More Than a Sum of Its Parts: Teamwork Through a Multidimensional Lens Xinlan Emily Hu

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Hu, Xinlan Emily, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Operations, Information and Decisions., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

0454.

0489.

0501.

0703.

0796.

Local Subjects:

0454.

0489.

0501.

0703.

0796.

Physical Description:

1 electronic resource (419 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-08B

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2025

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What makes a team more than the sum of its parts? And why is answering this question harder than one might think? Teams are a fundamental building block of organizational life. However, the diversity in both teams and their related research makes it difficult to produce a comprehensive science of teamwork: insights about a surgical team may not apply to an engineering team. A key gap is the inability to systematically characterize the contexts in which teams operate. Without a common language for describing how similar or different two team contexts are, researchers have no principled way to determine whether findings from one setting apply in another. In this dissertation, I propose the "Task Space," a multidimensional representation that synthesizes 24 task dimensions, making it possible to quantify similarities and differences between tasks. Using a large-scale experiment with 1,231 participants working on 20 tasks at three complexity levels, I demonstrate this representation's utility. Although teams show striking heterogeneity in whether they outperform equivalent individuals, task dimensions accurately predict when groups have an advantage, explaining 40% of variance and substantially outperforming taxonomy-based approaches. By inspecting the predictive models, I show that the models synthesize findings from previously disconnected studies; for example, the benefit of creativity depends critically on whether the task has demonstrably correct answers. Next, I turn to team processes. Task demands elicit different styles of interaction; teams display starkly different levels of communication across the 20 tasks. Mirroring the Task Space, I develop a "Communication Space" that extracts over 160 theory-backed communication metrics. The tool allows analysts to understand the effect of a conversational attribute in the context of a broader family of features that equivalently explain the phenomenon. Together, the Task and Communication Spaces form two components of an integrative model of teamwork. Rather than asking whether a team will be more than the sum of its parts, these multidimensional methods shift the conversation to understanding which conditions allow teams to exceed individual performance, and how organizations can facilitate them

Notes:

Advisors: Watts, Duncan J. Committee members: Almaatouq, Abdullah; Knox, Dean; Milkman, Katherine L.

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-08, Section: B.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2025

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798276001272

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license