About

Deborah L. Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management and a Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is also the Founder of the MIT Leadership Center. Her pioneering research focuses on how successful teams operate, emphasizing the importance of managing both inside and outside team boundaries. This work led to the development of the concept of X-Teams, which are designed to drive innovation within large organizations. Ancona's research also explores distributed leadership and the creation of research-based tools, practices, and coaching models that foster creative leadership at all levels of an organization. She is the author of the book 'X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed' and has published influential articles such as 'In Praise of the Incomplete Leader' in Harvard Business Review. Her studies of team performance have appeared in prominent journals including the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the MIT Sloan Management Review. Ancona holds a BA and an MS in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in management from Columbia University. She has served as a leadership and innovation consultant to various companies and has been involved in academic and professional boards, including the Board of the Penn Graduate School of Education and the Canadian Council of Academies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Geography

Selected publications

• Compose Teams to Ensure Successful External Activity

  2023-04-10 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter proposes the fundamental principle that teams should be composed of individuals who can effectively carry out external boundary activity. It asserts that the external activities of interdependent organization teams are related to their performance. The first mechanism for designing a team that can effectively manage its boundaries is to select people who can represent and have expertise in the diverse functional areas that will contribute to the group's ultimate product. A second tool for managing team boundaries is including individuals on the team who have connections or relationships with others outside the group. A third approach to composing a team that effectively manages its boundaries is configuring team members' roles. Team members should collectively have a mix of strong and weak ties with other individuals. It is important to have individuals on the team who understand the knowledge and resources that may be spread out through the organization.

  PublisherDOI

• X-teams: why they succeed and how to nurture them

  ˜The œbusiness & management collection. · 2023-07-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Shifting Team Research after COVID‐19:<i>Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change</i>

  Journal of Management Studies · 2020 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  Even before COVID-19 we saw an evolution in team discourse that will continue long after the disease is gone. That said, COVID-19 has been a disruptor that has shifted the trajectory of that evolution, accelerating some trends and introducing others. This is not a story of moving from one state to another, but rather shifting the ongoing arc of change. In this brief we examine the shifts before the pandemic, where COVID-19 has taken us, and implications for future research. Richard Hackman’s definition of a team has been active for decades: a set of individuals who work interdependently toward a common goal and view themselves as a team (Hackman, 2003). While this definition still holds, underlying it are several unstated assumptions that have been under assault for decades – and on which COVID-19 has had a significant effect: While the traditional model assumed a stable set of members for the life of a team, this is rarely the case anymore (Ancona & Bresman, 2007). Now, membership changes frequently as part-time and part-cycle members come and go and as membership moves to include customers, suppliers, and partners (Gambardella et al., 2017). Moreover, as task needs shift and different forms of expertise are needed and as organizations undergo personnel changes, full-time membership moves accordingly (Bakker, 2010). COVID-19, with its push towards people working remotely reduces the costs of switching membership, making it easier for people to join and shift team membership, and accelerating the need to understand the impact of this fluidity. While the Hackman model assumed clear team boundaries, we have increasingly seen contexts in which team membership itself is contested (Mortensen, 2014). For example, knowledge work, with members often working remotely across partial commitments to multiple fluidly-shifting teams that frequently span organizational boundaries, often leaves individuals with differing understandings of who is on the team. COVID-19 has exacerbated this trend, particularly as many organizations have shifted to using more contingent and gig workers to manage market shifts and demand uncertainty – making it even more important that we understand the psychological impact of fuzzy boundaries on things like belonging, coordination, learning, and performance. While the old model of teams assumes a focus on internal composition and dynamics, the importance of boundary spanning and connecting to the external knowledge, work, and political networks is seen as increasingly important. COVID-19 is one more example of an external event that will require more sensemaking, vicarious learning, adaptability, and collaboration both within and across boundaries (Bresman, 2013; Maloney et al., 2016). Research models will need to shift to include both an internal and external lens, as well as a focus on how to effectively blend external outreach with internal cohesion and coordination. While in traditional organizations, employees were assigned to one team at a time, now most employees are balancing multiple memberships (O’Leary et al., 2011). People stretched across many teams face issues of fragmented attention, task switching, conflicting demands, and work overload. These, in turn affect their individual cognitions, behaviors, and performance as well as both learning and productivity at the team and organizational levels (Mortensen and Gardner, 2017). COVID-19 has pushed this trend further as organizations seek higher resource utilization and resilience through cross-staffing. We, therefore, need to continue to study how people can manage multiple commitments, phases, deadlines, and identity matches to make this mode of operating better (Rapp and Mathieu, 2019) and to understand the implications of overlapping – and, therefore, non-independent – teams. The trend toward an increased focus on the use of technology in teams started before COVID-19 (e.g., Glikson and Woolley, 2020) as we witnessed AI as a partner in team decision-making and synchronous feedback. However, the pandemic has accelerated our desire to push more work onto machines and provide feedback and coaching remotely. This forces us to examine whether machines add to the process – no groupthink, self-censorship, or ulterior motives for them – or present us with a cold and unwelcome partner, potentially with biases inextricably designed in. While most early team theorists looked at the organization as the context for teams, as organizations move to greater interaction and collaboration with the broader ecosystem, team activity must follow. Research on multi-team systems has examined the impact of teams collaborating – frequently across organizational boundaries – towards a common overarching goal (Zaccaro et al., 2012) while team scholars have studied rotating leadership across teams from different organizations (Davis and Eisenhardt, 2011). COVID-19 has opened up many more opportunities for cross-organizational collaboration calling for a more research on multi-team collaboration and eco-system outreach. In short, the nice neat world of stable teams with known and set boundaries, an internal focus, and a clear mandate was already on the wane, but with COVID-19 it has almost been obliterated. Now it is time for our models to keep pace and explore the complexities of ever-shifting teams working with new technologies to compete and collaborate across multiple boundaries. While the shifts described above speak of continued evolutionary change, COVID-19 has brought major disruptions too. What are some of the biggest shifts? Remote working and collaborating through mediating technology, rather than face-to-face, is not new (O’Leary et al., 2002), but until recently, it was the domain of a few who were geographically far or chose a different lifestyle. COVID-19-driven lockdowns instantly transformed a massive portion of the population into remote workers. In an instant we went from wondering if we could or should do this to asking if we can ever go back? This raises the question of how do we structure and manage our teams in a way that drives integration, collaboration, and identification across both those in and out of the office and those on aligned versus mis-aligned schedules? How do we use in-person versus remote time most effectively? How should we design tasks to best take advantage of hybridity and its inherent dynamism? How do we maintain equity and fairness across differing access to resources? As such hybrid environments appear to be here to stay, we desperately need to examine how best to manage them and to identify best practices. For decades, scholars have argued that socialization is critical to establishing strong teams, leading us to push for effective on-boarding that helps newcomers to understand their new environments and socialization to reduce misunderstandings and increase the efficiency of interactions. COVID-19 has effectively separated many of us from colleagues, bosses, and our physical and social environments. While technology helps, many people have lost their felt experience of work. COVID-19 raises the questions: how can we help people to join and understand their work context when they are not physically in it and have no access to casual interactions at the elevator or coffee bar? How do we create and foster team identities, belonging, and safety in the absence of physical and social cues? Is it even possible? Work-life balance is a well-established body of research, on which we are not experts. However, COVID-19 has brought the blurring of boundaries between home and work into stark relief. As COVID-19 pushes us into more contact with our families, friends and selves, many people are feeling drawn to activities and meaning outside of work. As these centrifugal forces pull us away from work, they can erode the social glue that holds team members together. How do we manage to create the countervailing centripetal force? Or do we need to? Can we create the containers to provide safety, value, meaning, and identity, when members have shifted their primary focus elsewhere? Taken together, these trends may push us to rethink the relationship of teams to the organizations within which they sit – and maybe even those organizations themselves. Consider the example of pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Takeda – fierce competitors before COVID-19 – who now find their two R&D organizations collaborating on new medications to combat the virus, bringing universities, government regulators, labs, and patients into the conversation. Complex, global challenges – of which COVID-19 is a stark example – are increasingly leading us to constitute teams of teams working across organizations, sectors, countries, and specialties not only to do joint work but to rewrite the ground rules of the entire ecosystem. Examples of new organizational forms that essentially constitute dynamically shifting systems of teams increasingly appear in the business press. For practitioners, the promise of this design, often referred to as ‘agile’ or ‘nimble’ (Ancona et al., 2019), is the ability to use distributed, ephemeral, loosely bounded teams in the service of responsiveness and innovation. However, as scholars we may need to consider a new level of analysis, as ‘meta-teams’ – the populations drawn on to dynamically reconstitute such collaborations – may begin to exhibit traits and characteristics of their own. What rules are required to manage such dynamic contexts with directives from all sides? How do individuals balance competing identities and allegiances and do people start to identify with a meta-team itself? How do relationships between and across such dynamic teams change over time through shifting and shared membership? To date, we have surprisingly little empirical evidence to help us understand the questions this new way of organizing raises. Even with such fundamental shifts, however, the team will remain the indispensable agent of action and change and, hence, a critical focus for management scholars.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acknowledgments

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Geography

  Transforming Relationships for High Performance would not have been possible without the generosity and openness of many change agents in many organizations-especially Group Health, Varde Municipality, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and Billings Clinic.There were others as well.In 2011, a series of influential individuals, most of whom I had not known before, approached me one by one with the idea that relational coordination could provide practical insights for organizational change.

  DOI

• Beyond Task and Maintenance: Defining External Functions in Groups

  DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2018-02-08 · 215 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Using interview and log data from 38 new product team managers and 15 team members, we identify a set of activities that group members use to manage their dependence on external groups. Team member...

  Publisher

• Structural Balance in Teams

  Psychology Press eBooks · 2017-09-25 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter considers the literature on interpersonal relationships and their impact on team outcomes. It observes that this literature is characterized by four attributes: it tends to focus on dysfunction; it is fragmented; it focuses primarily at the behavioral; and its basic paradigm derives from a mechanistic model. Teams are seen as a pattern of relationships in which individuals feel the need to conform and so uniformity prevails. Structurally balanced teams are responsive to the precise context in which they function, and produce health according to that context, not just a standard arbitrarily imposed on it. D. Kantor and W. Lehr's model of the action patterns in human and family systems, which they call the four-player model, to introduce a frame for structural balance to the teams literature. The model suggests there are four core acts—move, follow, oppose, and bystand—that are the essential building blocks of both dysfunctional and healthy sequences of action in teams.

  PublisherDOI

• Compose Teams to Assure Successful Boundary Activity

  2017-08-25 · 4 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  The basic principle we propose here is that teams should be composed of individuals who can effectively carry out external boundary activity. The central argument is that teams need people who can bridge to the outside – people who can get resources, negotiate agreements, and know who to contact for expertise. A number of studies have shown that external boundary activity is a key predictor of team performance. Therefore, an important element in deciding on a team's composition should be to ensure that such activity takes place.

  PublisherDOI

• Sustainable Innovation: the Evolutionary Journey

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2015-01-01

  articleSenior author

  The concept of sustainability is an evolving one driven by many factors. While business organizations face risks if they ignore the social, political and regulatory shifts that accompany the movement toward sustainability, they also have the opportunity to significantly differentiate themselves from competitors by creating new business models to address sustainable challenges. Reimagining sustainability as a central strategic issue for the firm is, however, easier to talk about than to do. After more than twenty years of attempts to achieve sustainable innovation in various business organizations, it is now apparent that plans often go awry. Even the most sophisticated technologies, the best business models, and the leadership of powerful, inspiring, energetic, and frequently highly capable individuals do not always lead to what Esty and Winston have called

  PublisherDOI

• Entrainment

  Wiley Encyclopedia of Management · 2015-01-21 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The term “entrainment” means the adjustment of the pace, cycle, and rhythm of one activity to match that of another.

  PublisherDOI

• Outward Bound: Strategies for Team Survival in the Organization

  DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · 2015-08-23 · 83 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Using the external perspective as a research lens, this study examines team-context interaction in five consulting teams.The data show three strategies toward the environment: informing, parading, and probing.Probing teams revise their knowledge of the environment through external contact, initiate programs with outsiders, and promote their team achievements within the organization.They are rated the highest performers, although member satisfaction and cohesiveness suffer in the short run.Results suggest that external activities are better predictors of team performance than internal group processes for teams facing external dependence.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• David F. Caldwell

  Santa Clara University

  11 shared

• Michael L. Tushman

  7 shared

• Paul S. Goodman

  Newcastle University

  6 shared

• David Caldwell

  Santa Clara University

  6 shared

• Henrik Bresman

  6 shared

• Barbara Lawrence

  6 shared

• Tony Suchman

  Indiana University Health

  4 shared

• Marjorie M. Godfrey

  University of New Hampshire

  4 shared

Labs

• MIT Center for Collective IntelligencePI

Awards & honors

• 2022 Samuel M. Seegal Faculty Prize
• 2018 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching