Teams Research in Project Management and Organizational Behavior: Leveraging One Discipline to Propel Another

Abstract

Teams and team related concepts have been investigated in the organizational behavior (OB) and project management (PM) disciplines for a century and nearly half-century respectfully. A five-decade, interdisciplinary examination of the OB and PM team literatures suggests areas for expeditiously incorporating OB concepts into PM research thus reducing an average 25-year "thematic lag" between OB's and PM's similar, team-centric research initiations. Adoption of a shared agenda, as done previously in other fields (e.g. Selznick, 1948), would allow PM researchers to leverage prior OB studies while focusing sharply on PM-specific team issues thus propelling research in theory and practice.