I wonder if there is away to avoid copying references to objects when you need to create a simple object which has an array of embedded objects.The situation is as follow: I
Your question says you want to "avoid deep copy", but I'm not sure that's accurate. It sounds like you just want to use angular.copy, because you need to create a copy of the team member and add that to the array:
$scope.addTeamMember = function(teamMember) {
var newTeamMember = angular.copy(teamMember);
$scope.team.teamMembers.push(newTeamMember);
};