Understanding the Change Trajectories of Team Transition and Action Processes Over Time: A Regulatory Focus Perspective

ABSTRACT Team transition processes (i.e., teams' evaluation and planning activities for goal accomplishment) and team action processes (i.e., teams' activities directly contributing to goal accomplishment) have been long conceptualized as dynamic; yet there has been little understanding of what drives team process dynamics and what results from it. Drawing on team development and team regulatory focus research, we examine the change trajectories of transition and action processes in temporally bounded teams and antecedents and consequences of such trajectories. We posit that deadlines for output delivery shift team members' attention and effort from conceptualizing project ideas and forming task structures to implementing project ideas and executing team tasks, thus rendering team transition processes to decrease and team action processes to increase over time. The extent to which transition processes decrease and action processes increase over time is determined by team regulatory focus, as team promotion focus sustains team effort for improvement and accomplishment over time and team prevention focus constrains it. Given that transition and action processes both contribute to team performance, teams that experience a less decrease in transition processes or a greater increase in action processes over time will achieve higher team performance in the end. We conducted a longitudinal study with 125 four‐person student teams engaged in a business simulation over 7 weeks and measured team processes weekly. Overall, results from latent growth modeling (LGM) support our hypotheses.