The History of Teamwork’s Societal Diffusion

Weiss, Matthias and Hoegl, Martin (2015): The History of Teamwork’s Societal Diffusion. A Multi-Method Review. In: Small Group Research, Vol. 46, No. 6: pp. 589-622

Abstract

In the literature, the notion of the ever-growing prevalence of teamwork is dominating. First, has there indeed been a steadily increasing trajectory of the societal diffusion of and academic research on teamwork? If so, what have the main drivers of this trajectory been? In this review, we apply a multi-method approach to examine these questions. Specifically, we combine the established bibliometric method of scholarly article counts with the innovative approach of culturomics that allows the content analysis of a literature corpus spanning millions of books, both popular and scholarly. The results show that although academic research on teamwork has grown constantly and has shown a sharp increase over the past 40 years, the societal diffusion of teamwork, as indicated through the culturomics approach, actually followed a volatile trend in the past century. Certain large-scale events and developments, such as war, may serve as an explanation for these changing trends.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Form of publication: Publisher's Version
• Faculties: Munich School of Management > Institute for Leadership and Organization
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• ISSN: 1046-4964
• Alliance/National Licence: This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.
• Language: English