for sustained competitive advantages, organizations are pursuing enterprise agility, an organisational ability to quickly respond to market changes and opportunities that aim to create and preserve business value (Sambamurthy et al., 2003). In other words, organizations strive to develop fast and appropriate responses at both the strategic and operational level so that they can adjust their business models, including social and technological structures to survive and thrive. Organizations move away from a traditional hierarchical structure and gravitate toward a team-based structure. A recent study indicates team interactions and communications have increased by 50% over last two decades, which for many companies, means more than three-quarters of an employee's day (Cross et al., 2016). For instance, Netflix is adopting tools such as intuition engineering and chaos engineering in their eight engineering teams to harness such complexities (Renaudin, 2016). Similarly, Spotify configures the organization structure based on tightly bonded small core units called squad. Squads with different development foci, when combined, bring new ideas and spark innovation. Moreover, squad members belong to other larger formal and informal teams, such as Chapters, Tribes, and Guilds, to build a sharing understanding of tasks and teams (Kniberg and...