Organizations increasingly rely on teams of relative strangers who cross disciplines, functions, and organizations, to rapidly come together and leverage their diverse knowledge to solve problems innovatively. Such ''emergent teams'' create new products and services among alliance partners, trouble-shoot product bugs, and respond to natural disasters and security threats. Research on emergent teams is early in development and so far consists primarily of single case studies. This study will examine key mechanisms in the functioning of innovative emergent groups by means of a set of comparative case studies and a longitudinal, cross-sectional survey.
Our central research question is how does an emergent team construct its transactive memory system (TMS), its concept of who has relevant knowledge and capabilities and who can be trusted, particularly as problem definitions and expertise needs evolve and change. Toward this end, we examine the ''boundary objects'' that teams use to simplify problem definition and solution generation, drawing upon a theory of guided instruction from educational psychology. We will examine how team members develop and use boundary objects to share their evolving problem definitions, how they use boundary objects to optimize TMS development and innovation, and the contextual conditions that moderate how boundary objects and guided discovery enhance development and updating of an emergent team's TMS. Finally, we will develop practical, empirically validated job aids for participants in emergent teams.
