Interactive technologies through the lens of team effectiveness: an interdisciplinary systematic literature review

ABSTRACT

Although interactive technologies increasingly shape teamwork, their relationship with team effectiveness (inputs, processes, emergent states, and outputs) remains unclear. To provide an overview of this relationship, we systematically reviewed empirical articles from Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). To bring the two disciplines closer, we analysed 37 papers that validated the effects of interactive technologies, focusing on the type and characteristics of these technologies, the psychological mechanisms that they intended to support, and the methodological information of the conducted studies. We found that interactive technologies had mainly positive effects on various team effectiveness components (e.g., action team processes and task-related outputs), especially when they allowed team members to be physically close to each other or to have the option to interact synchronously. Nevertheless, the picture remains incomplete (e.g., limited evidence about affect-related properties and outputs), with several methodological limitations (e.g., mainly experimental studies with student teams). We discuss ways to shape the existing technological potential for effective team functioning, especially for affective and implicit psychological mechanisms. We highlight the need for interdisciplinary research and present an exemplary approach as an inspiration for WOP and HCI to work together and move beyond the boundaries of each single discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Systematic review
• literature
• review
• interdisciplinary
• teams
• interactive technology

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Yanchen, Marissa, Melissa, Dasha, Valery, Lilian, Artem, Katja, Natalia and Fabio for their support at different stages of this manuscript and Hannah for her visual inspirations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2023.2178904

Notes

1. A collection of individuals, who “possess one or more common goals, are brought together to perform organizationally relevant tasks, exhibit interdependencies with respect to workflow, goals, and outcomes, have different roles and responsibilities, and are together embedded in an encompassing organizational system, with boundaries and linkages to the broader system context and task environment”. (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006, p. 79).

2. Teamwork is defined as “a set of interrelated thoughts, actions, and feelings of each team member that are needed to function as a team and that combine to facilitate coordinated, adaptive performance and task objectives resulting in value-added outcomes”. (Salas et al., 2005, p. 562).

3. We excluded all articles that treated different interactive technologies as one ‘technology’, as this did not allow us to differentiate between them and review their impact distinctively. However, when articles investigated the impact of multiple interactive technologies separately, these were included for coding.

4. As the coders (e.g. research assistants) did not have the same experience and expertise as the authors in the research topic, in case of uncertainty (e.g. unclear with whom the interactive technology was validated), one of the authors screened the respective article ensuring that the inclusion criteria were met.

5. The results of the systematic review are based on 37 accepted papers, 38 studies, and 35 interactive technologies (see Table 1 and Appendix B). Data were extracted from each of the studies according to the criteria outlined above. However, studies did not always include information for all coding categories (e.g. team size, team membership). Therefore, tabulation of studies in each category may not always sum to the total number of articles included in the review. Furthermore, two studies did not provide information about the impact of the interactive technology on some of the constructs we coded (Gumienny et al., 2014; Heidrich et al., 2015).