The September Article of the Month from The Spanish Journal of Psychology is entitled Struggling to Fix Teams in Real Work Settings: A Challenge Assessment and an Intervention Toolbox by Carlos-María Alcover, Ramón Rico, and Michael West.

The success of organizations and individuals’ careers depends to a large extent on the quality of the processes and outcomes of work teams. In an increasingly complex, interdependent, and uncertain world, organizational objectives can only be achieved if employees are motivated to collaborate, participate, engage, and perform optimally within teams. This reality applies in any work and production context —research and development, sports, industry, innovation, creative, commercial, emergency, military, and so on— although each environment creates its habitat and conditions the performance of real teams in the wild.

Research on teamwork and work teams has generated countless theoretical and conceptual models and has accumulated an impressive body of evidence over the decades. However, many scholars and practitioners ask whether these research findings are useful in practice. Specifically, they ask whether theory and empirical research serve organizational teams to solve their dysfunctional processes and performance problems. And also to what extent it is helpful to increase team effectiveness and member’s well-being and satisfaction.

Consequently, our first goal in this paper is to identify five main challenges to create conditions for real teams’ effective performance. These five challenges have been selected considering the team performance drivers identified in the most recent literature and the current nature of teams and their embedding work and organizational settings: a) Purposeful team staffing; b) proper task design and allocation; c) task and interaction process functionality; d) adoption of an appropriate affective tone and e) suitable assessment or analysis of the relationship between team outcomes and the relevant effectiveness criteria within their context.

Our second goal considers how the former challenges may be handled to transform its potential threat into an opportunity. To this end, we differentiate between “empowering” interventions that aim for improving and developing the positive aspects of teams in facing the five challenges analyzed; and “restorative” interventions seeking to redirect dysfunctional aspects of teams in the same challenges. By proposing both kinds of team interventions, we offer a toolbox to encourage researchers and support practitioners to design and use them in teams performing in real work settings.

The proposed toolbox for team intervention eases prioritization decisions about which interventions or new team arrangements are more necessary. Our toolbox is helpful for both managers and team leaders in learning new ways to handle team processes. The new operating contexts (e.g., multi-team systems), ongoing technological development (e.g., human-machine teams), new ways of organizing work (e.g., teamwork in teleworking mode), and new kinds of teams (e.g., meta-teams) that the future of work is bringing require bespoke tools.

The disruptive changes generated by the COVID-19 pandemic in the last 18 months are a clear demonstration of how we need versatile conceptual and applied tools capable of rapid and effective responses to unpredictable and unknown work challenges. The future is exciting, but we cannot go into it without good training and proper equipment. The toolbox we propose has a heuristic value for scholars and practitioners, setting a stage to be expanded as new types of teams, tasks, and organizational contexts generate new intervention needs. In short, we offer in this piece of work an open toolbox to be improved with the feedback and cross-fertilization of practice and research.

The Spanish Journal of Psychology is published with the aim of promoting the international dissemination of relevant empirical research and theoretical and methodological proposals in the various areas of specialization within psychology. Follow the journal on Twitter at @Spanish_PsyJour for the latest updates and news.