Taking Teams Seriously in the Co-Creation of Firms and Economic Agency

In this paper it is suggested that it is time to take the agency of teams seriously. Whereas the debate has previously focused on how firms may function more effectively by using team-based work organization, our aim here is to discuss and understand how teams affect the evolutionary dynamic of companies. Fieldwork in four Danish manufacturing companies helped us discover that firms as ‘communities of teams’ are highly dynamic entities with complex layers of different team forms that operate, innovate and improve by constantly recombining, collaborating across organizational divisions and redistributing authority, thereby challenging some of the existing ‘idioms’ of team research and theories of the firm. Building on these findings, we rethink research on teams by re-describing the evolutionary dynamics of firms and call for new comparative research.