MY PROJECTS

My dissertation draws from social networks and leadership perspectives to advance our understanding of team assembly – which I define as the goal-motivated, multi-step, and iterative process by which two or more potential team members interact to organize into nascent teams via formal and/or informal influence. Across three essays, I aim to redirect the conversation in the literature from who will become part of the team to how individuals assemble teams and place the individuals assembling teams and potential team members at the forefront of this research.

 

In Essay 1, I conducted an interdisciplinary integrative conceptual review of the team assembly literature to gain a better understanding of how people assemble into teams. My review identified four areas of confusion that have been hindering scholars’ efforts to advance team assembly research. To address these issues, I take the following steps: First, I use existing knowledge to establish a clear definition of team assembly (see above), and in doing so, address conceptual clarity issues. Second, I develop a network utilization framework for studying team assembly as a process in which individuals utilize their networks to assemble groups of potential team members. Third, I extend existing taxonomies to create a new leadership typology of team assembly processes. This typology explains the roles of leaders and followers in the team assembly process and introduces a novel type of process to assemble teams – Network-Leveraged Teams (NLTs). Fourth, I organize and synthesize the literature using the network utilization framework and the leadership typology to clarify what is currently known and unknown about team assembly and suggest several directions for future research.

 

In Essay 2, I seek to further explain how individuals assemble teams by using the network utilization framework I developed to study NLTs. In NLTs, leaders who lack formal authority use informal influence to recruit people from their network to join the team they are assembling. This framework utilizes network cognition and action thinking to explain that individuals assemble teams by activating (i.e., thinking of), mobilizing (i.e., reaching out to), and realizing (i.e., recruiting) potential team members from their networks. In particular, I focus on the role of the informal leader’s political skill in explaining differences in the network utilization process to assemble NLTs as well as the impact that the assembly process has on team processes and outcomes. I investigate these ideas in a sample of informally lead student project teams aiming to create a positive impact on others.

 

In Essay 3, I investigate how the status of informal leaders influences who they reach out to and successfully recruit to join their NLT. I use archival data from NCAA college football recruiting (i.e., scholarship offers made and accepted) to answer two related research questions. First, how does the status of informal leaders (i.e., coaches) influence the extent to which they are willing to take shots at mobilizing the most helpful potential team members, including those that may be unrealistic to recruit (i.e., realize)? Second, how does experienced threat (i.e., underperforming in comparison to expectations) alter informal leaders’ mobilization strategies (e.g., taking more unrealistic shots)? Finally, I examine the consequences for the overall quality of recruits realized by informal leaders, of different statuses, who assemble teams by shooting for the stars.