Time and team cognition: Toward greater integration of temporal dynamics

Since the early 1990s, there has also been increased awareness of the role of time in various team phenomena and the importance of explicitly incorporating temporal dynamics in conceptual and empirical work (e.g., Arrow, Poole, Henry, Wheelan, & Moreland, 2004; Ballard, Tschan, & Waller, 2008; McGrath, 1991; Mohammed & Zhang, 2009). For example, groups have been characterized as complex systems that change systematically over time and exhibit processes with temporal patterns and nonlinear dynamics (Arrow et al., 2004). In addition, empirical findings from teams investigated only in the short term may not hold over time (type I error), and findings from longer-term teams may not occur in short-term teams (type II error; McGrath, Arrow, Gruenfeld, Hollingshead, & O’Connor, 1993). Therefore, a temporal focus should inform conceptual as well as methodological team research choices (Ballard et al., 2008).