Adaptive Team Performance: The Influence of Membership Fluidity on Shared Team Cognition

Team membership change literature has traditionally focused on performance effects of newcomers to teams. Yet, in practice, teams frequently experience membership loss without replacement (e.g., downsizing) or membership exchanges—replacing a member who has left the organization with a current, experienced employee. Despite the prevalence of these practices, little is known about the impact of such changes on team performance. Drawing upon two complementary team adaptation theories, the influence of both membership loss without replacement and loss with replacement by experienced personnel on the cognitive processes underlying adaptation (operationalized as development of effective team mental models – TMMs) was examined. Results suggested that Teammate TMMs (i.e., shared knowledge of member preferences/tendencies) and Team Interaction TMMs (i.e., shared knowledge of roles/responsibilities) are differentially influenced by the movement of members in and out of teams and differentially predict adaptive team performance. Further, TMM measurement choice (i.e., the use of similarity versus distance scores) matters as relationships differed depending on which metric was used. These results are discussed in the context of team adaptation theory, with implications for strategic human resource management.