The fluid emergence of GenAI roles in temporary teams: How teams calibrate delegation under shifting situational demands

Abstract Temporary teams increasingly use GenAI to address innovation challenges under uncertainty and time pressure, but research explains more about what GenAI can do than how GenAI roles emerge as situational demands change. Drawing on interactionist role theory, we studied 28 temporary teams comprising 119 participants through stage-level interviews conducted during a 48-h innovation sprint. Our analysis identifies the servant, counselor, navigator, and oracle as role states that arise as teams use GenAI capabilities in response to shifting situational demands. We theorize this process as delegation calibration, whereby teams establish GenAI’s permitted influence, expected output, and intended reliance within a task episode. Calibration fit, that is, the degree to which the delegation aligns with task-episode conditions, shapes each role’s characteristic opportunity and challenge: conserved resources versus deviant realization (servant), expanded ingenuity versus trivial advice (counselor), harmonized insights versus eroded distinctiveness (navigator), and resolved deadlocks versus excessive complexity (oracle).