A Promising Time for Groups and Teams Researchers

I am honored to have been invited to write this reflection essay by the Small Group Research editors who provided the following prompt.

The field of small groups and teams research has been changing significantly over even the past five years. New technologies and methodologies including AI integration, biomarkers, and new considerations of team complexity are changing our theoretical understanding of teams and multilevel complexity (K. Emich, personal communication, September 5, 2025).

One November afternoon, as I re-reviewed the prompt I could not help but hear the Dylan (1963) song The times they are a-changin with the verse “Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone” preceding the eponymous refrain. Indeed, one cannot have missed the deluge of reports prognosticating societal disruptions of all kinds due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies (Cazzaniga et al., 2024; World Economic Forum, 2025). This led me to wonder “What changes will groups ¹ researchers need to make to stay relevant?” during this era of post-public AI (Bezrukova & Griffith, 2025) and societal transformation. Through additional scholarship and reflection, I concluded that most groups scholars will need to make few changes. As a scholarly community, we are well positioned to contribute in these complex times for several reasons.

First, in terms of relevance, we study a societally important problem—understanding and explaining group dynamics and collaborative processes. Groups are a key unit of organization in workplaces of all kinds (Mathieu et al., 2018), scientific laboratories (Hall et al., 2018), the halls of justice (Stevenson et al., 2017), and in our communities more broadly (Kane & van Swol, 2022). They have a strong temporal presence due to information and communication technologies that render it possible for members to interact with one another around the clock and from across the globe (Handke et al., 2019; Kane & Levina, 2017), transferring not only information but also emotions (Kane, van Swol, & Sarmiento-Lawrence, 2023). If you take the view that groups may include AI agents as teammates (e.g., Harris-Watson et al., 2023; Kuchmaner, 2026; O’Neill et al., 2022; c.f., Shneiderman & Muller, 2023), then groups are nearly ubiquitous.

Second, group scholars increasingly recognize that our objects of inquiry are themselves complex adaptive systems (CAS; Arrow et al., 2000; Mathieu et al., 2019; McGrath, 1991; Ramos-Villagrasa et al., 2017). As a CAS, groups have multiple, sometimes conflicting functions including those aimed at contributing to the embedding system (also termed a production function), to their constituents (also termed a member support function), and the group itself (also termed a group well-being function; McGrath, 1991). Such a complexity-embracing perspective of groups is well-suited to address current challenges from AI integration (Kane et al., 2026; Paletz & Dubrow, 2026) to climate change (Harth et al., in press; van Swol & Kane, in press).

McGrath (1991) noted a mismatch between the CAS perspective and the then-prevailing research focus on decontextualized groups with fixed membership performing simple tasks. Over the ensuing decades, I as well as many other researchers have addressed this mismatch. For example, Kane et al. (2005) found membership change across groups to support adaptation to the extent that members of both groups share a psychological sense of belonging to the same group, termed “superordinate social identity.” Subsequent research found that compared to the baseline situation when members identify with a local team, superordinate identity motivates greater adoption of innovative work routines shared by new members (Kane, 2010) and enhances the creative generativity of interacting with members of other teams nested in same superordinate organizational unit (Dokko et al., 2014). Rink et al. (2013) examined the ways that teams adapt to membership change, identifying reflection, knowledge utilization and team acceptance as key components of team receptivity to new members (also see, Kane & Rink, 2015; Kane & Rink, 2020). More recently scholars, including myself, have examined dynamic teams engaging in complex tasks across contexts, ranging from intelligence analysis (Kane, Paletz, et al., 2023; Kane et al., 2025; Paletz et al., 2025) and software development (Kane & Levina, 2017; Newton et al., 2024) to medicine (Mayo, 2022) and firefighting (Rico et al., 2025).

Third, we are a pluralistic, multidisciplinary research community (e.g., Kane et al., 2018; Kush et al., 2025; Salas et al., 2024; van Swol & Kane, 2019). Indeed, Kane and Emich (2025) observed,

Scientific progress in understanding work groups and teams has been and will be advanced collectively, as a community. Progress does not rely on the advances of a single study or one scientist’s body of work. Rather, scientific progress is gained by developing a mosaic of knowledge based on years of work grounded in different philosophies of science that question and augment each other. (p. 1704)

This kind of scientific progress on a societally important and complex topic, also termed “convergence research,” requires researchers to actively build communities that enable integration across disciplines (National Science Foundation, 2024; Roco, 2020). In our field, the Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (INGroup) with its annual meeting is a key integrating mechanism (Weingart, 2025; Wittenbaum et al., 2006). The researchers with whom I have had the privilege of working come from multiple disciplines, including, among others, communication (Lyn van Swol, Irene Sarmiento-Lawrence), computer science (Madeline Diep, Adam Porter), human-computer interaction (Sara Kiesler, Ruogu Kang), information sciences (Natalia Levina, Susannah Paletz, Sarah Vahlkamp, Tammie Nelson), my home discipline of organizational behavior (Linda Argote [my graduate advisor deserves special recognition], Gina Dokko, Kyle Emich, Jonathan Kush, Theresa Lant, Floor Rink, Martiza Salazar-Campo, Marco Tortoriello), and psychology (John Levine, Naomi Ellemers, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock). I came to know most from participating in INGRoup annual meetings, which began in Pittsburgh in 2006 (Special thanks to the founding organizers —Laurie Weingart, Joanne Keyton, Gwen Wittenbaum, Franziska Tschan, and Richard Kettner-Polley —for their leadership and vision).

To conclude, opportunities abound for groups and teams researchers. Our topic of inquiry is of utmost societal import. We have decades of experience tackling the theoretical challenges and empirical issues involved in studying complex adaptive systems. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we are a multidisciplinary, pluralistic community with integrating mechanisms that support convergent research on groups. As Popper ([1963] 2002) famously observed, “We are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the borders of any subject matter or discipline” (p. 88).