Taking aim at research on esports teams: A systematic literature review and cross-disciplinary future agenda

Purpose: This paper aims to systematically review and integrate the fast-growing literature on esports teams. Esports have evolved into hyper-competitive and professionalized settings with particular challenges, which need to be understood to develop and support sustainable esports teams. Likewise, esports teams share similarities with teams from professional sports and beyond, thus having the potential to inform team research in general.

Design/methodology/approach: The authors leveraged a systematic literature review approach and conducted a structured keyword search in Web of Science. The results were extended by a journal-driven search and forward-backward citation tracking, resulting in a final sample of 92 articles, which were analyzed via qualitative content analysis.

Findings: First, the authors find that research predominantly leverages quantitative study designs and samples of nonprofessional MOBA players. Second, four main themes that shape effectiveness in esports teams emerged: team compositional and structural features, leadership and external resources, team emergent states and team action processes. Third, the authors discuss blind spots within the literature that need more attention (e.g. psychological safety and stress management mechanisms) and how scholars can leverage the rich, multifaceted and high-resolution data existing in this context (e.g. game logs, audio and video recordings) to generate important insights on team dynamics valuable far beyond the esports domain. Finally, the authors discuss practical implications for players and teams to build and maintain sustainable esports teams.

Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors provide the first systematic review on esports team effectiveness based on the Input-Mediator-Output-Input model and a critical evaluation of how it can fertilize esports research and practitioners.