# A Temporally Based Framework and Taxonomy of Team Processes

*Marks, Mathieu & Zaccaro · Team Learning, Measurement & Method · Academy of Management Review · 2001 · Paywalled*

The framework that gave team research its vocabulary for time, and the scaffolding several papers in this corpus stand on without restating it. Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro argue that team process is not one thing measured once but a set of activities distributed across recurring performance episodes, defined as distinguishable periods over which performance accrues and feedback becomes available. Teams multitask: several episodes run at once on different cycle lengths, longer ones segment into subepisodes, and input-process-output cycles nest inside them rather than running end to end.

Within each episode they separate transition phases from action phases and sort ten process dimensions accordingly. Transition processes are mission analysis and planning, goal specification, and strategy formulation. Action processes are monitoring progress toward goals, systems monitoring, team monitoring and backup behaviour, and coordination. Three interpersonal processes, conflict management, motivation and confidence building, and affect management, run throughout both phases rather than belonging to either, though what is at issue in them shifts as the episode moves.

This is a conceptual paper with no data, synthesised from earlier taxonomies rather than tested, and the authors offer it as a framework for others to operationalise. Its value here is structural rather than evidential: it supplies the temporal grammar that Fyhn's design, Zijlstra's work on early interaction and Stachowski's crisis patterns all use, and it is where the term performance episode comes from. The bridge to psychological safety is indirect but real. Placing conflict management and affect management as processes that must be sustained across every phase, rather than as a climate established once at formation, is the same claim this corpus makes when it argues that psychological safety is always in flux rather than achieved.

- **This page:** https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/marks-mathieu-zaccaro-2001/
- **View the source paper:** https://doi.org/10.2307/259182
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## Neighbours (6)

- [Time and Transition in Work Teams: Toward a New Model of Group Development](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/gersick-1988.md) (paper)
- [Learning Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/learning-teams.md)
- [Time Is Not Enough: Exploring the Processes That Shape Team Psychological Safety](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/fyhn-egeland-schei-2025.md) (paper)
- [High Performing Teams](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/high-performing-teams.md)
- [The Benefits of Flexible Team Interaction During Crises](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/stachowski-kaplan-waller-2009.md) (paper)
- [Setting the Tone: Early Interaction Patterns in Swift-Starting Teams as a Predictor of Effectiveness](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/zijlstra-waller-phillips-2012.md) (paper)