Whether coordinating emergency response teams, leading global businesses or preparing astronauts for spaceflight, organizations rely on decades of research to better understand what helps teams perform at their best.
A comprehensive international review published in the peer-reviewed journal Small Group Research ranked Rice faculty members Eduardo Salas and Daan van Knippenberg first and second, respectively, on its list of the Top 20 Most Influential Authors in Team Effectiveness Between 1992 and 2022. The study analyzed 6,051 peer-reviewed publications published over the past three decades, using bibliometric analysis to identify influential contributors to the field.
The recognition highlights Rice’s strength in organizational behavior and the science of teamwork, a field that explores how people engage in teaming, make decisions, solve problems and collaborate to achieve shared goals.
Salas, the Allyn R. and Gladys M. Cline Chair in Psychological Sciences and associate vice president for research (for collaborative engagement and team science), has spent decades advancing research on teamwork, team leadership, team training and team effectiveness. His work has helped organizations better understand how teams cooperate, coordinate, learn and perform in complex environments where collaboration is essential to success. The review highlights his influential contributions to team effectiveness measurement, teamwork, team dynamics and team leadership.
Van Knippenberg, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management at Rice Business, studies leadership, diversity and team performance. His research explores how leadership and team composition influence collaboration, creativity and innovation, helping organizations build more effective teams and workplaces. The review highlights his influential contributions to leadership, diversity, distributed information and team performance.
The publication, “A 31-Year Bibliometric Review of Team Effectiveness Research: Evolution, Trends, and Future Directions,” represents one of the most comprehensive analyses of team effectiveness research to date. Researchers combined systematic bibliometric methods with machine learning to examine the evolution of the field over three decades, identifying influential authors, publications, research themes and emerging directions. Among the study’s findings, the authors identified 10 major research themes and highlighted growing interest in artificial intelligence, hybrid and virtual teams, adaptive leadership and increasingly complex forms of collaboration.
The recognition reflects the impact of Rice scholarship on a field that extends well beyond academia. Insights from team effectiveness research help organizations recruit talent, develop leaders, improve training and create environments where teams can perform at their highest level across business, health care, education, government and other sectors.
Read the study: “A 31-Year Bibliometric Review of Team Effectiveness Research: Evolution, Trends, and Future Directions,” published in Small Group Research.