Playing Offense vs. Defense: The Effects of Team Strategic Orientation on Team Process in Competitive Environments

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Woolley, Anita Williams
• 署名单位: Carnegie Mellon University
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0617
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 1384-1398
• 关键词: team strategic orientation; outcome focus; process focus; collective information processing; team process

摘要

Organizations increasingly rely on teams to formulate plans and respond in critical situations. However, current models of team process are insensitive to the effects of team strategic orientation. This paper expands existing work on team process and strategic orientation to introduce and explicate the constructs of offensive and defensive strategic orientations in teams. It takes advantage of a rare opportunity to observe eight counterterrorism teams in the intelligence community that explicitly adopted an offensive or defensive strategic orientation in evaluating terrorist threats. The resulting inductive model suggests that the strength of a team's strategic orientation was enhanced or inhibited by its perception of oppositional strength and the problem scope it assumed in confronting the adversary. This in turn had effects on the work strategy the teams adopted, the extent to which they relied on internal versus external knowledge, and the norms for effort that evolved within the teams. The observations suggest broader theoretical implications for research on teams, as the offense and defense strategic orientations influence fundamental team processes related to effort, performance strategy, and use of member knowledge and skill.