Team science coaching has emerged as a promising strategy for supporting interdisciplinary research teams, yet coordinated empirical evidence linking coaching interventions to measurable team outcomes remains limited (Shuffler et al., 2018), particularly within scientific research contexts (NASEM, 2025). A growing body of scholarship suggests that access to coaches who guide teams through structured dialogue and reflection can facilitate team metacognition (Cravens et al., 2022), enhance psychological safety (Jones et al., 2024), and encourage effective group coordination and group dynamics (Sweeney et al., 2025). Although institutions have increasingly invested in coaching models delivered by research development professionals (Bauer et al., 2025; Stephens, Downer, & Cummings, 2024), more longitudinal, empirical evidence is needed to clarify how coaching influences team dynamics. Without empirics linking interventions with outcomes, policy makers will remain hesitant to devote resources to coaching initiatives.
The Translational Team Science Initiative (TTSI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is developing, implementing, and evaluating coaching programs across two contexts. The first involves a large, multi-site interdisciplinary initiative (N ≈ 80) in which coaches support governance development, role clarification, decision-making structures, and collaborative norms across distributed teams. The second focuses on early-stage research teams (N = 6 teams; 21 members) receiving internal seed funding and structured coaching to support team formation, communication norms, conflict navigation, and shared expectations.

A longitudinal mixed-methods evaluation integrates validated survey measures of team functioning, including psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999), team conflict (Jehn & Mannix, 2001), cohesion (Mathieu et al., 2015), transactive memory systems (Lewis, 2003), leadership and interpersonal climate (Martinson et al., 2025), and research integrity climate (Martinson et al., 2013; Briskin & Gunsalus, 2025), with qualitative interviews and session-level reflections from coaches and team members.

Qualitative interview data within the large initiative indicate that coaching programing has encouraged team members to clarify governance structures, authorship expectations, and cross-site coordination processes. Structured conversations about team functioning were described as helpful in surfacing concerns and increasing awareness of team processes, particularly among newly formed teams navigating early structural decisions.

Parallel evaluation of early-stage small teams (6 teams; 21 members) indicates strong perceived value of coaching sessions. The majority of participants agreed or strongly agreed that sessions helped teams reflect (11/13), created a shared starting point for future conversations (12/13), and motivated dialogue outside the meeting (13/13). Respondents reported feeling comfortable discussing team dynamics (12/13) and more prepared to engage in future collaboration conversations (11/13), suggesting that coaching may support psychological safety and collective reflection during early team formation. Open-ended responses emphasized the value of making implicit expectations explicit, identifying shared norms, clarifying communication procedures, and creating space for proactive team management. These findings suggest that early coaching interventions may function primarily as metacognitive and norm-setting mechanisms, helping teams surface implicit assumptions, articulate shared expectations, and formalize collaboration structures during formative stages of development.

This work contributes to the emerging empirical literature on team science coaching by identifying how coaching operates within scientific settings and by informing scalable, evidence-based approaches to strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration.