eoniva – Behavioral Economics, Emotional Intelligence and Mindful Management

r Academy of Management Journal

2020, Vol. 63, No. 1, 96–123.

https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.0685

FOSTERING POSITIVE RELATIONAL DYNAMICS:

THE POWER OF SPACES AND INTERACTION SCRIPTS

MICHAEL Y. LEE

INSEAD

MELISSA MAZMANIAN

University of California, Irvine

LESLIE PERLOW

Harvard Business School

Despite well-accepted understanding that relational dynamics characterized by respect,

openness, and connectedness are critical for healthy team functioning, we know little

about how to foster such dynamics. Drawing on observation and interview data from an

intervention that fostered positive change in the relational dynamics of a global distributed

team, this paper theorizes the mechanisms that enabled a move toward positive

relational dynamics. We find that the intervention brought about relational changes by

not only creating spaces where the team could experiment with new forms of interaction,

but also by utilizing “interaction scripts”—concrete guidelines for interaction

that specify content parameters and participation rules. We establish that the combination

of spaces and interaction scripts was critical for helping the team enact counternormative

forms of interpersonal sharing that led to the emergence of positive relational

dynamics. While existing research has highlighted the importance of spaces for enabling

positive relational change, this paper theorizes the complementary role that interaction

scripts can play in the change process. These findings have implications for research on

positive relationships at work, organizational change, and global and geographically

dispersed teams.

How team members relate to one another affects

how teams perform. A large body of research has

highlighted how relational dynamics characterized

by respect, openness, and connectedness can foster

team creativity (Carmeli, Dutton, & Hardin, 2015),

facilitate team learning (Edmondson, 1999), build

resilience in the face of failure (Stephens, Heaphy,

Carmeli, Spreitzer, & Dutton, 2013), and generate

higher performance (Carmeli et al., 2015; Edmondson,

1999). Yet, we know surprisingly little about how

teams can change relational dynamics in order to foster

these positive outcomes.

In the present paper, we explore how teams can

cultivate and develop what we label “positive relational

dynamics,” or patterns of interaction characterized

by respect, openness, and connectedness.

Using meeting observations and interviews from a

10-week intervention, we analyze how a globally

distributed team moved from interactions characterized

by mistrust, minimal communication, and

disconnection to interactions characterized by respect,

openness, and connectedness.

The intervention had team members set aside

dedicated time each week to meet (both as a full

group and in dyads). In addition, the intervention

provided concrete guidelines for team members to

engage in interactions designed to promote sharing

about personal lives and current work challenges.

Leveraging work that has established the importance

of spaces, or bounded social settings, for enabling

social and organizational change (Bucher & Langley,

2016; Howard-Grenville, Golden-Biddle, Irwin, &

Mao, 2011; Kellogg, 2009; Polletta, 1999), and

drawing on the notion of organizational scripts,

we conceptualize the intervention as consisting of

both spaces and a type of script that we call an “interaction

script.” Interaction scripts are concrete

guidelines for interaction that specify content parameters

and participation rules for interaction. Our

The authors would like to thank Jennifer Howard-

Grenville and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful

comments and excellent guidance during the reviewprocess.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Division of Research

at the Harvard Business School for providing financial support

for this research.

written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.

observations suggest that the combination of the

spaces and interaction scripts of the intervention

enabled individuals on the team to experiment with

new and socially risky forms of interpersonal sharing

and was key to fostering positive relational dynamics

between team members.

We unpack how the combination of spaces and

interaction scripts engendered new ways of relating

built on respect, openness, and connectedness. In

the early weeks of the intervention, we observed the

team enacting counter-normative forms of personal

and work-related sharing, guided by the interaction

scripts and supported by spaces. In the latter weeks

of the intervention, we observed the team enacting

the scripts with more disclosure and honesty while

simultaneously adapting the scripts in ways that

furthered the development of positive relational

dynamics. We theorize how spaces and scripts work

together to facilitate change: while spaces create

an opening for new dynamics to emerge, interaction

scripts specify and legitimate new forms of interpersonal

sharing that can foster the emergence of

positive relational dynamics.

RELEVANT LITERATURE

Positive Relational Dynamics in Teams

Wedraw on the literature on positive relationships

at work to conceptualize the changes in the team

we observed (e.g., Dutton & Ragins, 2007). While no

universally shared definition exists as to what constitutes

positive relationships at work, a large corpus

of scholarship has emphasized the importance of

respect (Carmeli et al., 2015; Dutton, 2003), openness

(Eisenberg & Witten, 1987; Rogers, 1987), and connectedness

(Dutton & Heaphy, 2003; O’Reilly,

Caldwell, & Barnett, 1989).

“Respectful” interactions refer to those actions

that confer a sense of value and worth to others

(Carmeli et al., 2015: 68). Substantial scholarship has

documented the lack of respect in workplace interactions,

such as incivility, abusive supervision,

public criticism, or rudeness (Andersson & Pearson,

1999; Liu, Liao, & Loi, 2012; Sutton, 2007). Respectful

interactions, on the other hand, place value

on others’ perspectives by listening empathically

(Dutton, 2003), fostering inclusivity (Blatt &

Camden, 2007; Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006),

and affirming and supporting others (Carmeli

et al., 2015). In addition to promoting greater

feelings of worth, respectful interactions have

been linked to positive identity formation (Rogers,

Corley, & Ashforth, 2016), reduction of status differences

(Phillips, Rothbard, & Dumas, 2009), increased

group creativity (Carmeli et al., 2015), and

faster error detection (Vogus, 2004; Weick, 1993).

“Openness” in interactions refers to candid and

frank communication of issues and feelings at work

and encompasses both task-related and personal dimensions

(Eisenberg & Witten, 1987). Task-related

openness involves the sharing of work issues, especially

across hierarchical lines. Scholars have investigated

this phenomenon across a number of

streams of research, including employee voice

(Morrison, 2011), issue selling (Dutton, Ashford,

O’Neill, & Lawrence, 2001), superior–subordinate

communication (Jablin, 1979), and critical upward

communication (Tourish & Robson, 2006). Personal

openness can range from engaging in casual social

interactions in the workplace (Bowen & Blackmon,

2003) to disclosing personally sensitive information

or feelings (Creed, 2003; Phillips et al., 2009). While

personal openness at work does not assume intimate

disclosure, it does presume some level of personal

sharing, social interactions, and emotional expression.

Openness at work has been shown to have positive

impacts on a variety of collective and individual

level outcomes. For instance, openness in taskrelated

communication has positive impacts on

learning and improvement (Detert & Burris, 2007;

Dutton et al., 2001; Edmondson, 1999), decisionmaking

(Morrison & Milliken, 2000), group performance

(Edmondson, 1999;O’Reilly&Roberts, 1977),

and individual health (Cortina, 2008). Openness and

disclosure of personal matters has also been shown

to improve interpersonal relationships (Collins &

Miller, 1994) and to reduce status and power differentials,

and, in doing so, enhance feelings of empowerment

(Ashcraft, 2000; Phillips et al., 2009).

“Connectedness” refers to the strength and quality

of relationships between individuals. Dutton and

Heaphy (2003) conceptualized the quality of a connection

as a function of the amount and range of

emotions expressed, the ability for a relationship to

withstand stress and strain, and its ability to open

new possibilities for action and creativity. These

scholars view connectedness as manifesting in feelings

of mutuality, positive regard, and vitality. Earlier

research on groups studied connectedness under

the guise of constructs such as social integration

and cohesion, which was defined as the degree to

which individuals in a group are “psychologically

linked” or “attracted” to one another (O’Reilly et al.,

1989; Shaw, 1981). Benefits of connectedness include

better health (Dutton & Heaphy, 2003), the

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 97

attainment of valued information and resources

(Burt, 2000), development of positive new identities

(Ibarra, 1993), and improved coordination (Gittell,

Seidner, & Wimbush, 2010).

While respect, openness, and connectedness are

three distinct dimensions of what we label “positive

relational dynamics,” these dimensions have

been shown to be deeply intertwined and mutually

reinforcing. For example, respectful interactions

between group members encourage speaking up

(Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006) and lead to feelings

of greater connectedness (Carmeli et al., 2015). Open

and frequent communication about work and personal

matters can foster greater attraction between

group members (Collins & Miller, 1994) and serve as

a sign of mutual regard (Carmeli et al., 2015). Feelings

of connectedness enable people to speak openly

(Carmeli & Gittell, 2009; Edmondson, 1999) and are

the foundation for respectful interacting (Dutton &

Heaphy, 2003). Scholars of positive relationships at

work emphasize the cyclical and self-reinforcing

nature of interactions characterized by respect, openness,

and connectedness: “Positive relationships in

groups and communities are created through ongoing,

self-perpetuating, and mutually reinforcing acts that

both offer and generate positive energy among their

members” (Kahn, 2007: 281).

Despite the self-reinforcing nature of positive relational

dynamics, they can be difficult to foster.

Status and power differences that pervade organizations

can undermine mutual respect and encourage

individuals to regard others as “less than”

(Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, & Gruenfeld, 2006; Kipnis,

1972). Speaking openly about personal or workrelated

matters requires navigating complex social

norms governing when and how to communicate

such information and can lead to social sanctions

when such norms are violated (Chaikin & Derlega,

1974; Detert & Edmondson, 2011; Morrison, 2011).

Connecting with others at work often involves overcoming

dominant, institutionalized norms of impersonality

(Ashcraft, 2000; Martin, Knopoff, & Beckman,

1998) and organizational politics that foster competition

rather than cooperation (Mayes & Allen, 1977).

While research has explored the antecedents of

positive relational dynamics (e.g., Baker & Dutton,

2007; Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006; Vogus, 2004),

there is strikingly little empirical work on how positive

relational dynamics emerge in the course of

everyday team interactions. Several scholars have

noticed this lack and called for empirical research

to explore this question (Dutton & Ragins, 2007;

Edmondson & Lei, 2014). The research presented

here takes up this challenge by providing empirical

insight into the microdynamics of change as one

team began to develop positive relational dynamics.

In theorizing this empirical story, we draw on two

different analytical constructs: spaces and scripts.

Spaces as a Vehicle for Relational and

Organizational Change

One construct that has been shown to play an important

role in organizational change, including relational

dynamics in groups, is the notion of

“spaces.” Scholars studying how to foster effective

group dialogue emphasize the importance of creating

spaces that can enable people to actively listen,

respect one another, suspend judgments, and

speak honestly (Bohm, 1990; Isaacs, 1999; Senge,

1990). Referred to as “containers,” “holding

spaces,” or “vessels,” such spaces are conceptualized

as social settings separated by physical and

symbolic boundaries from everyday work engagements

where “creative transformation can

take place” (Isaacs, 1999).

Spaces, or bounded social settings, have been

shown to play an important role in fostering change

in organizations. In explaining why one hospital

successfully implemented an institutional mandate

around reducing resident hours and another hospital

did not, Kellogg (2009) theorized the importance of

“relational spaces” in enabling potential reformers to

mobilize, connect, and develop strategies to enact

organizational change. In another study of changing

institutionalized logging practices in the forestry

industry, Zietsma and Lawrence (2010) emphasized

the creation of “experimental spaces.” These spaces

allowed representatives with different goals and

perspectives (timber companies, local residents, and

environmentalists) to try out new ways of working

shielded from institutional pressures. In a study

of routine change made at two hospitals, Bucher

and Langley (2016) found that the existence of

two different types of spaces—reflective and

experimental—enabled hospitals to implement

new complex medical routines. Furnari (2014) theorized

the role of “interstitial spaces”—or social settings

where members of different institutional fields come

together to interact—in facilitating the emergence of

new practices. Finally, in a study of a successful

initiative to bring a sustainability focus into a forprofit

enterprise, Howard-Grenville and colleagues

(2011) theorized the importance of liminality in

enabling the development and incorporation of new

cultural repertoires into the dominant organizational

98 Academy of Management Journal February

culture. Their notion of liminality, a process they label

as “bracketing the everyday,” closely echoes the

concept of spaces in other studies.

Thus, spaces have been identified as important

enablers of a variety of types of change in and across

organizations. Throughout these studies, spaces are

characterized by their separation from team, organizational,

or institutional norms and dominant

modes of working. This separateness comes from

physical, temporal, social, and/or symbolic boundaries,

and is theorized to reduce the salience of

existing norms and patterns of interaction while

fostering reflection, experimentation, and risk taking

(Bucher & Langley, 2016; Furnari, 2014; Zietsma &

Lawrence, 2010).

However, while spaces have been shown to enable

new dynamics to emerge, understanding why and

how particular dynamics emerge in spaces remains

under-theorized. To highlight this point, Furnari

(2014) argues that, while spaces can support the

emergence of new practices, they cannot, on their

own, explain the emergence of new practices. Furnari

(2014: 441) wrote:

The very same features of interstitial spaces that facilitate

the initial emergence of new activities and

ideas hinder their constitution into new practices . . .

the inherently transitional nature of interstitial spaces

means that the new activities and ideas that are tried

out in these settings may easily “get lost,” thereby

making difficult their repetition over time and the

formation of the shared meanings that are necessary

for them to be constituted into new practices.

Polletta (1999) makes a similar argument about

the role of spaces in the social movements literature.

She contends that, while scholars have highlighted

the important role of “free spaces” in enabling social

change, “the free space concept simply posits a

‘space’ wherein those dynamics occur, without

specifying how, why, and when certain patterns of

relations produce full-scale mobilization rather than

accommodation or unobtrusive resistance” (Polletta,

1999: 8).

To better understand how the intervention facilitated

the emergence of the relational dynamics that

we observed, we further draw on the construct of

scripts.

Scripts in Organizational Studies

Borrowing from the field of social cognition,

scholars have used the notion of “scripts” to explain

how people develop a shared understanding around

how to act and behave in organizations. According to

these theorists, scripts are internalized cognitive

schemas that direct individuals as to the appropriate

behavior for specific organizational situations or

contexts (Abelson, 1981; Ashforth & Fried, 1988;

Gioia & Poole, 1984; Lord & Kernan, 1987). According

to this work, scripts exist in common interactive

processes such as formal meetings or board presentations

as well as task processes such as production

or go-to-market routines. Scripts can be

either weak or strong, depending on how much detail

is specified in the script (Gioia & Poole, 1984;

Lord & Kernan, 1987). For example, a weak script

might specify expectations of behaviors, and a strong

script would specify both expectations of behavior

and also the sequence of events (Gioia&Poole, 1984).

Scripts serve several functions that are relevant to

these data. First, scripts legitimate behaviors within

organizations. The content of scripts aligns with the

expectations of those in power and thus reinforces

norms around acceptable behavior (Ashforth &

Fried, 1988). Scripts also provide a guide of what

behavior is appropriate in a given situation, helping

newcomers to become socialized into an organization’s

way of doing things (Ashforth & Fried, 1988;

Gioia & Poole, 1984). Finally, scripts conserve cognitive

capacity by supporting automatic enactment

of desired behaviors (Ashforth & Fried, 1988).

We find the concept of scripts to be useful for understanding

the microdynamics of change observed

in this study. Not only did the intervention create

spaces for new behaviors to emerge, but it also included

concrete guidelines for how interactions

should proceed within the spaces of the intervention.

These guidelines functioned like a script,

providing parameters around the content and sequence

of the interactions and reducing the uncertainty

and risk associated with interactions that

were counter-normative for the team.

While we found scripts to be a useful lens for understanding

the change process that we studied,

there are important distinctions between the scripts

provided by the intervention and the notion of

scripts found in the organizational literature. First, in

contrast to the traditional understanding of scripts

that operate in repetitive situations and socialize

people into dominant organizational norms, the

scripts in our study were used in novel situations and

served as a source of experimentation and change.

Second, whereas scripts in the literature are often

taken-for-granted and understood implicitly by organizational

members, scripts in our study were explicit,

communicated as instructions throughout the

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 99

intervention. Third, while organizational scripts

center around task-based routines, such as annual

review processes or manufacturing workflows, the

scripts in our study focused exclusively on guiding

interactions. As a result, we distinguish the scripts in

our intervention from the notion of scripts in the

existing organizational literature by referring to them

as “interaction scripts.”1

RESEARCH SETTING

We studied a technology consulting team that

worked in the health care industry within the technology

consulting arm of TaxCo (a pseudonym), a

large professional services firm employing over

100,000 people. This distributed global team was

responsible for building the data warehousing and

reporting functions for a client headquartered in the

Northeastern United States.

The team itself consisted of six people in the

United States and eight people in India. One

U.S. team member was based at the client site for the

duration of the project. Another U.S. team member

was based in California and rarely traveled to the

client site. The remaining four U.S. team members

worked remotely from three different cities in the

Northeast and traveled every two to three weeks to

the client site. The eight members in India were

based in four different offices throughout India. Four

Indian team members were based in Bangalore, two

were based in Delhi, one in Mumbai, and one in

Hyderabad.

In addition to the senior partner, the team in the

United States also included a partner, a senior

manager (who was the overall project lead), and

three managers. The team in India comprised one

senior manager, one manager, and six engineers.

As is evident from the team organizational chart

(Figure 1), a clear hierarchical divide existed between

the team members in the United States and

those in India. The Indian team members, aside from

the senior manager, were more junior and responsible

for most of the coding and testing work.

The U.S. team members were predominantly managers,

responsible for client communication, project

management, technical design, and oversight.

The senior partner overseeing the team volunteered

the team to participate in an intervention

to improve team effectiveness. For two weeks

prior to the intervention, we conducted on-site interviews

in the United States and India to understand

the issues facing the team. The initial focus of the

intervention was to targetwork–life challenges on the

team, and it quickly became clear during the first two

weeks of fieldwork that “work–life challenges”meant

very different things for the U.S. team members than

it did for the Indian team members. The U.S. team

members questioned the commitment and work

ethic of their Indian colleagues, and they feared that,

if they were not available to help, their Indian colleagues

would sit idle. As a result, the U.S. team

members felt overwhelmed by the volume ofwork and

responsibility to always be available. In contrast, the

Indian team members’ discontent stemmed from

feeling unappreciated and underutilized. They complained

that their U.S. managers gave them only lowlevel

work, did not provide adequate client exposure,

and generally treated them as doers rather than thought

partners. Thus, U.S. team members felt that their

work–life challenges stemmedfrom never being able to

disconnect from work,while Indian teammembers felt

that theirworkwasn’t satisfying and this dissatisfaction

translated as a “work–life challenge”.

In response to these insights, the interventionwas

established. The intervention aimed to help team

members work more effectively together so that

they could share work in new ways. The hope was

that, if the Indian team members could share more

of the workload, the U.S. members would not be so

overwhelmed and the Indian members would feel

more satisfied in their work. The intervention consisted

of two components: “collaborative work

time” (“CWT”) calls and weekly “pulse check”

meetings.

CWT

The first component of the intervention involved

weekly one-on-one calls between junior and senior

team members. These calls were structured to help

the team members get to know each other better as

humans and colleagues, with the hopes of sparking

new forms of collaboration. Team members were

instructed to spend the first 15 minutes of their onehour

call getting to know each other personally. The

remaining 45 minutes of the call were to be spent

1 We also distinguish our notion of script from the

Goffmanian notion of script. For Goffman and others,

scripts are the recurrent activities and patterns of action

characteristic of a given setting that provide the basis by

which individuals reproduce the institutional and interactional

order (Barley & Tolbert, 1997; Goffman, 1983).

Unlike Goffman’s concept of scripts, which are preexisting,

implicit, and taken for granted, interactions scripts

are novel, explicit, and not encoded cognitively.

100 Academy of Management Journal February

collaborating on a “non-routine task.” The task was

framed as work that built skills or knowledge, giving

the Indian team members exposure to more intellectually

stimulating work and giving the U.S. team

membersmore knowledgeable, better-engaged thought

partners.Most weeks, the six junior team members, all

in India, were expected to choose managers they wanted

to speak with and initiate scheduling the call.

Pulse Checks

The second aspect of the intervention asked the

entire team (i.e., all 13members) to hold a weekly, 90-

minute, mandatory team meeting. The goal of these

meetings, called “pulse checks,” was to create an

opportunity for the entire team to engage in meaningful

discussions about work challenges. To facilitate

these conversations, teammemberswere asked to

respondto a set of four questionswhile inthemeeting:

“How are you feeling?”

“How valuable is the work you are doing?”

“How satisfied are you with your learning?”

“Is your operating model sustainable?”

Facilitators provided four response options in the

form of cartoon faces that ranged from smiling to

crying. When given a prompt by the facilitator, each

team member would take turns responding to the

four questions in a round-robin format. They would

identify which face represented their feelings around

each question and provide an explanation for why

they had chosen that face. After each person provided

their ratings and explanations, others were asked to

comment. Throughout the pulse check meeting, the

discussion would evolve organically as team members

surfaced other issues and teammates tried to

address issues that were raised.

Both the CWT calls and pulse checks operated as

spaces, in that they were bounded social settings

temporally and symbolically separated from the

everyday work of the team (Bucher & Langley,

2016; Howard-Grenville et al., 2011; Kellogg, 2009;

Zietsma & Lawrence, 2010). In conjunction, both

the CWT calls and pulse check meetings contained

interaction scripts. We define interaction scripts

as guidelines for interaction that include content

parameters such as topics for discussion, conversation

prompts, direct questions to respond to, and

response options, and participation rules such

as who speaks, for how long, and in what order.

Facilitation

The four facilitators—the third author and three

other individuals—took a role that bridged research

and practice, taking extensive field notes regarding

the team’s interactions and conducting interviews,

while also helping implement the intervention. The

third author both collected data and acted as overseer

of the facilitation team. In the three early pulse

checks, one of the facilitators led the team through

the pulse check questions. In weeks 4 through 6

and in week 8, team members themselves led these

FIGURE 1

Team Structure

United States India

Partner

Sr. Manager (Project Lead)

Manager Manager Manager

Sr. Manager

Manager

2 Engineers 4 Engineers

Sr. Partner*

*Not involved in day-to-day operations of the team.

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 101

discussions and facilitators were present to observe

the conversation. After the first week, one facilitator

was based in India, spending a week at a time at each

of the four different locations where the Indian team

members worked. The other three facilitators spent

time on site at the U.S. location, with at least one of

them on site each time the U.S. team collocated

(every two to three weeks).

METHODS

Data Collection

The facilitation team served as the data collection

team, gathering qualitative data over the course of 12

weeks (two weeks prior to the intervention plus the

10-week intervention). All members of the facilitation

team were trained in ethnographic data collection

by the third author, who also oversaw all aspects

of data collection. Short interviews (generally lasting

15–30 minutes) were conducted each week with

most members of the team and were scheduled based

on team member availability. Interviews were semistructured

and included questions such as “How are

you feeling about your work?” and “What was your

experience this week with the intervention, both in

the one-on-oneCWTcalls and in the previous week’s

pulse check?” In addition, individual interviews

were conducted at the end of the intervention with

each team member (lasting 30 to 60 minutes) to capture

each person’s reflections on his or her experience

with the intervention. In total, 127 interviews were

conducted during the 12 weeks of the study. Weekly

interviewswere not taped but field noteswerewritten

up immediately following each interview. The interviews

at the end of the intervention were captured

via detailed notes taken by facilitators.

In addition, facilitators observed the following

meetings: an initial team meeting in which facilitators

discussed the issues that the team was facing, 10

pulse check meetings, two small-group CWT calls in

week 7 of the intervention (described in more detail

below), and occasional work meetings that were not

directly related to the intervention (e.g., sprint retrospective

meetings). In total, 15 meetings were observed

during the course of the study. All pulse

check meetings were transcribed by facilitators

while the occasional work meetings that were observed

were captured via detailed field notes.

Finally, email communications between members

of the facilitation team and between facilitators and

team members were saved as archival data. Emails

included those sent throughout the intervention as

well as discussions between members of the facilitation

team about how the intervention was going.

Data Analysis

The facilitation team came into the research project

with an interest in work–life challenges. However,

the ways in which people’s lives outside of

work were or were not affected by the intervention

were not salient in these data. Instead,what was most

striking about the intervention was a shift in how

teammates interacted. As a result, the facilitation

team, led by the third author, focused its analysis

on communication patterns and interpersonal

dynamics within the team. They wrote two different

forms of descriptive memos in the initial phase of

analysis—detailed empirical descriptions of each

team meeting and CWT call, and an annotated

timeline of the entire team with reflections on what

happened on a week-by-week basis with key milestones

and empirical description woven into the

team overview.

At this stage, the first and second author (neither of

whom participated in the facilitation or data collection)

were brought onto the project to bring an independent

perspective to data analysis and mitigate

insider bias. Using the techniques of grounded theory

building (Charmaz, 2006; Strauss & Corbin,

1998), the first author conducted independent iterative

textual analysis and open coding of the primary

data—the interview notes, meeting transcripts, and

archival data—as well as a review of the descriptive

memos produced by the facilitation team. The goal of

this exercise was to reexamine the data with a fresh

perspective in order to understand the nature of the

changes in the team’s interpersonal dynamics and

how these changes emerged.

Basedon this analysis, the first author wrote a series

of analyticmemos and shared themwith the other two

authors. The first series of memos revisited the primary

data, in order to explore the nature of the

changes that occurred within the team. The data that

had been coded as “team changes” were reanalyzed

and dimensionalized into subthemes such as “getting

to know each other as people” and “more open discussion

of work issues.” Together, the three authors

then went back to the literature to contextualize the

changes observed in the data and iteratively honed in

on the notion of positive relational dynamics as a

general category for capturing the changes observed.

The second set of memos focused on understanding

how the changes in relational dynamics emerged

through the course of the intervention. Categories

102 Academy of Management Journal February

such as “structured conversational guidance” and

subthemes such as “asking for more specific help”

emerged through the open coding exercise. Fromthis

process, it became clear that the guidelines for interaction

that had been introduced in both the CWT

calls and pulse check meetings played a key role

in changing team dynamics. These memos also interrogated

the nature of the guidelines provided by

the intervention. Through this analysis, and conversation

between all three authors, the distinction

between “content parameters” and “participation

rules” emerged. This distinction, in parallel with

reviewing literature on organizational change and

organizational scripts,helpedushone inonspacesand

interaction scripts as key constructs for understanding

how positive relational dynamics emerged throughout

the intervention.

These insights became the cornerstone of the next

stage of our analysis in which we reanalyzed every

CWT call and pulse check meeting through the lens

of spaces and interaction scripts. This analysis, in

conjunction with examining the literature on spaces,

provided insight into the key mechanisms by which

interaction scripts and spaces facilitated the enactment

of counter-normative ways of speaking and

acting and led to the emergence of positive relational

dynamics.

In the final stage of analysis, we sought to link the

emergence of positive relational dynamics in the

early weeks of the intervention with the overall

changes that we observed by the end of the intervention.

Going back to earlier memos and the

primary data as necessary, we induced aspects of the

change process as a whole—such as the positive response

of other team members, the increased energy

and engagement of the team members, and the adaptation

of scripts—that were key to understanding

how the initial momentumof change grew over time.

These insights led directly to the development of our

theoretical model and the notion of a feedback cycle

embedded within it.

FINDINGS

As the data below suggest, when facilitators first

met the team, relational dynamics were characterized

by a lack of respect, openness, and connectedness.

The lack of respect on the team manifested as

distrust and negative assessments of one another.

U.S. team members described their Indian counterparts

as “lazy” and “unaccountable.” One U.S.

manager, who was from India originally, described

the lack of respect that the Indian team members

experienced from other U.S. team members with

even more poignant language: “The Indian team are

humans, not robots. And it is important for the

U.S. team members to understand that. [The Indian

team members] are not treated as people.”

The lack of openness on the team was evident in

communication patterns that hewed to strict hierarchical

speaking rules and a general sense that

U.S. members spoke and gave directions while Indian

team members received direction and executed

tasks. The project lead, who was based in the U.S.,

remarked that the U.S. members had not engaged the

Indian members beyond requesting concrete tasks:

“We have pushed [the Indian team members] into a

box and they are living very comfortably in it.” An

Indian engineer described a “parent–child”dynamic

between the U.S. and Indian team members in which

the U.S. members would funnel only the barest of

needed information to the Indian members. Another

Indian engineer said, “[The intervention] will give a

lot more perspective to them and to us. Right now,

there is a disconnect.”

A lack of connectedness characterized both the

relationships across the India–United States divide

and relationships within the local teams. Team

members engaged in minimal interaction beyond

what was necessary for completing the work. The

U.S. team members met on-site at the client’s headquarters

once every two or three weeks. Even during

the limited time they were together, they made little

effort to interact socially. They did not go out to

lunch or make small talk in the conference room

where they were “camped” out. The Indian team

members had similar practices. At the Bangalore site,

four team members were based in the same building

but sat on different floors and rarely interacted face to

face. They would even call into team meetings from

their individual desks. One of the engineers in Bangalore

said, “We don’t have lunch together . . . It is

simply a work relationship.” Such a dynamic was

not unusual at TaxCo. Reflecting on the social norms

governing teams at TaxCo, an Indian engineer said of

the team, “We don’t talk about the personal things,

things to get to know each other. In the onshore/

offshore model, we just talk about the work.”

In the two weeks of engagement and planning

prior to the introduction of the formal intervention,

the facilitators observed firsthand some of the dynamics

on the team. Though everyone in the team

was encouraged to speak up to provide input on the

goals of the intervention, U.S. team members dominated

the conversations. Indian team members were

willing to discuss issues they were facing in their jobs

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 103

when speaking one on one with facilitators, but,

when the team met together, they would remain silent,

not bringing these issues to the attention of the

team. When speaking with facilitators, Indian team

members would often express curiosity about the

U.S. team members and their personalities. In contrast,

U.S. team members expressed no interest in the

Indian team members as individuals. Instead, U.S.

members were focused on how much work their

counterparts were doing and questioned how they

spent their time.

Early Weeks of the Intervention: Trying on New

Ways of Interacting

In the section below, we describe how, in the early

weeks of the intervention, the spaces and interaction

scripts of the intervention set the stage for the team to

interact in new ways. Team members made tentative

steps toward getting to know each other personally

and airing work challenges.However, teammembers

were often uncomfortable as they enacted the interaction

scripts. There was a sense of people “trying

on” new forms of interaction in the face of perceived

social risk.

Trying on new ways of interacting in the CWT

calls: Sharing personally. As described above,

CWTcalls comprised both a space and an interaction

script. As dedicated timeswhen team members were

to interact in counter-normative ways, theCWT calls

operated as spaces that were separated temporally

and symbolically from everyday norms and patterns

of interaction. The CWT calls also contained guidelines

for interaction with content parameters—the

injunction to get to know each other personally and

collaborate on work—and participation rules—the

specification that a junior and senior team member

were to spend 15 minutes talking about personal

topics and 45 minutes on a collaborative task. Together,

the content parameters and participation

rules formed an interaction script that enhanced the

symbolic separation of the 60-minute spaces of the

CWT calls and provided direction to team members

on how to engage within these spaces.

When the concept of the CWT calls was introduced,

team members were both excited about the

prospect of having personal conversations with each

other and nervous about what such interactions

might be like. As soon as the intervention was described,

several members expressed a concern that

the instructions to “get to know each other personally”

were too vague and asked for additional support

on how to have these conversations with each

other. For example, in the first pulse check, a U.S.

manager remarked about the prospect of having the

CWT calls

I know we have been talking about the collaborative

time, but do we have any parameters or guidance on

the type of [personal] conversations we should be

having? . . . I know we are career oriented and career

driven, but I think it’s equally important to invest in

[the personal component].

Another U.S. manager said, “I think in the beginning

it would be good to have guidance on the personal

conversations.” An Indian engineer agreed with this

request, saying that “The [Indian team] is not used to

this.”

As a result of the expressed discomfort, the facilitators

sent out weekly emails in the first five weeks of

the intervention with suggested topics, in the form of

explicit conversation prompts, that people could use

to jumpstart the personal portion of theCWTcall. For

example, in the second week of the intervention, the

facilitators sent out the following list in an email to

the entire team:

In case you would like something to guide the 15

minutes of relationship building, I have included a

few questions to get you started:

• Is there a story behind your name? Does your name

mean something?

• How many siblings do you have? Are you the oldest,

middle, youngest, or only child? Who are you closest

to in your family?

• What is one thing about you that people would be

surprised to learn?

• What is the best piece of career advice you have ever

received?

In each following week, a different set of prompts

were sent out by the facilitators. In week 4, the following

email was sent:

Hi all,

As you schedule your Collaborative Work Time for

the week, here are some questions for getting to know

your collaboration partner:

• Where did you grow up?Doyou still live close to that

place?

• What did you study in university?

• How did you get into technology consulting?

Looking forward to hearing how this week’s conversations

go.

104 Academy of Management Journal February

The request for more guidance on how to have personal

conversations reveals just how counternormative

these new interactions were and how

the specificity of the guidelines for interaction supported

the enactment of these new behaviors.

The injunction to get to know each other personally

had its desired effect: after engaging inCWTcalls

for just a few weeks, people reported that they were

getting to know each other better as people, not just

as coworkers. In order to allow for the emergence of a

new interpersonal dynamic, the facilitators did not

ask to listen in to these one-on-one calls. However,

the energy and excitement that came from these

personal interactions was palpable. For example,

after her call in week 4 with the U.S. project lead, an

Indian engineer commented to one of the facilitators,

“Do you see the smile on my face?” The facilitator

described in her notes:

[The Indian engineer] said it was a great call, that they

had had a really wonderful conversation about where

they are from, their career paths, their families, Bangalore

. . . they talked a bit about the current project,

but it was mostly a chance to get to know one another.

[The engineer] was very, very happy about the call.

Similar positive sentiments were expressed across

the team. A U.S. manager said, “[The Indian engineer]

and I had a really good session. It was the first

time we really got to know each other.” After

speaking with the Indian manager in week 3, another

U.S. manager reflected how important it was to get

to know his counterpart and to learn that his wife

would be having a baby soon (which he had no idea

of until this call). Another Indian engineer had a

conversation with a U.S. manager in week 3 in which

they went beyond the original directive and chose to

spend the entire call getting to know each other.

Reflecting on the call, this engineer said with surprise,

“It’s easy and comfortable to talk about things

with [the US manager] . . . The personal connection

with people makes it easier to talk about things related

to work.” The U.S. manager described the same

conversation as oriented around “how the team is

going, our families, where we are from,” and reflected

how “the conversation was more open in

work and personal discussions.”

While the CWT calls’ interaction scripts provided

guidance to team members on how to interact within

the spaces of the calls, the scripts still allowed for

unspecified interactions to emerge. For example, the

conversations in CWT calls in the early weeks also

included discussion of people’s desires for growth

and professional development. In week 3, one of the

engineers in India reported having a “great conversation”

with a U.S. manager in which he shared that

he was interested in doing more technical work besides

documentation and the manager suggested that

the engineer could help her with data modeling. The

U.S. manager reflected on the same conversation:

“It was the first time wereally got to know each other.

I learned about his background and the technical

exposure he wants to get.” These conversations

about professional growth were perceived as valuable

by Indian and U.S. team members. The fact that

they emerged organically reveals that scripts guided

conversations without fully specifying what was

said, leaving open the possibility for unspecified

interactions to emerge that supported positive relational

dynamics.

Thus, in the first few weeks, the spaces and interaction

scripts of the CWT calls guided team

members in engaging in new forms of interaction

centered around personal sharing. Notably, the personal

sharing in the CWT calls was reciprocal, as

both junior and senior members of the team were

sharing with each other.

Trying on new ways of interacting in the pulse

checks: Sharing work challenges. Like the CWT

calls, the pulse checks comprised both a space and an

interaction script. The dedicated time set aside for

each week’s pulse check, as well as the presence of

external facilitators, signaled to team members that

what was to occur in the pulse check was separate

fromeveryday routine interactions. Interaction scripts

further enhanced the symbolic separation of the

90-minute spaces and guided the substance of the

conversation within them. Four specific questionand-

answer prompts (or content parameters) were

provided to foster sharing and encourage the discussion

ofwork challenges. The participation rules—

the round-robin format—aimed to develop a more

balanced and egalitarian speaking dynamic. Notably,

both the content and the format of these interactions

were non-normative for this team.

In the early pulse checks, we observed both junior

and senior members of the team responding to the

pulse check questions by sharing their difficulties

and work challenges. Given the “chin up,” positive

attitude often projected by the U.S. managers prior to

the intervention, the presence of negative responses

to the questions was noteworthy. An Indian engineer

who was new to both TaxCo and the project was

completely overwhelmed in trying to come up to

speed. The team, however, had no idea about her

struggles.When it was her turn to speak up in the first

pulse check, she appeared visibly emotional to those

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 105

in the room with her and responded to the pulse

check question about the team’s operational sustainability

by saying, “‘Learning’: there is so much

learning, I am probably stretching to my limit, I

probably can’t do this forever—I can’t sustain this

pressure for very long.” Such openness immediately

humanized the engineer and affected others on the

team. A U.S. manager turned to the facilitator sitting

next to him with clear concern in his eyes and said,

“She sounds like she is going to cry. I need to talk

to her.”

The team’s response to this disclosure was as notable

as the disclosure itself. A U.S. manager immediately

suggested that the team help take some of the

deliverables off the Indian engineer’s plate while she

comes up to speed on the technologies. Later in the

pulse check meeting, the U.S. project lead said of the

new Indian engineer’s struggles:

We need to make the expectations clear. Give her

some time not only to understand the project, but the

technology and the role. Give her some time to get

familiar—assign tasks wary of the fact she is not on the

same level.

After the pulse check, several team members took it

upon themselves to reach out to this engineer in order

to help.AU.S. manager called her to discuss how

to prioritize her time. These efforts made a real difference;

the following week, the Indian engineer

expressed that she was doing much better and that

her manager was giving her more manageable tasks:

“He is honest with me and tells me what he’s giving

methree days to dowould take him one day . . . I work

at ease, I feel no pressure, I understand what I am

doing.”

Another Indian engineer, who had worked at

TaxCo for a few years but was new to this project

team, was also struggling because the work on this

team did not align with his expertise. In his first pulse

check, he said, “‘How valuable is my work?’

‘Frowning’ to ‘crying.’ I’m not aligned with what I

need.” At the end of the meeting, the U.S. project lead

tried to allay some of his concerns:

[Directed to the Indian engineer:] You come from a

different technical practice. You are moving away

from your technology from the past and concerned

about growth. The reason we brought you here is you

came highly recommended in Oracle—we are very,

very appreciative—a lot of it you can take it back to

Oracle practice. Some of the concepts work here—it

should be a win/win. We’ll try to assign you work

that helps. In my opinion, it shouldn’t be a complete

shift.

In the second pulse check, a different Indian engineer

answered the pulse check questions with

striking honesty. She described the frustrations that

arose from sitting idle while waiting for code to be

delivered for her to test. This lack of a smooth work

stream created a great unevenness in her workload:

“How am I feeling?”: Between “accepting” and

“frowning.” This week is okay . . . the way Agile is,

my work will not be easily distributed over three

weeks. . . . “How satisfied am I with learning?”: Between

“accepting” and “frowning.” I’mlearning from

a testing point of view [but not in other ways]. It’s

not working very well for me right now. “Operating

model”: “Accepting” to “frowning.” [Two other Indian

engineers] both have their own set of responsibilities.

I don’t have a backup person or a plan in place

right now. I’m trying to bring them up to speed on

the testing process, but they have their own set of

responsibilities as well. It will take some time.

Beyond eliciting honest negative feelings about

how the work was going, which would have been

taboo prior to the intervention, the pulse check

meetings became a space where team members,

particularly managers, heard about issues facing individual

team members and the team as a whole. The

degree to which managers responded to these surfaced

issues in anempathetic and productive fashion

was notable. For example, after this engineer spoke

up about her uneven workload, the U.S. project lead

immediately began to address her concerns:

We’ll try to be creative for the next sprint and look into

the even distribution part. [The two other Indian engineers]

are new to this process, talk to [the Indian

manager], see if he can help you on any of your asks, or

any of the developers here in the United States.

Thus, the pulse checks provided a forum where team

members began to share feelings and raise issues

about how work was going. Furthermore, the pulse

checks encouraged team members, particularly senior

members, to listen empathetically and respond

in productive ways.

Indian team members were not the only ones to

share their work challenges. The degree to which

senior U.S. team members also shared their struggles

in response to the pulse check questions was striking.

In week 1, the U.S. project lead responded to the

question about his satisfaction with his learning by

saying:

[I am between] “accepting” and “frowning.” The nature

of our work is so much driven by the deadlines,

we don’t get to focus on important things. We are

106 Academy of Management Journal February

driven by the urgency factor. I need to invest in myself

. . . but that doesn’t happen for various reasons.

In the same week, the U.S. partner on the project said:

“How am I feeling?” I think I’m somewhere between

“accepting” and the “frown” . . . I got a call from a

partner on the West Coast regarding an oral presentation

Thursday morning—I’m not too sure what

I’m leading . . . I had to clear everything on my calendar

yesterday, have client conversations about it, and

put together a “response” to a client I’ve never met

before, a solution I have no experience with.

Such insight into the daily lives and challenges faced

by senior managers and partners on this project was

new for the rest of the team and humanized those in

power.

Hence, even in the early weeks, the spaces and

interaction scripts of theCWTcalls and pulse checks

enabled the team to engage in new, counternormative

forms of interpersonal sharing. Through

this sharing, team members began to see one another

as humans with lives outside of work who were also

experiencing real challenges at work. The same Indian

team members who just weeks earlier were

described as being treated as “non-human” and

“robots” were not only sharing about their lives and

their experience on the project, they were also being

heard. As the U.S. project lead said after the first

pulse check:

Some of the feedback I heard is really eye opening;

folks are overwhelmed with the volume of work and

new things coming. Agile and [the intervention]

should help them. It’s nice to get the personal aspect

from everyone. Hopefully, on the next pulse check,

there will be more “smiley” faces. I really appreciate

what the intervention is trying to do. It will really

help.

This quote suggests that the team leaders quickly

developed a positive perspective of the communication

and disclosures elicited by the intervention, a

perspective that encouraged additional sharing and

provided participants with the experience of feeling

heard.

These insights and disclosures, along with the

positive response to them, began to shift the relational

dynamics on the team. One indication of this

shift was that, in week 4, the four team members

based in Bangalore, who had previously sat on

different floors of the same office building, intentionally

moved their workspaces to be together.

Attributing the change to the growing sense of connectedness

sparked by the intervention, they chose

to cram together into two cubicles despite this being

an unusual practice for teams at TaxCo. They were so

proud of the change that they sent a picture of

themselves sitting side by side in the two cubicles to

the facilitators. The subteam benefited from colocation

both in terms of work efficiency—“It’s faster

when we’re working in the same space”—and in

terms of feeling more connected to one another. In

his week 4 pulse check, one Indian engineer from

Bangalore responded, “‘My learning’: ‘smiling,’

coming to office regularly and sitting with the

team—I’m getting to know everyone and nothing

went wrong [this week].”

Despite the emergence of respect, openness, and

connectedness in the early weeks of the intervention,

change did not happen immediately. Indian team

members still remainedmostly silent outside of their

pulse check check-ins. In working team meetings not

directly related to the intervention, Indian members

rarely spoke up except when called upon. In week 3,

a U.S. manager remarked that it took “a lot of encouragement

from [another U.S. manager]” to get

Indian members to talk in the meetings. Also, Indian

team members continued to share some work difficulties

in private conversations with facilitators but

did not bring them up in the pulse checks. For instance,

a facilitator wrote in her notes in week 2:

[The Indian manager] has mentioned that it can be

challenging to manage the Indian team members and

a full task load. Didn’t hear anything about that on the

[pulse check] call. And [an Indian engineer] has told

menumerous timeshowhe doesn’t feel like he’s using

much of his brain in his work, and yet he gave an

“accepting” face for “How satisfied are you with your

learning?”

Getting to know each other personally and sharing

work struggles across geographic and hierarchical

divides challenged team norms. Weeks into the

intervention, team members struggled to engage

openly across these boundaries, indicating the difficulty

of changing the team’s relational dynamics.

However, as we describe below, the energy and excitement

generated by the interactions in the early

weeks in the intervention supported deeper enactment

of the scripts in the latter weeks and fueled a

cycle of increasing positive relational dynamics.

Latter Weeks of the Intervention: Deeper

Enactment and Adaptation of Interaction Scripts

In this section, we describe how team members

continued to enact the interaction scripts in the

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 107

spaces of the intervention but with increasing honesty,

openness, and playfulness. They also began to

take ownership of the process, “working” the spaces

of the intervention by experimenting and adapting

the interaction scripts. We view these adaptations as

important in the life of the change process, as they

represented a new level of engagement in the intervention

and led to further emergence of positive

relational dynamics.

Deeper personal sharing. In the intervention’s

fourth week, an Indian manager suggested to a facilitator

that, in order to foster more engagement

from the team, the team should experiment with rotating

facilitation of the pulse check between team

members. He then nominated a particularly outgoing

Indian engineer for the job. The facilitators and the

project lead agreed to this idea, and the nominated

engineer not only agreed to lead the next pulse

check, but also asked if he could add to the script—

asking everybody to tell a funny or embarrassing

story, in addition to the four standard pulse check

questions.

Notably, the Indian engineer’s suggestion came

out of the growing connectedness he had been experiencing

since he and the other team members in

Bangalore started sitting together. In describing his

motivation, he said the team in Bangalore had been

able to joke around a bit that week since they had all

been together, and suggested, “This team is too formal.

If the whole project team were in a team room

together, maybe things would be more casual, more

fun.” This motivation is revealing on multiple levels.

First, it points to the fact that the greater connectedness

from the first weeks of the intervention inspired

teammembers to becomemore engaged and invested

in the change process. Second, it suggests that some

team members began to view the scripts as resources

they could use and adapt to further promote positive

change in the team’s relational dynamics.

The funny or embarrassing story script prompted

new levels of personal sharing within the team. Individuals

shared humorous stories about their children,

dogs, and friends. An Indian engineer started

things off with a story about having terrible handwriting.

It didn’t get a big laugh, but the facilitator

bantered with her about his own bad handwriting. A

U.S. engineer shared how her one-year-old daughter

added a lot of curiosity to her life.AnIndian engineer

told a story about a group of friends who ended up

eating a very small piece of cake together after

expecting it to feed all of them. The energy picked up

when a U.S. manager shared a story of his young

daughter, who was going to be the flower girl in his

cousin’s wedding that weekend. Everyone laughed

as he described having his “hyperactive” daughter

practice walking down the aisle, tossing plastic

Easter eggs instead of flower petals. The senior

manager in India talked about her four-year-old son

who liked to pet the dog next door. After she told him

that he must wash his hands after petting the dog, her

son decided from then on to keep his hands high

above his head around the dog, allowing the dog to

lick his entire face and body instead. “That’s how he

tries to get out of handwashing!” she exclaimed. The

Indian engineer who was facilitating added, “Have

him take a bath!” At that point, the entire team was

laughing. The same engineer then told a story from

his youth about putting a firecracker in a neighbor’s

mailbox and the trouble that he got into as a result.

People were laughing at the stories and engaging

with one another with an energy not observed in

previous pulse checks. At one point, a U.S. manager

asked an Indian team member how her back was

doing, as she had been dealing with back pain. At

another point, an engineer based in Delhi mentioned

that it was nice having another Indian engineer who

was also based in Delhi to sit next to. The engineer to

whom the comment referred responded, “Oh, that’s

sweet.” The U.S. partner gave the Indian engineer

who was facilitating a hard time about his story about

dropping a firecracker in a mailbox. There was a

palpable energy in the room from the personal

sharing and the responses to one another’s sharing.

Communication and interaction was occurring in

new ways across United States–India lines and

around the personal details of each other’s lives.

Team members commented on the pulse check afterward,

reflecting to facilitators that they enjoyed

having “more interactive” time together, that it was

good to have an “informal” piece to the check-in so

that people “start opening up,” and that it was just

plain fun.

Buoyed by the success and energy of this pulse

check, members of the project team chose to continue

to facilitate the pulse checks for the next two

weeks. They passed the baton between teammates on

the India side, and each new facilitator brought their

own addition to the pulse check. In week 5, an Indian

engineer asked each team member to pick the team

member with whom he/she would trade places with

for a week and why. In week 6, another Indian engineer

had the team play the parlor game “two truths

and a lie.”

Notably, the adapted pulse check script in week 5

did not lead to the same level of energetic and lighthearted

communication across hierarchical lines

108 Academy of Management Journal February

that emerged in the week 4 and week 6 pulse checks.

In response to the question of which team member

they would want to trade places with for a day, every

team member chose a U.S. team member. While the

interaction was not perceived or experienced as

overtly negative, it exposed the power and status

divides that persisted within the team. As the facilitator

wrote in her field notes that week, “The team

was not dynamically engaged, even with the personal

question. Everyone wanted to be a [U.S. team

member] . . . Not a soul wanted to be someone in India.”

These interactions also revealed that not all

adaptations of the interaction scripts over the 10

weeks of the intervention had the same positive effect

on the team’s relational dynamics, variation that

we explore later in this paper.

In weeks 6 and 7, the team further experimented

with the interaction scripts in ways that deepened

personal sharing. While reflecting with the facilitators

on how the intervention was going, two Indian

engineers mused over the right group size to foster

more open and connected interactions. According to

the facilitator’s field notes:

This was my last week in Bangalore, and as [two Indian

engineers] were reflecting on [the intervention],

they had the idea of having a small-group pulse

check—they thought it would be more intimate and

give people a better chance to know each other and

really talk about the issues they were facing—it was

too difficult to really get into any meaningful conversation

on the large pulse checks.

The very fact that this was a topic of reflection is

noteworthy, given the initial dynamics on this team.

These team members came up with the idea of a

“small-group CWT call,” and successfully pitched

their idea to the facilitators. In the following week,

the team put this idea into practice.

The small-group CWT calls were initiated in week

7, replacing the one-on-one CWT calls. Facilitators

split the team into two groups with a mix of U.S. and

Indian members in each group. Two Indian engineers,

with feedback from other members of the

team, developed the interaction script for the calls.

One of the two Indian engineers sent the following

email to his small group:

Hi All,

Below is the agenda of the meeting.

The CWT will run for one hour. The conversation

[will] consist of two elements:

1. Relationship building (15 minutes)

The group will spend 10 minutes talking about personal

interests. Get started by sharing about a fun

weekend adventure you have recently had.

2. Share on individual strengths and areas for growth

(45 minutes)

One team member will share about the skills and

strengths he or she brings to the table and the areas he

or she is working to develop. The other team members

will have a chance to react, respond, and share their

own impressions. The group will do this with each

person on the call. The goal of this exercise is to be

more aware of each team member’s abilities so that,

as issues arise in the work, there will be greater understanding

of who is best equipped to respond

to what issues and who can stretch in their development

areas.

As this email indicates, the small-group CWT calls

constituted spaces, in that they were temporally,

socially, and symbolically separated from daily work

interactions. In addition, they contained the elements

of an interaction script: content parameters

(getting to know each other better by sharing a recent

fun weekend adventure and sharing strengths and

weaknesses) and participation rules (half of the team

members in a small group, 15 minutes of individual

personal sharing followed by 45 minutes of sharing

on strengths and weaknesses, and each individual

shares while others respond). In essence,members of

the team adapted the boundaries of the space and

modified the interaction scripts of the weekly CWT

calls in a manner that continued to foster respect,

openness, and connectedness.

The small-group CWT adaptation led to deeper

personal sharing than we observed in the early

weeks. For example, in one of the small-group

CWT calls, everyone was asked what as children

they had wanted to be when they grew up. When a

U.S. manager said he wanted to be the Pope, an Indian

engineer responded by asking the U.S. manager

whether he was still religious. The U.S. manager

took a deep breath, clearly uncertain about how

much to share, and after hesitating said:

Yeah, I mean . . . it’s always an interesting question.

My religious denomination is Roman Catholic, but

there’s always the question of “do you agree with the

church?” And I don’t agree with the church in all

things, but I think at the end of the day religion tomeis

being spiritual, a set of guiding principles and morals,

a way to develop as a person. Church for me is

something we do as a family, it’s a good time to spend

together and grow in our spirituality.

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 109

This type of disclosure about religious beliefs represented

a substantial deepening in the intimacy of

the personal sharing in the team. In experimenting

with how to foster deeper personal engagement by

changing the number of people on the calls and

expanding the time spent discussing personal and

professional goals, the team moved beyond being

passive recipients of the intervention to become designers

of their own change process.

Deeper sharing of work challenges. In the latter

weeks of the intervention, the team also adapted the

scripts in the pulse checks with the aim of inspiring

deeper sharing of work challenges. In pulse check

responses throughout the early and middle weeks of

the intervention, team members frequently brought

up the challenge of feeling crunched for time and

not having enough hours to complete work. In fact,

multiple team members raised challenges around

hours worked in their responses to the pulse check

questions in weeks 3 through 7. After hearing repeated

frustration about this issue of hours, the

facilitators tried to initiate a discussion about hours

in the week 5, 6, and 7 pulse checks. While these

attempts generated some discussion, the conversations

yielded little concrete resolution. The lack of

resolution was due, in part, to the limited time

remaining after the round-robin responses to the

pulse check questions. At the end of the week 7

pulse check, the team finally addressed the issue

head on. A U.S. manager expressed his desire for

the team to dive deeper into the underlying problem

with hours:

I just wanted to put out one point that everyone is

coming up with time, but it’s really great to know

that—why they are not getting time? Is it because of

too much work and they already committed, as per

estimation, but are not able to do it? There has to be a

reason, right? It’s not that 24 hours has squished to 20

hours, that’s not it. So, if everybody can come up with

how to talk about time and how it can be improved,

rather than just mentioning time.

Motivated by a desire to engage in a real discussion

about the hours challenge, the same U.S. manager

suggested an adaptation to the following week’s

pulse check script. Rather than have everyone answer

the four standard pulse check questions in

a round-robin style, he instead wanted to focus

the entire team’s time, energy, and attention on the

issue of hours for the week 8 pulse check. The

U.S. manager facilitated the meeting and opened by

encouraging people to express their concerns about

hours:

We want to be thinking about how we can work

smarter, not harder . . . If we are not finding time to do

what we need, we need to talk about it—not just the

reason but how we can make adjustments around the

issue of time.

After weeks of generalized discussion of the topic,

the substance and productivity of the week 8 pulse

check discussion was remarkable. Not only did the

India side raise concrete issues around hours, the

U.S. project lead and managers responded in a way

that indicated they acknowledged the challenges

the Indian members were facing and genuinely

wanted to resolve these issues. In response to the

U.S. manager’s encouragement, two Indian engineers

pointed out that the time required for testing

their code was not included in time estimates for

tasks in the team’s project planning.Thismeant that

they had to put in more hours than was expected to

finish their tasks. A third Indian engineer questioned

the usefulness of the “showcase” meetings

that the team held each week to show the client the

progress the team made. The entire team was expected

to be on these two-hour calls, evenmembers

who weren’t presenting their work. To accommodate

the client, the calls took place in the evenings,

India time. He said:

Basically, we have four to five showcase meetings . . .

they will help me understand the other activities in

the project, but, if I have a time crunch or my plate is

full, I wish I could drop off that call and focus on my

work.

He also questioned the value of meetings that had

been created among the Indian team members to

make sure that the Indian manager was aware of

issues before they were raised in the meeting with

the entire team. Finally, a fourth Indian engineer

raised an issue related to the challenges the team

had with conferencing software that often took a

long time to set up: “Sometimes, Citrix is really

slow; there are days when we have to restart our

laptop for Citrix and it takes 15 minutes or 20

minutes to start a call.”

Not only were Indian team members openly sharing

their issues and challenges, the U.S. managers

heard the challenges and developed concrete actions

to try to address these issues. For instance, the

U.S. project lead agreed that it may not make sense

for everyone to be on the call for the showcase

meetings and even admitted that it “was probably

poor planning on my part.” The team also discussed

the problem of not including estimates of time spent

110 Academy of Management Journal February

testing code in their sprint planning. Based on this

discussion, the team decided to allocate more time to

testing and to start documenting howmuch time was

being spent on testing so that they could develop

accurate estimates for future efforts. The U.S. project

lead said:

What we need to account for is testing support, that’s

the short-term solution we can account for [Indian

engineer’s] time or somebody’s time to support the

tester to navigate through the process, so we account

for that, that is one thing. Once we account for that,

other things will start to fall off their plate. You’re

right, we’re not accounting for that anywhere, but it is

an important task, yet we all hear from Scrum calls

that work is not getting done because of support for

testers.

Awareness of a positive change in relational dynamics

was shared throughout the team. As one

Indian engineer reflected after the pulse check,

“Everyone is talking—the team is becoming more

vocal and speaking up about their perspectives.”

Thus, in the latter weeks of the intervention, the

positive change in relational dynamics continued

to build through the deeper enactment and adaptation

of the intervention’s interaction scripts.

Team members, buoyed by the momentum from

the early weeks, worked the spaces of the intervention

and redesigned the interaction scripts

to further the change effort. In so doing, they connected

more deeply as people, not just as colleagues,

and tackled persistent work challenges.

As a result, new forms of interacting and relating,

which were counter-normative before the intervention,

increasingly became accepted and embraced

by the team.

Changes in Team Relational Dynamics

Throughout the course of the 10-week intervention,

we witnessed a shift in the level of respect,

openness, and connectedness on the team. The

emergence of positive relational dynamics on this

team was evidenced by both the actions and reflections

of those involved.

Respect. The increase in respect among team

members was evident in the degree to which team

members increasingly valued and supported one

another, especially across geographical and hierarchical

divides. An example of the increased respect

within the team occurred in week 9, when the U.S.

team lead suggested a change in the time of one of

the team’s calls. In an email to the team, he wrote:

Team—As you might have started to realize that we

are literally fighting for meeting time during the

day . . . I am thinking if it will be a good idea to move

the [meeting name] calls to the night (India morning)

so that we can free up the prime-time meeting slots.

I have given a few options, letmeknowthe consensus.

Also, “No” is also an acceptable answer!!

Several Indian team members pointed to this incident

as indicative of a broader shift in the way the

U.S. team members were engaging with the Indian

team members. In week 10, an Indian engineer reflected,

“Usually the U.S. [team] just tells us when it

is. There’s more two-way dialogue now.” Another

Indian engineer also noted a change in the way the

U.S. project lead engaged with the Indian team

members: “[The U.S. project lead] is now more open

to the team’s perspectives and ideas.” A third Indian

engineer compared this team to those he had been on

in the past: “In this project, the first thing is [the Indian

team members] have been heard—the feeling

that your voice is heard by the leadership.”

Openness. The development of openness within

the team was evident in the increased sharing about

personal matters and work issues. In the meetings

leading up to the intervention’s start and during the

first few weeks of the intervention, everyone on the

team was encouraged to speak up to provide input on

the goals of the intervention. However, the senior

U.S. members of the team dominated the conversations

during this early period and Indian team

members would often remain silent.

By the end of the intervention, the team was

sharing more openly, surfacing and addressing issues

across the group. The Indian team members

became more willing to speak directly and reflected

that they had become “more equal in terms of communication

and the kind of work that is happening.”

As one Indian engineer said in her week 10 reflection,

“It’s definitely increased our communication

together.” Another Indian engineer reflected:

[The intervention] has definitely helped the team come

together. People are more expressive, there is a platform

to express opinions and problems. Any one of us

would not have taken the step to do that on our own.

This reflection points to the role of spaces in bringing

the entire team together outside of everyday interactions

and the critical component of interaction

scripts that enabled the expression of “opinions and

problems” in a productive manner. The “platform”

referred to is, in essence, the spaces and interaction

scripts of the intervention.

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 111

Connectedness. The increased connectedness

within the team was reflected in the way the team

members began to connect with one another as

people, not just as coworkers. In the CWT calls and

the adapted pulse check meetings, team members

learned about each other’s personal lives and engaged

with each other in both light-hearted (telling

funny stories) and earnest (talking about one’s religious

views) ways. After the intervention ended, an

Indian engineer reflected:

The team became more close-knit after all those

weeks … All those icebreakers on the pulse check,

they may seem like stupid questions, but at the end of

the day they really help—everyone was laughing, and

that really helps.

At one point in week 9, the workload on the team

became intense. It was at this moment, when an

earlier incarnation of this team may have developed

frustrations with their global counterparts, that the

team’s greater connectedness became evident. Instead

of each member of the team retreating into his

or her own workload, an Indian engineer stepped

forward and volunteered to help the U.S. manager

with a complex task that the manager did not have

the time to work on. During this period, an Indian

engineer shared, “The team is working really hard to

help each other out to make sure everything is finished

for the deadline. We’re working together to

see that we didn’t miss anything.” Also in week 9,

the U.S. manager emphasized the change in the way

the team was collaborating during this time of high

workload and increased stress:

If we hadn’t had [the intervention], we would still be

in small, small teams and passing specs across the

wall from one side to the other and not this level of

[team-wide] collaboration . . . like the email from [the

Indian engineer this week] saying “I am available.”

Those kinds of things are happening because of [the

intervention]–better understanding, knowing people

better on personal level, understanding career aspirations,

and feeling much more comfortable reaching

out asking for help or asking for work.

To be sure, team relational dynamics are the

product of numerous small exchanges, and not every

single interaction observed was uniformly positive.

In fact, how team members dealt with exchanges that

they experienced as less than positive was also an

important part of the change process. For example, in

the week 8 pulse check, the most junior Indian engineer

raised that one of her challenges was feeling

like part of her day was less productive because she

was waiting for direction. After the call, her manager

admonished her for sharing this on the call and asked

her to run things by him before she brought them to

the entire team. The junior engineer turned to one of

her Indian colleagues to make sense of this exchange.

As she relayed to a facilitator, the colleague told her

that “she had every right to say what she did and that

she should always have that right going forward.”

This response reassured her, and, a week later, she

was adamant in her weekly check-in with the facilitator

that the team had become more open and

connected. She emphasized that she hoped that the

intervention would continue, indicating her continued

faith in her colleagues and the intervention. This

incident, while rare in our data, reveals the difficulty,

if not impossibility, of fostering relational dynamics

that are uniformly positive. It also suggests that, once

a team has made a shift to more respectful, open, and

connected forms of interaction, these positive relational

dynamics can help contextualize and mitigate

difficulties when they arise.

Across the board, teammates were struck by the

dramatic growth of respect, openness, and connectedness

in the team during the intervention. Table 1

provides additional data documenting the emergence

of positive relational dynamics that occurred

over the course of the 10 weeks.

FOSTERING POSITIVE

RELATIONAL DYNAMICS

Based on our findings, we induced a theoretical

model that distills how the intervention—a set of

spaces and interaction scripts—facilitated the emergence

of positive relational dynamics on a global team.

Below, we present each component of our model.

Spaces and Interaction Scripts Facilitated the

Enactment of Sharing Interactions

During the course of the intervention, we observed

the team interacting in new ways. Specifically, we

saw evidence of team members sharing aspects of

their personal lives and work challenges across

geographic, cultural, linguistic, and hierarchal divisions.

We also witnessed team members responding

to each other’s sharing in positive ways. We label

the combination of a sharing behavior and a positive

response as a “sharing interaction.” Understanding

how the intervention facilitated the enactment of

sharing interactions requires insight into how spaces

and interaction scripts worked together to transform

the team’s taken-for-granted ways of interacting.

112 Academy of Management Journal February

TABLE 1

Changes in Positive Relational Dynamics over the Course of the Intervention

Early weeks: Low levels Middle weeks: Growing levels Latter weeks: High levels

Respect:

Affirming,

Supporting,

Listening,

Helping

“I’m more excited for the [Indian team

members] . . . Before, it was like

a parent–child, funneling

information.” (Indian senior

manager)

“[A U.S. manager] struggles. He is a

pretty involved person who gets

upset when things are not done on

time . . . He is accepting these

realities . . . I have seen a softening of

his tone. I amencouraging him to ask

what we can do to help when things

are not done in time.” (U.S. senior

manager)

“It was the first time I ever heard [U.S.

managers] ask us to think about what

would work best on our end as a

team.” (Indian engineer)

“I echo [the U.S. senior manager, who

gave a low score on being heard]—I

want to challenge the team that,

when issues are raised, people

respond to them.” (U.S. manager) “It’s important to have time to

appreciate the work of the team. It’s

good to have more interactive time

together and have other activities

with the team.” (Indian engineer)

“So many things are going on—just

working, working, working. The

team is reviewing each other’s work,

stepping up, and generally

functioning at high throttle together.

We’re working together to see that

we didn’t miss anything.” (Indian

engineer)

“Right now, [the U.S. manager] is

passing the commands to the Indian

team members and you can’t just

pass the commands . . . He is in order

giver mode. He needs to become

more engaged and to help offshore.”

(U.S. senior manager)

“[A U.S. manager] ‘blocked time to talk

informally’ on Friday (his initiative).

She feels he is the mentor she’s been

looking for.” (Facilitator notes,

conversation with Indian engineer)

“The team is functioning more like

a team now and helping each other

if a task is not completed.” (U.S.

manager)

“I had a great conversation with [the

U.S. senior manager] last week and

will be helping out on one of his firm

initiatives this week. He gave a lot of

advice about a lot of things. He asked

me all the questions I have for him

and took time to answer each one.”

(Indian engineer)

Openness:

Sharing,

Disclosing,

Speaking up

“I don’t discuss things with others. I

prefer to think about a problem on

myown and solve it myself.” (Indian

engineer)

“The CWT calls are one of the best

ways to get people talking and

breaking the ice.” (Indian engineer)

“I like the CWT and meetings with the

whole team. It’s definitely increased

our communication together.”

(Indian engineer)

“She agrees that the Indian team is

quiet, that it takes ‘a lot of

encouragement from [a U.S.

manager]’ to get them to talk. She

also thinks part of the issue is that

they are more junior; ‘I, too, didn’t

have the confidence to speak up

when I was more junior.’”

(Facilitator notes, conversation with

Indian senior manager)

“The team is doing better than

last week . . . the dynamics are

improving . . . The team was very

vocal on the call [with an Indian

senior manager] and were talking

to each other.” (Indian engineer)

“We’re doing good, all been speaking

up, give inputs that we hadn’t really

been doing. Most people have

issues—the same ones that you

would find at other companies or

with other people—but we talk

about them.” (Indian engineer)

“When offshore has spoken up in the

past, the pushback from [the U.S.

side] has been very hard. I think this

makes people more hesitant to speak

up and to feel as if their voice is not

being heard.” (Indian engineer)

“Offshore doesn’t generally speak

much on the calls but the team is

starting to speak up on calls the last

two weeks.” (Indian engineer)

“‘Last three to four weeks, everyone

talking’—they said they’ve seen a

change in the last three to four weeks

as far as everyone on the team really

willing to be open and share their

concerns.” (Facilitator notes,

conversation with two Indian

engineers)

“From the business perspective,

people were talking about

themselves, trying to be more

honest. Important things came

out like technical skill sets,

development needs, and soft skills

that people want to develop. It will

help us get good at managing those

types of things. We also gave

suggestions—‘if you are doing this,

you may want to try this instead.’We

gave suggestions for next steps.”

(U.S. manager)

“Since we’ve [been on the project]

here, the point was more of one-way

communication. Now, everyone is

speaking and highlights [their]

concerns openly.” (Indian engineer)

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 113

The intervention’s spaces—the temporally and

symbolically bounded CWT calls and pulse check

meetings—created the opening for new forms of interaction

to emerge. The separation of the spaces

from the everyday interactions of the team rendered

existing norms and patterns of interaction less salient.

As a result, team members came into the CWT

calls and pulse checks knowing that the typical

norms might not apply. The symbolic and temporal

separation of the spaces also meant that team members

could not rely on habitual patterns of interacting

as a guide for how to behave in the spaces. Instead,

spaces encouraged individuals to set aside their

preconceived notions and bring an open mind to the

situation at hand. Furthermore, the intervention’s

spaces were referred to explicitly as a place for the

team to interact with each other in new and different

ways, supporting experimentation and risk taking.

However, spaces on their own do not provide direction

for how a team might interact within the

space or what type of experimentation could occur.

Taking a theater metaphor, spaces can be conceived

as a new stage, a place where people don new

clothing, set aside taken-for-granted assumptions,

and experiment with a new style of interaction.

However, an empty stage on its own leaves open

infinite possibilities—thus, the value of having

a script. Whereas spaces created the opening for

change, interaction scripts provided direction and

shape to the change process. These data suggest that

interaction scripts shaped interactions within spaces

through three mechanisms.

Interaction scripts guided experimentation into

specified forms. Within the boundaries of spaces,

scripts provided specific guidance on what to discuss

(content parameters) and how to discuss it

TABLE 1

(Continued)

Early weeks: Low levels Middle weeks: Growing levels Latter weeks: High levels

“[Indian engineer] still feels that it is

inappropriate to voice his issues on

the team calls since it is not an issue

that impacts everyone . . . He said he

would be more comfortable bringing

up issues in a small group setting

because he doesn’t want to ‘bug’ the

team by ‘generalizing’ things that

don’t apply to everyone.” (Facilitator

notes, conversation with Indian

engineer)

Connectedness “There should be some kind of

motivation for the team, a team

outing, a team lunch. It would

definitely help us. Something from

the on-site team motivating us . . .We

are only professionally connected.”

(Indian engineer)

“I’mseeing a change that is a very good

sign . . . [The intervention] is really

helping to bring the Indian team

members together and getting

them to increase the level of

communication.” (U.S. senior

manager)

“[The U.S. senior manager] thought

there were clear benefits in

improving one-on-one rapport,

collaborating across the United

States and India and understanding

what work is on each other’s plates.”

(Facilitator notes, conversation with

“Note that [Indian engineer] was U.S. senior manager)

expecting his first child and yet very

few people knew about it on the

team.” (Facilitator notes)

“It was such a delight talking to [the

U.S. senior manager]. I now fear him

a little less than I did before the call.”

(Indian engineer)

“I feel good—I know [U.S. manager] as

a person, I now know certain things

about [the U.S. senior manager] that I

didn’t know before. We are more

bonded within the team.” (Indian

engineer)

“[Indian engineer] says that there are

many team members that she does

not know, and thus would like to

focus on getting to know more of

them during the CWT calls.”

(Facilitator notes, conversation with

Indian engineer)

“[Speaking about the small-group

CWT calls:] Since I am on the BO

team, I don’t interact as much with

ETL—we got a chance to know

each other. Plus, there was a light

moment, to help to chill out with

each other . . . Overall, we got to

know each person—not just

professionally, but personally.”

(U.S. manager)

“It is difficult to differentiate [the

intervention] from the way that the

team now operates. There has been a

positive impact on collaboration

since the experiment began.” (U.S.

manager)

“I feel really disconnected from the

team.” (Indian engineer)

114 Academy of Management Journal February

(participation rules). The specificity and explicitness

of the interaction scripts were key to reducing

uncertainty during the change process and structuring

what type of experimentation and risk taking

was to happen in the spaces of the intervention. The

value of the specificity of the scripts was evident

when team members continued to ask for concrete

conversation prompts to guide their personal sharing

in the early weeks of the intervention.

The scripts’ concrete guidelines also made team

members aware of potential disconnects between

ideal sharing behaviors as specified by the scripts

and how the team was actually interacting. For example,

in week 3 of the intervention, the Indian

senior manager expressed to the U.S. project lead

that the Indian team members were still not speaking

up in the pulse checks as much as desired and that

senior members of the team needed to continue

to encourage them to express their feelings. Such

feedback points to how the explicit guidelines of the

scripts provided a benchmark by which team members

could assess their interactions and encourage

each other to more fully engage in sharing behaviors.

Interaction scripts legitimated counter-normative

forms of interaction. Whereas the spaces of the intervention

reduced the salience of existing interaction

norms, scripts seeded the development

of new norms. In this study, scripts expanded the

scope of what was legitimate sharing and, in doing

so, challenged expectations of what was appropriate

behavior. Prior to the intervention, sharing

personal information and work challenges violated

implicit team norms and entailed social

risk. The scripts, however, explicitly asked individuals

to engage in such sharing. In doing so,

the scripts reduced the social risk of broaching

such topics, making them legitimate topics of

conversation.

Interaction scripts established an expectation of

shared risk taking. Interaction scripts also fostered

risk taking by establishing an expectation that everyone

would engage in the same risky behaviors.

Classic research in game theory points to the difficulty

for a single person to take a risk that only yields

benefit if others also take the same risk. In strong

organizational cultures, an individual challenging

normative assumptions about what, when, and how

to speak is likely to be censured, mocked, or completely

ignored. Interaction scripts, however, mitigated

that risk through the promise of collective

engagement. It was established up front that every

single member of the team was expected to take the

risk (i.e., participate in the intervention activities).

As a result, the collective action problem was alleviated

and benefits accrued for each group member.

Notably, the same mechanisms through which

spaces and scripts facilitated sharing of personal and

work-related matters also facilitated consistently

positive responses to disclosures. Positive responses

manifested as empathetic listening, reciprocal sharing,

and active responding to the expressed challenges.

First, the fact that these interactions were

occurring in a space separate from the everyday

created latitude for the team to take the time to hear

each other. Second, the participation rules of the

scripts (e.g., round-robin turn taking in which people

were given a turn to talk and clear expectations of

when to listen) set the stage for collective sharing.

This guided reciprocity and structured listening

limited immediate and unreflective reactions to

disclosures. Third, because scripts legitimated the

new sharing behaviors, the chances that any single

disclosures would be viewed as socially deviant

were reduced. Instead, individuals were primed to

give each other leeway and respond positively to

sharing.

Figure 2 depicts how spaces and interaction

scripts facilitated the enactment of sharing interactions.

The intervention spaces created the opening

for change by reducing the salience of existing

norms, fostering greater mindfulness of one’s interactions,

and facilitating experimentation. Scripts

provided shape and direction to the change process

by specifying both the what and the how of the interactions,

establishing the legitimacy of such behaviors,

and creating an expectation that all would

engage in these new risky behaviors. Notably, the

mechanisms by which spaces and interaction scripts

facilitated sharing interactions were mutually reinforcing.

The symbolic and temporal separation of the

spaces from everyday patterns of interaction facilitated

the enactment of the new interactions specified

by the scripts. Conversely, the existence of scripts

that explicitly specified forms of experimentation

and counter-normative interaction further enhanced

the symbolic separation of the spaces.

Positive Cycle of Emerging Positive Relational

Dynamics and Deeper Sharing

As the intervention progressed, the sharing interactions

sparked the emergence of a virtuous

feedback cycle of relational dynamics built on

respect, openness, and connectedness. Building

from Figure 2, which details the link between

spaces, interaction scripts, and sharing interactions,

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 115

Figure 3 outlines our full model of how positive relational

dynamics emerged. This model illustrates

how sharing interactions led to a feedback cycle

of increasing respect, openness, and connectedness.

Below, we unpack the elements and links in

this cycle.

First, the sharing interactions directly established

respect, openness, and connectedness. The sharing

interactions fostered respect by humanizing individuals

across hierarchical, cultural, linguistic,

and geographic distances. These interactions helped

team members see one another as people, with lives,

interests, and passions outside of work. The sharing

interactions established openness by virtue of the

wider range of topics—both personal and work

related—that the team shared in pulse checks and

CWT calls. And the sharing interactions fostered

connectedness through the positive responses to

personal and work-related disclosures. Taking the

form of reciprocal sharing, empathetic listening,

and active responding, positive responses fostered a

sense that the group cared about each other’s work

experiences and who they were as people. In these

ways, the sharing interactions established the beginnings

of positive relational dynamics on the team.

Second, the respect, openness, and connectedness

that emerged from early sharing interactions generated

energy and engagement within the team, fueling

a cycle of growing positive relational dynamics. The

energy was evident in the excitement and satisfaction

that individuals displayed after their CWT

calls and during the fun, personal pulse check

conversations in weeks 4 and 6. The increased engagement

by the team manifested in the team’s

adaption of the initial scripts, starting in week 4. Such

adaptation of the interactions scripts indicated that

team members were progressively investing more

of their time, energy, and belief in the possibility of

change.

The increased energy and engagement of the team,

in turn, inspired individuals to fully embrace the

scripts in latter weeks. Thus, the enactment of sharing

interactions, facilitated by the intervention’s

spaces and interaction scripts, initiated a cycle of

growing respect, openness, and connectedness on

the team—a cycle fueled by increased energy and

engagement in the change process.

One important feature of our theoretical model is

that not every type of interaction script will necessarily

lead to the emergence of positive relational

FIGURE 2

How Spaces and Interaction Scripts Facilitated Enactment of Sharing Interactions

Spaces: Separation from everyday norms and patterns of interaction

Sharing personally

and about work

challenges

Interaction scripts

that specify collective

interpersonal sharing

(content parameters and

participation rules)

Positive response

(empathetic listening,

reciprocal sharing,

active responding)

Sharing Interactions

Space creates opening for change

1. Reducing salience of norms

and patterns

2. Increasing attention to

immediate situation

3. Fostering experimentation

and risk taking

Scripts support change by

1. Guiding experimentation

into specified forms

2. Legitimating counter-normative

forms of interacting

3. Creating expectation of

shared risk taking

Mutually

reinforcing

116 Academy of Management Journal February

dynamics. In this particular intervention, the content

parameters—interpersonal sharing about personal

or work challenges—and participation rules—

collective engagement across cultural and hierarchical

team divides—of the interaction scripts were

important to the observed outcomes of the intervention.

The collective interpersonal sharing

specified by the interaction scripts in our study were

key to humanizing individuals, fostering positive

responses to disclosures, and generating positive

relational dynamics.

In addition, not every single instance of interaction

scripts fostered sharing interactions that were

equally successful at facilitating respect, openness,

and connectedness—notably, the week 5 pulse

check when team members were asked with whom

they would like to trade places. One feature of the

adaptation of the week 5 pulse check script was that

it prompted social comparisons within the team. The

content parameters in other weeks did not prompt

social comparisons, but instead asked people to

share a personal story or to discuss a work challenge.

This variation suggests that interaction scripts that

elicit social comparisons are less likely to humanize

team members and, as a result, are less likely to foster

respect, openness, and connectedness. This variation

also highlights how spaces on their own would

likely not have led to a transformation in the team’s

relational dynamics.

The Role of Script Adaptation to the Change

Process

The organic adaptations of the scripts, prompted

by suggestions from the team members to the facilitators,

played a critical role in the change process.

Such adaptations indicate that, while the scripts

were initially developed via a top-down process,

their evolution occurred through a bottom-up process.

The adaptations of scripts led to some of the

most consequential moments in the team’s evolving

relational dynamics, indicating that, when there is

an opportunity for bottom-up adaptation of scripts,

valuable experimentation may occur.

FIGURE 3

How Spaces and Interaction Scripts Fostered Positive Relational Dynamics

Sharing personally

and about work

challenges

Interaction scripts that

specify collective

interpersonal sharing

Positive response

to sharing

Cycle of positive relational

dynamics

Spillover of positive

relational dynamics in

everyday interactions

Adapting scripts

Spaces: Separation from everyday norms and patterns of interaction

Enabling: Leadership Support and External Facilitators

Respect,

openness,

connectedness

Energy and

engagement

Sharing Interactions

Figure 2

Everyday

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 117

Spillover of Positive Relational Dynamics Outside

of the Intervention Spaces and Scripts

The emergence of positive relational dynamics

within the spaces of the intervention led to improved

dynamics outside of these spaces. Examples of

spillover included the team members moving to sit

together in week 4. Further, their sitting together fed

back into how the team engaged within the spaces of

the intervention. Another example of spillover occurred

in week 8, when the U.S. project lead asked

the Indian team members for their input in changing

one of their meeting times, and in week 9, when a

team member became aware of how busy certain

colleagues were and offered to pitch in and help

those with more on their plate. These examples

highlight the fluidity of the boundaries between the

intervention spaces and the everyday interactions of

the team as well as the positive feedback in relational

dynamics across these boundaries.

Enabling Conditions: Leadership Support and

External Facilitators

These data suggest that, in order to realize the

generative potential of spaces and interaction scripts

for fostering positive relational dynamics, two enabling

conditions should be present: leadership

support and external facilitation.

Leadership support. As noted above, one of the

key functions of spaces and interaction scripts is

that they mitigate the social risk of enacting new

behaviors. However, the legitimating power of

spaces and interaction scripts do not solely reside in

the spaces and scripts themselves. The authority of

the team and organizational leaders who sanctioned

and supported the intervention imbued the spaces

and scripts with external legitimacy. Such legitimacy

was particularly important in the initial stages

of the intervention, when team members were deciding

how to enact the scripts and whether or not to

engage in what they perceived to be socially risky

behaviors. The engagement and support of the

U.S. senior manager and partner were critical for signaling

to the other teammembers that itwas legitimate

and safe to interact with one another in new ways.

Team and organizational leaders supported the

intervention in multiple ways. They sanctioned the

intervention as an official firm priority by ensuring

that time spent on the intervention could be logged as

part of each team member’s target hours toward firm

initiatives. Just as importantly, the project lead and

senior partner participated in the intervention itself.

Their participation and engagement in the sharing

interactions reinforced the sense that everyone on

the team would be taking the same risks, thus reducing

the risk for any one person.

External facilitation. Facilitators also supported

the change process in multiple ways. First, the presence

of the external facilitators in the intervention

enhanced the symbolic separation of the

intervention’s spaces and the everyday work of the

team. Their presence signaled to team members that

team norms would not necessarily apply in these

spaces. Second, the neutral status of external facilitators

mitigated the impression that participating

in the intervention was a top-down imperative of

management. The presence of facilitators, as outsiders

to the team’s formal power structure, bolstered

the sense that everyone on the team was in

the change effort together. Third, facilitators provided

in situ feedback and encouragement to support

script enactment. For example, following a

team member’s response to the pulse check questions

in week 5, the facilitator said, “Thank you so

much. That was terrific. So we are hoping that all of

your openness that existed in the first half of the call

will carry over in the second half.”

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

This research documents one way that organizations

can foster positive relational dynamics on

teams.We found that the combination of spaces and

interaction scripts can enable the emergence of respect,

openness, and connectedness in teams. While

spaces create the opening for new relational dynamics

to emerge, interaction scripts provide content

parameters and interaction rules that can guide

team members to interact in ways that generate respect,

openness, and connectedness.

These findings contribute to the literature on

positive relationships at work. Existing research in

this area highlights the importance of relationships

characterized by respect, openness, and connectedness

to team and organizational functioning (Carmeli

et al., 2015; Dutton & Heaphy, 2003; Edmondson,

1999). While scholars have suggested different potential

enablers of positive relational dynamics, such

as inclusive leadership (Fletcher & Ragins, 2007;

Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006) and relational skills

and practices (Baker&Dutton, 2007; Quinn, 2007), few

studies have empirically investigated the processes

and mechanisms by which relational dynamics can

be transformed. This present study deepens our understanding

of how positive relational dynamics can

118 Academy of Management Journal February

be fostered. We illustrate how, by carving out spaces

and providing interaction scripts that encouraged

collective interpersonal sharing, a distributed global

team developed a virtuous cycle of respect, openness,

and connectedness. This study also provides empirical

support for the positive feedback loops that

scholars of positive relationships at work have theorized

are inherent to the evolution of positive relationships

(Kahn, 2007; Quinn, 2007), and the role of

energy as a catalyst for these feedback loops (Dutton &

Heaphy, 2003; Quinn, 2007).

This study also deepens our understanding of

when interpersonal sharing can lead to positive relationships

at work. Existing research in psychology

highlights the positive relationship between personal

sharing and relational strength in general social

contexts (e.g., Collins & Miller, 1994). However,

studies of sharing in work contexts have noted the

negative impact that personal disclosure can have in

these settings (Detert & Edmondson, 2011; Morrison,

2011). The present study supports the importance of

normative context in influencing how interpersonal

sharing is received, but also suggests that the preexisting

normative context is not fully determinant.

The preexisting team norms in this study were

hardly favorable to the sharing of personal matters or

work challenges. Instead, the temporary opening in

the normative context of the team, facilitated by the

interaction scripts and spaces of the intervention,

was sufficient for the interpersonal sharing to be received

positively.

In addition to contributing to the research on

positive relationships at work, the concept of interaction

scripts contributes to research on change in

organizations. Prior research has highlighted the

importance of spaces, or bounded social settings, for

enabling change in institutional practices, routines,

group dynamics, and organizational culture (Bucher

& Langley, 2016; Furnari, 2014; Howard-Grenville

et al., 2011; Isaacs, 1999; Kellogg, 2009; Zietsma &

Lawrence, 2010). However, the notion of spaces,

which are, by definition, neutral as to what happens

within them, fails to provide insight into the dynamics

and mechanisms of change (Furnari, 2014;

Polletta, 1999).

This study introduces the notion of interaction

scripts to deepen our understanding of how and why

certain changes in interaction patterns can emerge

within a space. Furthermore, this study identifies the

mechanisms by which interaction scripts complement

spaces in affecting relational change: namely,

they help a team overcome the uncertainty, social

risk, and collective action problem associated with

deviating from team norms and engaging in risky

interpersonal sharing behaviors.

Notably, when we revisited the empirical research

that establishes spaces as a vehicle for change in

organizations, we found evidence of additional

structures resembling our concept of interaction

scripts that contributed to the change processes.

For instance, in Howard-Grenville and colleagues’

(2011) study of cultural change, they note the use of

“liminal spaces” that appear to incorporate interaction

scripts. One of the key liminal spaces in their

study is a strategy retreat that introduced celebration

and games (content parameters) and invited participation

from all hierarchical levels (participation

rules).AsHoward-Grenville et al. (2011: 530) explains:

Actors gave careful thought to how they would facilitate

and invite interaction, intentionally bringing to

the fore moments, events, or occasions in which

people could interact differently, suspend the usual

organizational social dynamics, and allow role-based

interactions to recede in importance.

In other words, these actors were consciously incorporating

scripts to structure interactions within

the space to bring about new ways of relating.

Similarly, Bucher and Langley’s (2016) study of

routine change describes how both reflective and

experimental spaces facilitated successful changes

in medical routines. Upon examination, both kinds

of spaces in their study contained structured guidelines

for interaction. For example, in reflective

spaces, individuals were explicitly directed to

review the old routines while envisioning new

routines (i.e., content parameters), and, in one of

their cases, an external facilitator was even brought

in to guide the reflection. In experimental spaces,

the new envisioned medical routines provided the

structured guidelines governing how the teams

would interact within the space. In Kellogg’s (2009)

study of institutional change at two hospitals, in

addition to relational spaces where reformers could

meet to interact and mobilize, additional guidelines

shaped reformer’s interactions in ways that supported

the change process. For example, directors of

surgery gave directives to doctors to discuss how to

change practices in order to comply with the new

hours policy (content parameters) and, in afternoon

rounds, juniors and seniors were both expected to

speak and raise issues (content parameters and participation

rules).

That guidelines for interaction with content parameters

and participation rules are present in several

existing studies of organizational change highlights

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 119

that spaces are often accompanied by additional

structures that support the change process. However,

this hidden role of interaction scripts as a unique

contribution to fostering change has been undertheorized.

For example,while Furnari (2014) recently

suggested that, in addition to spaces, successful interaction

rituals—or interactions characterized by

mutual attention andemotional energy—are needed to

support the emergence of new practices, he did not

address how successful interaction rituals come to be.

Our notion of interaction scripts serves as one possible

means for facilitating successful interaction rituals

within spaces.

This work also contributes to the literature on

distributed and global teams. Research on global

teams has highlighted the challenges of overcoming

cultural, hierarchical, linguistic, and geographic

distance to achieve team effectiveness (Cramton,

2001; Espinosa, Slaughter, Kraut, & Herbsleb, 2007;

Herbsleb & Mockus, 2003; Hinds & Bailey, 2003;

Hinds & Mortensen, 2005; Metiu, 2006). Scholars

note the importance of fostering closeness within

global teams to manage coordination challenges.

Current work suggests that in-person site visits are

critical for fostering this familiarity (Hinds &

Cramton, 2014). According to this research, site

visits allow individuals to work together in vivo and

provide informal time for getting to know one another

outside of work (Hinds & Cramton, 2014). Our

study suggests an alternative mechanism for fostering

closeness in global teams that may not require

extended time with each other on-site. In these data,

spaces and interaction scripts fostered positive relational

dynamics even while the team remained

distributed. The team described in this research

never met face to face as an entire group.

This research has implications for practitioners

and leaders seeking to foster positive relational dynamics

in teams. Practitioners should think about

how to structure personal sharing and open discussion

of work issues in service of fostering respect,

openness, and connectedness and should consider

using spaces and interaction scripts as a resource.

The recent research on choice architecture in behavioral

economics provides a useful analog for

understanding the potential implications of interaction

scripts for practitioners. Choice architecture

is the study of how designing the decision

environment can influence or “nudge” individuals

to make decisions that have better outcomes for the

individual and/or society, such as making 401(k)

contributions a default option in order to increase

retirement savings (Benartzi & Thaler, 2007; Thaler

&Sunstein, 2012). Interaction scripts can be viewed a

form of “interaction architecture”; just as choice architecture

can be used to nudge individuals to make

more optimal decisions, interaction scripts may

serve as a way to nudge group members to interact

with each other in more productive and beneficial

ways.

This study was limited in temporal scope. While

the relatively short duration of the study (two-week

assessment plus a 10-week intervention) speaks to

the power that spaces and interaction scripts can

have in fostering new dynamics, it would be worthwhile

to examine how team relational dynamics

evolve over a longer timeframe. To borrow Lewin’s

classic framework on the process of group change

(Lewin, 1947), we observed the “unfreezing” and

“changing” stages of change but likely did not observe

the full process of the team “re-freezing”

around new norms or patterns of interaction. Do

teams continue to utilize spaces and interaction

scripts even after the new patterns of interaction are

firmly established, or do they no longer need them?

Future research could explore the temporal dynamics

of relational change over time and the evolving

role that spaces and scripts play throughout a longer

process of relational change.

Future research is needed to further understand

the conditions under which spaces and interaction

scripts are likely to foster positive relational dynamics.

Specifically, future research could explore

whether there are certain content parameters and

participation rules of interaction scripts that make

them more or less effective at fostering positive relational

dynamics. For example, what level of personal

sharing is needed to foster connectedness?

What might be the downside of too much personal

sharing (e.g., Martin et al., 1998)? Also, while the

intervention we studied comprised spaces and

scripts, future research could explore under what

conditions bounded spaces might be sufficient to

foster positive change without the addition of interaction

scripts. Alternatively, can scripts effectively

facilitate change outside of spaces? Finally, the

question of whether external facilitation is needed in

order for spaces and scripts to enable change is an

open question. Notably, the interaction scripts in

Howard-Grenville and colleagues’ (2011) study were

developed and utilized by insiders, suggesting that

external facilitators may not always be necessary for

scripts to support change.

Lastly, future research is needed to explore the

relevance of interaction scripts for fostering other

types of change. As noted, interaction scripts can be

120 Academy of Management Journal February

found in many other case studies of change in and

across organizations but have yet to be theorized or

identified as an important enabler of change. How

might the relevance and functioning of interaction

scripts be different when the change is in organizational

routines, practices, or cultural repertoires

rather than in relational dynamics? What are the

boundary conditions for when interaction scripts are

useful for facilitating such change?

It is notoriously difficult for teams to change negative

patterns of interacting and relating. Our research

shines light on one resource for facilitating the

emergence of positive relational dynamics in teams.

We found that the combination of spaces and interaction

scripts can guide groups to collectively

manage social risk and experiment with new forms

of interpersonal sharing. In doing so, they plant the

seeds of respect, openness, and connectedness that

can grow and ultimately transform a team’s relational

dynamics.

REFERENCES

Abelson, R. 1981. Psychological status of the script concept.

American Psychologist, 36: 715–729.

Andersson, L. M., & Pearson, C. M. 1999. Tit for tat? The

spiraling effect of incivility in the workplace. Academy

of Management Review, 24: 452–471.

Ashcraft, K. L. 2000. Empowering “professional” relationships:

Organizational communication meets feminist

practice. Management Communication Quarterly, 13:

347–392.

Ashforth, B., & Fried, Y. 1988. The mindlessness of organizational

behaviors. Human Relations, 41: 305–329.

Baker, W., & Dutton, J. E. 2007. Enabling positive social

capital in organizations. In J. E. Dutton & B. R. Ragins

(Eds.), Exploring positive relationships at work:

Building a theoretical and research foundation:

325–346. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Barley, S. R., & Tolbert, P. S. 1997. Institutionalization and

structuration. Organization Studies, 18: 93–117.

Benartzi, S., & Thaler, R. H. 2007. Heuristics and biases in

retirement savings behavior. Journal of Economic

Perspectives, 21: 81–104.

Blatt, R., & Camden, C. T. 2007. Positive relationships

and cultivating community. In J. E. Dutton & B. R.

Ragins (Eds.), Exploring positive relationships at

work: Building a theoretical and research foundation:

243–264. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates.

Bohm, D. 1990. On dialogue. New York, NY: Routledge.

Bowen, F., & Blackmon, K. 2003. Spirals of silence: The

dynamic effects of diversity on organizational voice.

Journal of Management Studies, 40: 1393–1417.

Bucher, S., & Langley, A. 2016. The interplay of reflective

and experimental spaces in interrupting and reorienting

routine dynamics. Organization Science, 27:

594–613.

Burt, R. S. 2000. The network structure of social capital.

Research in Organizational Behavior, 22: 345–423.

Carmeli, A., Dutton, J. E., & Hardin, A. E. 2015. Respect as

an engine for new ideas: Linking respectful engagement,

relational information processing and creativity

among employees and teams. Human Relations, 68:

1021–1047.

Carmeli, A., & Gittell, J. 2009. High-quality relationships,

psychological safety, and learning from failures in

work organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior,

30: 709–729.

Chaikin, A. L., & Derlega, V. J. 1974. Variables affecting the

appropriateness of self-disclosure. Journal of Consulting

and Clinical Psychology, 42: 588–593.

Charmaz, K. 2006. Constructing grounded theory: A

practical guide through qualitative research. London,

U.K.: SAGE.

Collins, N. L., & Miller, L. C. 1994. Self-disclosure and

liking: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin,

116: 457–475.

Cortina, L. M. 2008. Unseen injustice: Incivility as modern

discrimination in organizations. Academy of Management

Review, 33: 55–75.

Cramton, C. D. 2001. The mutual knowledge problem and

its consequences for dispersed collaboration. Organization

Science, 12: 346–371.

Creed, W. E. D. 2003. Voice lessons: Tempered radicalism

and the use of voice and silence. Journal of Management

Studies, 40: 1503–1536.

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. 2007. Leadership behavior and

employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of

Management Journal, 50: 869–884.

Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. 2011. Implicit voice

theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship

at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54:

461–488.

Dutton, J. E. 2003. Energize your workplace: How to

create and sustain high-quality connections at work.

Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Dutton, J. E., Ashford, S. J.,O’Neill, R. M.,&Lawrence, K. A.

2001. Moves that matter: Issue selling and organizational

change. Academy of Management Journal, 44:

716–736.

Dutton, J. E., & Heaphy, E. D. 2003. The power of highquality

connections. In K. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton,

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 121

&R.E.Quinn(Eds.), Positiveorganizational scholarship:

Foundations of a new discipline, 3: 263–278. San Francisco,

CA: Berrett-Koehler.

Dutton, J. E., & Ragins, B. R. E. 2007. Exploring positive

relationships at work: Building a theoretical and

research foundation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates.

Edmondson, A. 1999. Psychological safety and learning

behavior in work teams. Administrative Science

Quarterly, 44: 350–383.

Edmondson, A. C., & Lei, Z. 2014. Psychological safety:

The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal

construct. Annual Review of Organizational

Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1: 23–43.

Eisenberg, E. M., & Witten, M. G. 1987. Reconsidering

openness in organizational communication. Academy

of Management Review, 12: 418–426.

Espinosa, J. A., Slaughter, S. A., Kraut, R. E., & Herbsleb,

J. D. 2007. Team knowledge and coordination in

geographically distributed software development.

Journal of Management Information Systems, 24:

135–169.

Fletcher, J. K., & Ragins, B. R. 2007. Stone center relational

cultural theory. In B. R. Ragins & K. E. Kram (Eds.),

Handbook of mentoring at work: Theory, research,

and practice: 373–399. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

Furnari, S. 2014. Interstitial spaces: Microinteraction settings

and the genesis of new practices between institutional

fields. Academy of Management Review,

39: 439–462.

Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H.

2006. Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological

Science, 17: 1068–1074.

Gioia, D. A., & Poole, P. 1984. Scripts in organizational

behavior.Academy ofManagementReview, 9: 449–459.

Gittell, J. H., Seidner, R., & Wimbush, J. 2010. A relational

model of how high-performance work systems work.

Organization Science, 21: 490–506.

Goffman, E. 1983. The interaction order: American Sociological

Association, 1982 presidential address.

American Sociological Review, 48: 1–17.

Herbsleb, J. D., & Mockus, A. 2003. An empirical study of

speed and communication in globally distributed

software development. IEEE Transactions on Software

Engineering, 29: 481–494.

Hinds, P. J., & Bailey, D. E. 2003. Out of sight, out of sync:

Understanding conflict in distributed teams. Organization

Science, 14: 615–632.

Hinds, P. J., & Cramton, C. D. 2014. Situated coworker

familiarity: How site visits transform relationships

among distributed workers. Organization Science,

25: 794–814.

Hinds, P. J., & Mortensen, M. 2005. Understanding conflict

in geographically distributed teams: The moderating

effects of shared identity, shared context, and spontaneous

communication. Organization Science, 16:

290–307.

Howard-Grenville, J., Golden-Biddle, K., Irwin, J., & Mao, J.

2011. Liminality as cultural process for cultural

change. Organization Science, 22: 522–539.

Ibarra, H. 1993. Personal networks of women and minorities

in management: A conceptual framework. Academy

of Management Review, 18: 56–87.

Isaacs, W. 1999. Dialogue: The art of thinking together.

New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Jablin,F.M.1979. Superior–subordinate communication:The

state of the art. Psychological Bulletin, 86: 1201–1222.

Kahn, W. A. 2007. Meaningful connections. In J. E. Dutton

& B. R. Ragins (Eds.), Exploring positive relationships

at work: Building a theoretical and research foundation:

189–206. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates.

Kellogg, K. C. 2009. Operating room: Relational spaces and

microinstitutional change in surgery. American Journal

of Sociology, 115: 657–711.

Kipnis, D. 1972. Does power corrupt? Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 24: 33–41.

Lewin, K. 1947. Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept,

method and reality in social science: Social equilibrium

and change. Human Relations, 1: 5–41.

Liu, D., Liao, H., & Loi, R. 2012. The dark side of leadership:

A three-level investigation of the cascading

effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity.

Academy of Management Journal, 55: 1187–1212.

Lord, R. G., & Kernan, M. 1987. Scripts as determinants of

purposeful behavior in organizations. Academy of

Management Review, 12: 265–277.

Martin, J., Knopoff, K., & Beckman, C. 1998. An alternative

to bureaucratic impersonality and emotional labor:

Bounded emotionality at The Body Shop. Administrative

Science Quarterly, 43: 429–469.

Mayes, B. T., & Allen, R. W. 1977. Toward a definition of

organizational politics. Academy of Management

Review, 2: 672–678.

Metiu, A. 2006. Owning the code: Status closure in distributed

groups. Organization Science, 17: 418–435.

Morrison, E. W. 2011. Employee voice behavior: Integration

and directions for future research. Academy of

Management Annals, 5: 373–412.

Morrison, E. W., & Milliken, F. J. 2000. Organizational silence:

A barrier to change and development in a pluralistic

world. Academy of Management Review, 25:

706–725.

122 Academy of Management Journal February

Nembhard, I. M., & Edmondson, A. C. 2006. Making it safe:

The effects of leader inclusiveness and professional

status on psychological safety and improvement efforts

in health care teams. Journal of Organizational

Behavior, 27: 941–966.

O’Reilly, C. A., III, Caldwell, D. F., & Barnett, W. P. 1989.

Work group demography, social integration, and turnover.

Administrative Science Quarterly, 34: 21–37.

O’Reilly, C. A., & Roberts, K. H. 1977. Task group structure,

communication, and effectiveness in three organizations.

Journal of Applied Psychology, 62: 674–681.

Phillips, K. W., Rothbard, N. P., & Dumas, T. L. 2009.

To disclose or not to disclose? Status distance and

self-disclosure in diverse environments. Academy of

Management Review, 34: 710–732.

Polletta, F. 1999. “Free spaces” in collective action. Theory

and Society, 28: 1–38.

Quinn, R. W. 2007. Energizing others in work connections.

In J. E. Dutton & B. R. Ragins (Eds.), Exploring positive

relationships at work: Building a theoretical and

research foundation: 73–90. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence

Erlbaum Associates.

Rogers, D. P. 1987. The development of a measure of perceived

communication openness. Journal of Business

Communication, 24: 53–61.

Rogers, K. M., Corley, K. G., & Ashforth, B. E. 2016. Seeing

more than orange: Organizational respect and positive

identity transformation in a prison context. Administrative

Science Quarterly, 62: 219–269.

Senge, P. 1990. The fifth discipline: The art and practice

of the learning organization. New York, NY: Currency

Doubleday.

Shaw, M. 1981. Group dynamics.NewYork, NY: McGraw-

Hill.

Stephens, J. P., Heaphy, E. D., Carmeli, A., Spreitzer, G. M.,

& Dutton, J. E. 2013. Relationship quality and virtuousness:

Emotional carrying capacity as a source of

individual and team resilience. Journal of Applied

Behavioral Science, 49: 13–41.

Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. 1998. Basics of qualitative research:

Techniques and procedures for developing

grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Sutton, R. I. 2007. The no asshole rule. London, U.K.:

Sphere.

Thaler, R. H., Sunstein, C., & Balz, J. P. 2012. Choice architecture.

In E. Shafir (Ed.), The behavioral foundations

of public policy: 1–13. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Tourish, D., & Robson, P. 2006. Sensemaking and the distortion

of critical upward communication in organizations.

Journal of Management Studies, 43:

711–730.

Vogus, T. J. 2004. In search of mechanisms: How do HR

practices affect organizational performance? (Unpublished

doctoral dissertation). University of Michigan,

Ann Arbor.

Weick, K. E. 1993. The collapse of sensemaking in organizations:

The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative

Science Quarterly, 38: 628–652.

Zietsma, C., & Lawrence, T. B. 2010. Institutional work in

the transformation of an organizational field: The interplay

of boundary work and practice work. Administrative

Science Quarterly, 55: 189–221.

Michael Y. Lee (mike.lee@insead.edu) is an assistant professor

of organizational behavior at INSEAD. His research

focuses on novel and innovative approaches to organizing

that facilitate individual, team, and organizational

effectiveness.

Melissa A. Mazmanian (m.mazmanian@uci.edu) is an

associate professor of Informatics at the School of Information

and Computer Sciences, University of California,

Irvine. Her research revolves around the use of

information and communication technologies in relation

to daily work practice, communication patterns, and the

experience of personal and professional time in the digital

age.

Leslie A. Perlow (lperlow@hbs.edu) is the Konosuke Matsushita

Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior

Unit at Harvard Business School. Her research

focuses on the microdynamics of work. She documents

existing work patterns, identifies ways teams and organizations

can change their work patterns, and studies the

change process.

2020 Lee, Mazmanian, and Perlow 123

Author: eoniva

Group Coaching: Sample Questions

FOSTERING POSITIVE RELATIONAL DYNAMICS

What is behavioral economics and what it has to offer

Seeking to explore the human side of business?