Setting the programmatic agenda: A comprehensive bibliometric overview of team mechanism research

Team mediating mechanisms are vital to team functioning as they explain how member attributes transform into collective outcomes. Yet, the field exploring them has grown vast and fragmented. This disunity indicates a lack of intellectual structure, preventing the development of general knowledge. We suggest that two aspects of this literature may contribute to this issue: its content division into affective, behavioral, cognitive, motivational, and perceptual categories, and its division into distinct scholarly communities. Using the 10,220 connected teams articles in the Scopus database, from 1952 to 2021, we present the first objective architectural map of this literature. We find that it does a good job concurrently examining different categories of mediating mechanisms, with only a few limitations. Chiefly, more research on affective team mechanisms is needed, especially considering their relationship to cognitive team mechanisms, and the top management team and sport team communities need to further integrate with other communities.