Linking Team Fluidity to Organizational Performance in Team-Centric Organizations

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

The domain of this work - post-disaster debris removal operations - has become a focal concern for both Federal and state governments as the threat of extreme wind events (such as hurricanes and tornadoes) has extended to areas outside the southeast United States. Rapid and efficient debris removal is the first step toward successful recovery from disasters. This work will marshal data associated with debris removal following a recent large-scale tornado storm in Alabama to investigate these phenomena. This work is expected to benefit society by contributing to its ability to plan for and respond to large-scale disasters, particularly by improving understanding of the determinants of debris removal performance. In particular, it should develop models and lessens that will speed up the recovery process and make communities more resilient to disaster impacts. It will advance discovery while promoting learning by developing educational materials which will be integrated into undergraduate- and graduate-level course work, as well as into materials for practicing professionals. It will broaden participation of under-represented groups through their inclusion in the research team and enhance research infrastructure through the creation of data sets and analytic tools for use by other researchers. Results of this work will be broadly disseminated through publications and presentations in academic and practitioner venues, to include seminars organized to introduce new tools and techniques to the practice of debris management. The central goal of this research is to extend and test theories that link team-level phenomena to organizational outcomes. The central focus is upon debris removal teams. A particular thrust of this work is on developing and evaluating new theory and methodologies to investigate (i) team-level phenomena that link team composition to team performance, and (ii) reciprocal relationships from team-level phenomena to organizational-level outcomes. To do so, it will extend current methodological approaches for examining these relationships within and across team and organizational levels. It will also explicitly model tradeoffs among different aspects of performance (effectiveness, efficiency and equality) in relation to team and organizational composition. This work benefits from access to a wealth of data associated with debris removal operations (including transactional records of every load of debris hauled by every team during this operation), as well as access to subject matter experts. A distinguishing feature of this research is its use of process-level data on team members and the work they perform. Validation will be undertaken from multiple perspectives, ranging from consultation with subject matter experts to archival research and classical statistical methods such as holdout samples.