Professor Sharon Parker talks about how leaders can use work design principles to assist their employees and colleagues to be well and thrive in their job roles. This video was filmed at the Victorian Workplace Mental Wellbeing Collaboration's Leadership Breakfast in February 2018 where Professor Sharon Parker was the keynote speaker.
What did we look at?
We reviewed 42 studies that tried to understand the role of “time” on team dynamics. With dynamics, we mean changes in the way that teams are interacting with each other over time. Furthermore, we looked at various types of "real" teams (surgical teams, flight crews, military teams, collaboration between online crowd-sourcing workers, but also research teams that go on Mars missions for multiple months).
Our goal was to better understand:
- What novel methods currently exist to study team dynamics?
- How do researchers think about "time" when they approach team dynamics?
- How can we help this field of research to move forward?
What did we find?
- Team dynamics have been studied with various methods, such as video-recordings teams while they are working on a task, analyzing logged online activities from virtual teams, or the use archival sports performance records from professional sport teams (e.g., NBA or ice-hockey).
- Team dynamics occur over significantly different time spans (spanning from seconds to multiple years) and dynamic shifts are often relevant for team effectiveness.
As an example, for micro team dynamics, the reviewed literature has shown that action teams change their interaction patterns when they face a crisis (this is often relevant in safety related contexts, such as aviation or nuclear power plant operators) .
As an example, for macro-dynamics, the reviewed literature has shown that dynamics of team resilience (i.e., the ability of a team to bounce back from an adverse event, e.g., when an important team members leaves the team) affects team performance trajectories over multiple months.
Who is going to really benefit from it?
- Our review is important for the larger scientific field of “team science” as we have outlined various methodological approaches (and how researchers can use them) which will help researchers in tracking how teams are operating while working on important tasks. Our research clarified how we can better study these complex social processes and how researchers can come up with more precise models that can tell when specific issues are going to arise within a team and what can be done about it.
- Our review is also important for organizations and people working in teams as our review shows that changes in interpersonal and task-related dynamics affect team performance. Furthermore, organizations learn that it is important to monitor both short-term and long-term team dynamics as this is crucial for the success of many team tasks (e.g., dealing with unexpected events when flying a plane, but also dealing with conflicts during a multi-month mission on Mars).
Read the full article by Florian Klonek here.
Seven Curtin University researchers, including ARC Laureate Fellow Sharon Parker, have been named among the world’s most influential scientists and social scientists in the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list released by the Web of Science Group.
The annual edition acknowledges world-class researchers for their exceptional research, which is demonstrated by their production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top one per cent by citations for field and year in Web of Science.
The 2019 list recognised more than 6,200 leading researchers in 21 sciences and social sciences fields around the world, including 23 Nobel laureates.
Australian research institutes continue to impress. The number of researchers recognized as Highly Cited has more than tripled in six years, from 80 in 2014 to 271 in 2019, among those selected in one or more of the 21 fields. Australian research institutions appear to have recruited a significant number of Highly Cited Researchers since 2014 as well as increasing their number of homegrown Highly Cited Researchers.
Curtin University Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Professor Garry Allison congratulated the Curtin researchers on being named among the world’s most influential researchers.
“It is particularly exciting to see ARC Laureate Fellow Professor Sharon Parker, Director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design based in Curtin’s Future of Work Institute, recognised as the University’s first non-science and engineering Highly Cited Researcher.”
Within the Economics and Business field, there are 113 highly cited researchers. Only 3 of these are based in Australia, Sharon Parker being the only female.
For more information about the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list, visit here.