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Innovation teams must navigate inherent tensions between different learning activities to produce high levels of performance. Yet, we know little about how teams combine these activities—notably reflexive, experimental, vicarious, and contextual learning—most effectively over time. In this article, we integrate research on teamwork episodes with insights from music theory to develop a new theoretical perspective on team dynamics, which explains how team activities can produce harmony, dissonance, or rhythm in teamwork arrangements that lead to either positive or negative effects on overall performance. We first tested our theory in a field study using longitudinal data from 102 innovation teams at a Fortune Global 500 company; then, we replicated and elaborated our theory in a study of 61 MBA project teams at an elite North American university. Results show that some learning activities can occur within the same teamwork episode to have harmonious positive effects on team performance, while other activities combine to have dissonant negative effects when occurring in the same episode. We argue that dissonant activities must be spread across teamwork episodes to help teams achieve a positive rhythm of team learning over time. Our findings contribute to theory on team dynamics, team learning, and ambidexterity.

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Professionals need to develop increasingly innovative solutions to complex problems, which are often cocreated through client–professional collaborations, but this demand creates a theoretical and practical tension. On the one hand, professionals need to establish long-standing relationships with clients so they can deeply understand their client’s business and develop more effective solutions. On the other hand, such strong relationships can breed similar perspectives that undermine their ability to develop more innovative ideas. To resolve this conflict, we introduce a new contextual condition to the literature that is fundamentally associated with innovation in organizations—the stakes of an innovation project—and develop theory explaining how it creates conditions under which familiarity either enhances or undermines innovation in teams. Using a mixed-method approach to study an innovation contest held in the legal industry, we found that under lower-stakes conditions, collaboration in new teams was positively associated with innovation and produced significantly more innovative outcomes than collaboration in long-standing teams. But under higher-stakes conditions, these effects reversed. When exploring the mechanisms underlying our results, we found that familiarity was valuable for innovation under higher-stakes conditions primarily because teams with shared perspectives took greater risks on more innovative ideas during the selection stage of the innovation process.