A Stimulus-Based Model of the Team Adaptation Process: An Integrated Conceptual Review

As organizations face constant pressures to respond to changing situations and emergent demands, team members are frequently called upon to change their processes and routines and adapt to new ways of working together. In examining adaptation, most researchers have taken a behavior-driven approach where they collapse across the many types of adaptive demands teams face and rely on traditional input–process–outcome frameworks (e.g., Hackman, 1987; McGrath, 1984) to isolate specific behavioral responses. However, this perspective has resulted in several critical limitations. There are key differences in the way teams must collectively respond to different types of adaptive stimuli to be successful, and current research cannot account for or differentiate adaptive demands by stimulus type and needed responses. In this integrated conceptual review, we address these limitations and develop a novel, stimulus-based phase model of team adaptation. We examine studies across our newly developed stimulus detection, urgency identification, and duration assessment phases, and through the team’s adaptive response, adaptive performance, and learning from the experience. We integrate research within each phase of the adaptive process, highlighting factors that demonstrate what successful team adaptation “looks like,” and describe future avenues of research to address key issues within each phase.