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Old Theories, New Teams: Advancing Team Adaptation Theory for Human-Autonomy-Teams
Citation. Nols, T., Ulfert, A.-S., & Gevers, J. (2026). Old Theories, New Teams: Advancing Team Adaptation Theory for Human-Autonomy-Teams. Organizational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/20413866261478644
Summary. This conceptual article develops the Adaptation-enabling Conditions for Teams (ACT) framework for human-autonomy teams (HATs), treating adaptation as an emergent property of interdependent members, tasks, and environments. It argues that theories developed for all-human teams insufficiently account for differences in how human and autonomous members perceive, represent, communicate, and act on information. The framework identifies predictability, observability, plannability, and directability as conditions that need deliberate sociotechnical support in HATs.
Key claims
- The ACT framework proposes that HAT adaptation depends on the dynamic, emergent conditions of predictability, observability, plannability, and directability rather than on member capability alone.
- Conditions that can emerge from shared cognitive and interaction architectures in all-human teams may need active technical, organizational, and interactional support when humans work interdependently with autonomous agents.
- HAT performance should be treated as a system property shaped by the alignment of team composition, task demands, and environmental change rather than as a simple aggregation of individual human and AI performance.
Evidence & limitations
- This is a peer-reviewed conceptual synthesis that develops propositions and illustrates them with established HAT testbeds; it does not itself test the ACT framework in a new empirical study.
- The authors state that the four proposed conditions are not exhaustive and that the micro-level interaction processes through which they emerge across specific human-agent configurations remain to be established.