Coordination Processes In Work Teams

Team coordination is a process that involves the use of strategies and patterns of behavior aimed to integrate actions, knowledge and goals of interdependent members, in order to achieve common goals. Coordination ensures that a team functions as a unitary whole, and is identified as a key process to understand work team effectiveness.To explain how teams coordinate, research has traditionally focused on explicit coordination, including planning and communication as basic coordination mechanisms. Recent work complements our understanding of the process with the concept of implicit coordination that takes place when team members anticipate actions and needs of their peers and task requirements, and dynamically adapt their behavior without having to communicate with each other or to plan ahead.The objective of this paper is to review main studies on both explicit and implicit team coordination in an integrative and synthetic way. To do so, we examine the role of different antecedents and concurrent team processes that modulate the effects of coordination on team effectiveness. Additionally, we discuss the contributions of team coordination research to the development of assessment methods and interventions in work teams, as well as their practical implications for professional practice.