A Social Regulation Perspective on Team Reflexivity: The Development of an Analytical Framework

Teams are nowadays seen as the cornerstones of organizations. Previous research has shown that team reflexivity is positively related to team performance. Traditionally, team reflexivity is conceptualized as a process that occurs during transition moments, ignoring reflexive moments during teams’ action phases. Moreover, most studies used self-reported questionnaires and cross-sectional designs and thus provided limited insights into how team reflexivity unfolds during both the action and transition phases of teams. In this study, we adopt a social regulation perspective to develop an analytical framework to study team reflexivity in the flow of work. The study was conducted in a software development setting and included 50 h of video recordings of different types of team meetings of six professional self-managing teams (a total of 33 team members). Using concepts from social regulation theory as developed in student learning settings as an analytical lens, an analytical framework with four components of social regulation (knowledge co-construction and regulation; regulation activities; focus of regulation, and type of interaction) was developed and applied. Outcomes show that in more than half of their conversations, the teams jointly engaged in regulation-related activities, of which most concerned planning activities and a very low occurrence of evaluation activities. Different patterns of team reflexivity were found in the action and transition phase but zooming in on the interactions also showed high interrelatedness of the different activities. The analytical framework could assist future research to further study the interaction between the different components and how they mutually relate to team performance.