The long and short of it: exploring the effects of membership change event characteristics on immediate team performance and team performance trajectories

Teams research has traditionally treated teams as static entities while paying limited attention to the dynamics introduced by changes in team membership. Furthermore, the few studies that have examined the effects of team membership change have focused on the effects of membership change at a single point in time without considering the potential effects on team performance trajectories over time. In an effort to extend this research and understand how teams respond over time to changes in team membership, this dissertation integrates Team Adaptation Theory with Collective Turnover Theory and proposes a model in which three characteristics of membership change events (quantity of team members changed, status of team members changed, and shared experience of unchanged, continuing team members) influence immediate team performance and serve as signals for post-change team adaptation. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 253 primary care medical teams in a large U.S. healthcare system. Results showed that membership change events were immediately disruptive to primary care Continuity outcomes, but not to Access or Coordination outcomes. Counter to hypotheses, these immediate disruptions were larger when changes involved members who occupied lower-status roles within teams. Furthermore, team performance trajectories were lower when unchanged, continuing team members had larger amounts of shared work experience. This study contributes to theory and teams research by identifying shared experience as a moderator of the membership change-team performance relationship and by linking the effects of membership change characteristics to both initial post-change performance and longer-term performance trajectories.