Abstract:

Dynamic changes and competitive environment have spawned a large number of temporary teams. Temporary team can be defined as a type of team where a temporally bounded group of interdependent members, form to complete a specific task over certain time periods. Compared to regular teams with long-term shared goals and rich interaction bases, members of temporary teams focus more on individual tasks, lack common cognitive and emotional foundations, and are thus less motivated to collaborate with each other. How to promote proactive collaborations of temporary teams under circumstances of limited teamwork-time expectations and compressed interaction process is crucial to team development. Existing research has mainly focused on emergent states and behaviors that affect temporary team performance, neglecting the important role of existent connections when a temporary team is first built. This is not conducive for temporary teams to leverage of initial social resources in order to improve the proactive collaborative behaviors. Therefore, this paper draws upon social network perspective to explore how a temporary team’s collaboration history network influences proactive collaborative behaviors from views of individual network position and team network structure in three theoretical models.

Specifically, at the individual level, this paper first examines the cognitive and emotional approaches through which individual collaboration history network centrality impacts individual proactive collaborative behavior, as well as the contingency effect of leader behaviors (model 1). Further at the team level, this study investigates the influences (model 2) and mechanisms (model 3) of the interaction between team collaboration history network structure (i.e., centralization and density) and contextual factors (task and team member characteristics) on team proactive collaborative behaviors.

This study makes four primary theoretical contributions. First, the existing literature of the temporary team has focused on the emergence states and behaviors that can improve team performance. This study is one of the few research efforts to introduce individuals’ existent connections at the formation stage of a temporary team when studying team effectiveness, offering a new perspective for the development of temporary team research. Secondly, this paper further discusses the important effects, influencing mechanisms and boundary conditions of the temporary team’s collaboration history network, which expands the theoretical explorations in the field of collaboration history network. In addition, previous research on collaboration history has mainly concentrated on its quantity. This paper enriches the measurement of collaboration history by incorporating a network perspective including individual network position and team network structure, which more accurately captures the essential attributes of collaboration history and advances research methodologies. Finally, this paper integrates both individual and team levels to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding how a temporary team’s collaboration history network can affect members’ proactive collaborative behaviors, thereby enriching the research level of temporary team literature.

This study also has some practical implications. First, we highlight the important role of past collaborative experiences in shaping members’ proactive collaborative behaviors in a temporary team. Thus, managers should recognize that collaborations among temporary team members are not “one-shot deals” and the collaboration history network should be paid attention to before teaming up. An appropriate collaboration history network together with a “collaboration-friendly” social context can facilitate and amplify positive collaborative connections in more temporary teams. Besides, organizations are recommended to boost individuals’ proactive collaborative behaviors by carefully arranging their positions within a temporary team’s collaboration history network. Additionally, teams’ proactive collaborative behaviors can be promoted by adopting different collaboration history network structures in various situations.

In sum, this paper reveals a new perspective on the research of temporary teams’ collaboration, clarifies the mechanisms and boundary conditions of collaboration history network on proactive collaborative behavior, and provides insights for enterprises to promote collaboration through strategic formation of temporary teams.

Key words: temporary team, collaboration history, social network, proactive collaborative behavior