Designing Teams for the Future: How a “Permeable Organizational Design” Intervention Enables Environmental Prognostication to Promote Turning Points in Team Trajectories

ABSTRACT Teams often struggle to sustain performance improvement over time, yet there is a lack of research on how to shift stagnant performance to a positive performance trajectory to create what we refer to as positive team turning points . We utilize situation awareness theory to explain how such change can be prompted by a design intervention that improves the permeability of the organization and increases environmental prognostication—utilizing knowledge from the external environment to take actions today that can help overcome challenges that will likely exist in the future. We test this theory with a quasi‐experiment pooled interrupted time series design. The intervention involved implementing the permeable organizational design by creating a hub of specialists outside the team who were enlisted to bring information to the team, so knowledge acquisition processes are experienced as support. The sample was 57 sales teams across 3 years tracking quarterly gross profit. We hypothesized and found that for the teams in the intervention condition, a positive team turning point emerged in team performance, whereas the control condition continued to struggle with flat performance trajectories. In a subsample of 33 teams, we found that environmental prognostication was significantly higher in the intervention condition compared to the control condition and that environmental prognostication mediated the link between the quasi‐experimental condition and positive turning point in team performance. We also showed that alternative knowledge processes (e.g., less advanced forms of situation awareness, external information gathering, and reflexivity) and perceived access to organizational resources did not account for the relationship as mediators. We discuss the implications for theory, future research, and practice.