Five core themes of intentional team formation

Cohesive group dynamics and innovative scientific ideas are essential
components of successful research collaborations. However, the group
dynamics (i.e., the “people”) and the scientific process and outcomes
(i.e., the “science”) are often considered separately and with unequal
emphasis, such as when the focus on the science comes at the expense of
individual team members. This results in a loss of team energy,
motivation, and direction. Innovative ideas will only arise and thrive if
team members feel psychological safety to propose, take ownership of, and
pursue new project directions. As a case study, we describe a large
collaborative and crossdisciplinary project team navigating the proposal
development process. These efforts were carried out with design grant
funding, and the sudden onset of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a
fully virtual collaboration. This experience led us to identify Five Core
Themes of Intentional Team Formation to develop and align teams and ideas:
Team Development, Effective Communication, Perspective Alignment, Team
Management, and Project Workflow. Here, we use the experience gained from
our own crossdisciplinary proposal project to: (1) explain the importance
of each theme to team formation, (2) describe our team's approach to
each theme in terms of process and interventions, and (3) evaluate the
extent to which these approaches contributed to team formation and
function with an emphasis on multiple metrics of success. We found that
when individual contributions and expectations are aligned through
psychological safety, mutual trust, and respect, idea generation and
contributions can launch a team towards achieving goals and objectives. In
this article, we discuss limitations, future directions, and
crossdisciplinary team applications of our five core themes for team
formation. Ultimately, these five core themes provide teams with the team
formation tools they need to set a strong foundation to effectively tackle
big challenges.