A Taxonomy of Team-Assembly Systems: Understanding How People Use Technologies to Form Teams

The emergence of team-assembling technologies has brought with it new challenges in designing and implementing socio-technical systems. Our understanding of how systems shape the team assembly processes is still limited. How do systems enable users to find teammates? How do users make decisions when using these systems? And what factors explain the characteristics of the teams assembled? Building on existing literature from CSCW, computer science, and management science, we propose a conceptual framework called the "Model of Online Team Assembly" (MOTA) to characterize how users and systems configure team assembly in computer-mediated environments. This framework argues that two dimensions determine how systems influence team assembly: (i) to what extent users can exercise their agency, and (ii) how many users can participate in the team formation process. The intersection of these two dimensions manifest four types of teams enabled by systems: self-assembled teams, staffed teams, optimized teams, and augmented teams. We characterize each one of these types of teams, considering their qualities, advantages, and challenges. To contextualize these types of teams, we map existing studies and systems using a scoping literature review. Lastly, we discuss ways through which these two dimensions alter users' behavior, team diversity, and team composition. This paper provides theoretical implications and research questions for future systems that reconfigure the organization of people into teams.