Researching Teams: Nothing's Going to Change Our World

As researchers focused on enhancing the performance of complex teams within military organizations, we offer a uniquely applied perspective to the issues raised in the focal article (Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas, & Cohen, 2012). We concur with Tannenbaum and colleagues that a gap between research and practice exists. To bridge this gap, we propose that we need to evaluate how variables affecting team effectiveness manifest, evolve, and affect performance in complex teams utilizing existing theory within and outside of our discipline. Moreover, we propose that more sophisticated methodological approaches that result in improvements in our ability to measure the phenomena of interest are necessary. Before elaborating on our proposed ideas, we pause to consider whether anything has changed and if anything is missing.