Small Group Research, Ahead of Print.
The concept of Team Emergent States (TES) is gaining significant traction among researchers and practitioners in the field of organizational behavior. Despite the growing interest in TES, there is a notable lack of theoretical consensus among scholars regarding its definition and constituent elements. This situation mirrors similar challenges in the domains of leadership effectiveness, organizational culture, employee engagement, and employee well-being, where the absence of clear definitions and theoretical frameworks has hindered the development of coherent theory and measurement. This paper advocates for a more grounded approach to the study of Team Emergent States, anchoring it firmly within the psychological literature on human needs. We review the leading conceptualizations of TES in the academic literature and argue that they can be distilled into a core set of human needs, each supported by robust research traditions. By proposing a framework that comprehensively enumerates and integrates need concepts, we demonstrate the value of adopting a more structured and theoretically grounded approach over current practices, which tend to accumulate an unwieldy array of dimensions and elements without clear theoretical justification. We consider the impact of setting TES concepts within existing motivational constructs for each of the following: (a) theory, especially the development of emergent state frameworks; (b) methods, including the value of applying a comprehensive, structural approach; and (c) practice, where we emphasize the practical advantages of clear operational definitions.