Since the pandemic, both scholars and organizations have placed increased emphasis on employee wellbeing. While much of the focus has been on individual wellbeing, team wellbeing is critical to the overall functioning of organisations. We introduce the definition of team wellbeing—a capacity of a team to achieve team wellbeing goals—as an emergent state of a team that is dynamic in nature, emerging as a function of team interactions. Based on our mixed-methods case study of a team of 20 members working for a healthcare-related organisation in the UK, we develop a model of three levels of social regulation to explain when and how team members engage in social regulation processes in which they influence each other’s cognition, emotion and motivation to achieve their shared wellbeing goals. Findings reveal that collective attention serves as the key factor driving team members’ engagement in the social regulation to achieve team wellbeing goals. Team interactions dynamically shape this collective attention, forming a 'we' perspective where the sense of 'self' and 'others' merge into a unified 'we'. This perspective motivates team members to prioritise and enhance 'our wellbeing'. Our findings offer theoretical advancements by reframing team wellbeing as a collective phenomenon distinct from the aggregation of individual experiences. Practically, the study underscores the importance of designing interventions that activate social regulation processes to enhance team wellbeing.
