Taking Qualitative Methods a Step Further to Team Science

Pratt and Bonaccio's (2016) focal article properly reviews and identifies the need for qualitative research methods in our field. However, they overlooked one important benefit—team science—that is crucial to current organizations. Despite the fact that qualitative research in team science is lacking, we suggest that with qualitative research we can gain more insight into what teams need in order to be effective. According to Kozlowski and Bell (2003), team dynamics are historically looked at in a static way in teams research, solely focusing on individuals’ perceptions of the team at a given time as opposed to multilevels over time. In an attempt to further expand on how qualitative research can examine constructs that purely quantitative methods may not, the purpose of this commentary is to highlight importance of qualitative research regarding its ability to capture team dynamics as they occur in the real world. The need for qualitative methods exists across various components (i.e., inputs, team emergent states, processes, outputs) when it comes to teams. We argue that how these components appear, happen, and, more importantly, evolve over time should be taken into consideration. The current commentary highlights how qualitative research can start to fill the gap of understanding team dynamics and how to improve team practices by taking time into consideration.