Sculpting Team Success: How Team Work Crafting Benefits Team Adaptation and Team Effectiveness in Dynamic Business Environments

In contemporary dynamic business environments, teams face the imperative of adaptation to maintain and enhance effectiveness (Griffin et al., 2010). At the individual level, job crafting-where employees proactively reshape their roles to better align with their strengths and interests—has been shown to enhance adaptability and performance (Berg et al., 2010; Demerouti et al., 2014). Building on this foundation, it is worth exploring whether team-level crafting behaviors can similarly boost a team’s adaptive capacity and overall effectiveness in these challenging environments (McClelland et al., 2014). The emerging literature on team-level crafting has predominantly addressed individual perspectives, but the team-level perspective was not thoroughly addressed despite calls for more comprehensive exploration. For instance, existing team-level crafting research primarily focuses on individual outcomes, such as work engagement and job performance, but there is a dearth of studies examining crafting at the team level and how this impacts overall team dynamics and team (adaptive) performance. Critics argue that traditional cross-sectional studies fail to capture the evolving nature of team-level crafting behaviors, which are inherently dynamic and influenced by fluctuating team demands and resources over time (Rudolph et al., 2017; Tims et al., 2013). They advocate for longitudinal research designs that can better illustrate how team crafting develops, adapts, and impacts team outcomes across different stages of team functioning (Niessen et al., 2016). Furthermore, there's a pressing need for advanced methodologies to establish insights regarding the relationship between team-level crafting and team effectiveness, given that current research is largely correlational. There is a need for intervention research that truly tests for causal impact of team-level crafting behavior. The above research gaps give rise to three research questions: 1) What does team-level crafting entail, and how can it be assessed? 2) How does team-level crafting relate to team adaptation and team outcomes within dynamic work environments? 3) Can team-level crafting be trained, and how will team-level crafting training benefit work teams? This dissertation addressed these questions by conducting four empirical studies on the concept of Team Work Crafting (TWC), drawing samples from 131 working teams from seven organizations and 165 student teams, together covering more than 2000 individuals in total. Chapter 2 offered a conceptualization and measurement of Team Work Crafting (TWC) as a team-level, coordinated efforts beyond their usual work routines comprising four main dimensions: seeking taskwork resources (S-TWR), enlarging interpersonal resources (E-IPR), reducing hindering demands (R-HD), and coordinating crafting efforts (C-CE). Rather than an aggregated individual-level phenomenon, TWC is considered as a collective, team-level process that emerges from the interactions and shared efforts of team members. This perspective highlights the importance of collaborative dynamics, where members collectively modify and align tasks, relationships, and perceptions to optimize team performance and well-being. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data, the findings in this chapter show solid validity and reliability of the TWC Scale. Chapter 3 entailed a longitudinal survey study investigating how the relationship between team situation awareness and team adaptive performance is mediated by TWC and shared cognition. The study highlights TWC’s significance as a behavioral mechanism in team adaptation, in addition to well-known cognitive ones. Chapter 4 conducted a daily diary study that examined TWC in relation to team performance and team members’ well-being, represented by team work engagement and members’ satisfaction within their team. The study shows that a team's general- and day-level TWC both predict a team's reported performance on a given day, with higher levels of TWC being associated with higher levels of both team performance and members’ well-being. Chapter 5 investigated the potential of a TWC intervention to improve goal clarity, team adaptation, team performance as well as team members’ well-being. The study shows higher team-level and individual-level work outcomes (e.g., team performance, work engagement) through increased TWC in the intervention group compared to the control group. The research of this dissertation contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it introduces TWC as a solid team-level concept that can be validly and reliably measured with a self-report questionnaire. Second, this dissertation provides evidence for the relationship between TWC and multiple work outcomes for teams and team members operating in dynamic work contexts. Third, the findings confirm the potential of a TWC intervention as a practical and cost-effective method to improve team adaptation and team effectiveness in contemporary business environments.