The concept of Team Emergent States (TES) is gaining increasing attention in discussions of organizational leadership and team effectiveness. Despite growing interest, there have been stubborn problems of how to define and think about team states. This challenge is not unique—similar definitional gaps have existed in areas such as leadership effectiveness, organizational culture, employee engagement, and workplace well-being. The absence of clear theoretical frameworks in all these areas has led to fragmented approaches that hinder effective measurement and intervention.
This paper advocates for a more structured and research-backed approach to understanding the ways teams are feeling, positioning it within established psychological frameworks on human needs. By reviewing the leading academic perspectives on team states, we identify key themes that align with fundamental human needs, each of which has a strong foundation in psychological and organizational research. Our proposed framework simplifies and organizes these concepts, offering a clear structure that replaces the endless brainstorming of new ways of describing team states.
By applying the AgileBrain framework of 12 emotional needs, the product of three levels of striving in four domains of life, we find that every one of the more than 50 descriptions of team states finds a home, with nothing left over.
By rooting the ways teams feel in a model of human emotional needs, we can understand the conditions that bring these states about, the short- and long-term consequences of these states, and the differences between needs for more of the good (promotion) and needs for less of the bad (prevention), which are significant.
Other significant benefits of this approach include:
- Strategic Alignment – Improve actual team effectiveness and organizational outcomes by replacing poorly articulated concepts with clear, simple terms.
- Effective Measurement – Applying a structured approach that enhances clarity and consistency in research and practice.
- Practical Implementation – Providing organizations with clearer definitions that support leadership development, team dynamics, and workplace interventions.
- Common Language and Framework – The same model has been successfully used to clean up similar conceptual messes in leadership effectiveness, organizational values and culture, employee engagement, goal-setting, and employee well-being. This means that insights from any one of these areas is immediately applicable to the rest!
Ultimately, this approach offers a more practical, scalable, and theoretically sound way for organizations to understand and leverage Team Emergent States to enhance team cohesion, performance, and overall workplace well-being.
