Transactive memory system links work team characteristics and performance

Teamwork and coordination of expertise among team members with different backgrounds are increasingly recognized as important for team effectiveness. Recently, researchers have examined how team members rely on transactive memory system (TMS; D. M. Wegner, 1987) to share their distributed knowledge and expertise. To establish the ecological validity and generality of TMS research findings, this study sampled 104 work teams from a variety of organizational settings in China and examined the relationships between team characteristics, TMS, and team performance. The results suggest that task interdependence, cooperative goal interdependence, and support for innovation are positively related to work teams' TMS and that TMS is related to team performance; moreover, structural equation analysis indicates that TMS mediates the team characteristics-performance links. Findings have implications both for team leaders to manage their work teams effectively and for team members to improve their team performance.     

团队文化多样性对团队创新的影响及作用机制

随着经济全球化和跨国企业的迅速发展, 越来越多的企业中开始出现具有多样性文化背景的团队。企业管理者期待具有不同文化背景的员工能在团队工作中贡献新的观点和视角, 从而促进团队创新。因此, 探讨团队文化多样性与团队创新之间的影响关系已成为近年来学术界和企业界共同关注的焦点问题。所以, 采用社会分类-信息加工的理论视角, 首先厘清团队文化多样性的理论框架, 并进一步检验团队文化多样性与团队创新之间的影响关系及内在机制; 并且, 分别从团队内部和团队外部因素出发, 探讨团队文化多样性与团队创新影响关系中的边界条件。在实践上, 研究结论也将为企业有效管理跨文化团队, 推动企业创新提供一定的理论指导。     

Silence in Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration: Not Everything Said is Relevant,Not Everything Relevant is Said

Solving publicly important issues asks for the development of socio-technical approaches, which demands collaboration between researchers with different perspectives, values, and interests. In these complex interdisciplinary collaborations, the course of communication is of utmost importance, including the moments when people, consciously or not, keep silent. In 2012, an interdisciplinary group of water management engineers and scientists collaborated to explore how the university's separate water management research fields could fit better in today's socio-technical trends. Studying the interactional process revealed that during the collaboration many issues were not said by various parties at various times. Results show that, in particular, engineers and scientists stayed silent to secure group performance, to keep disagreements from surfacing, and manage conflicts of interest in the bargaining process. Although silence served various interactional functions, it also shaped the course of interaction in ways that were not intended, resulting in the development of a latent conflict. It is concluded that the concept of silence adds a relevant dimension to our understanding of interaction among engineers and scientists participating in interdisciplinary collaboration that is currently absent in existing literature on scientific collaboration.     

Managing team interpersonal processes through technology: a task-technology fit perspective

This article addresses the broad question, How can virtual teams that manage a majority of their interactions through information and communication technologies (ICTs) be made more effective? Focusing specifically on interpersonal interactions, the task-technology fit paradigm is used as the foundation for a theoretical model that seeks to identify how such teams can match available communication technologies to the different types of interpersonal interactions in which they engage. The authors draw on media synchronicity theory to identify the functionalities of the wide range of ICTs available today, and map these functionalities onto the salient communication needs of 3 key interpersonal processes: (a) conflict management, (b) motivation and confidence building, and (c) affect management. The model also incorporates a temporal dimension examining how the communication needs, and hence, the need for ICT functionality, varies depending on the virtual team's developmental stage. Opportunities for future research arising from the theoretical model are discussed.     

Shared Leadership and Innovation: The Role of Vertical Leadership and Employee Integrity

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between shared leadership, as a collective within-team leadership, and innovative behavior, as well as antecedents of shared leadership in terms of team composition and vertical transformational and empowering leadership.

Design/Methodology/Approach

Data were obtained from a field sample of 43 work teams, comprising 184 team members and their team leaders from two different companies. Team leaders rated the teams’ innovative behavior and their own leadership; team members provided information on their personality and their teams’ shared leadership.

Findings

Shared and vertical leadership, but not team composition, was positively associated with the teams’ level of innovative behavior. Vertical transformational and empowering leadership and team composition in terms of integrity were positively related to shared leadership.

Implications

Understanding how organizations can enhance their own innovation is crucial for the organizations’ competitiveness and survival. Furthermore, the increasing prevalence of teams, as work arrangements in organizations, raises the question of how to successfully manage teams. This study suggests that organizations should facilitate shared leadership which has a positive association with innovation.

Originality/Value

This is one of the first studies to provide evidence of the relationship between shared leadership and innovative behavior, an important organizational outcome. In addition, the study explores two important predictors of shared leadership, transformational and empowering leadership, and the team composition in respect to integrity. While researchers and practitioners agree that shared leadership is important, knowledge on its antecedents is still in its infancy.     

多团队成员身份及其作用机制

多团队成员身份(multiple team membership)是指员工在一段时间内以正式身份参与多个团队的工作状态及工作模式。以往围绕“团队数量”和“团队成员身份多样性”展开的研究未能对多团队成员身份的效应形成一致的认识和研究结论。因此,在系统回顾发展历程、厘清概念内涵的基础上,提炼出多团队成员身份“多重团队情境”和“多重团队认同”两个关键特征,并从注意力资源视角、社会网络视角和社会身份视角梳理并发展多团队成员身份的作用机制。最后,针对以往研究对多团队成员身份关键特征的关注缺失、社会网络视角和社会身份视角下有意义却尚未被探索的问题,综合技术和时间等因素提出了未来研究建议。     

La recherche psychosociale sur le processus d’innovation individuelle et d’équipe: un bilan des connaissances

The enterprises’ competition depends on motivation and actions from individuals and work teams who answer to their job demands and task in every day. The management in the world stimulate the employees to be proactive and innovate for coping and manage the changes and market demands. It is important to analyse and understand the factors which are able to activate the process through with the individuals contribute to innovation in the work context, and understand how the process can develop in the organisation for produce generation and realisation of innovations. These last years, the research in individual and team innovation is advanced. This article presents a synthesis of certain antecedents of the innovation process at individual and team level. It suggests new avenues of research on the innovation behavior based on multilevel research.     

Team Science,Justice, and the Co‐Production of Knowledge

Science increasingly consists of interdisciplinary team‐based research to address complex social, biomedical, public health, and global challenges through a practice known as team science. In this article, I discuss the added value of team science, including participatory team science, for generating scientific knowledge. Participatory team science involves the inclusion of public stakeholders on science teams as co‐producers of knowledge. I also discuss how constructivism offers a common philosophical foundation for both community psychology and team science, and how this foundation aligns well with contemporary developments in science that emphasize the co‐production of knowledge. I conclude with a discussion of how the co‐production of knowledge in team science can promote justice.     

Antecedents and Consequences of Creativity in Teams: When and How Leader Humility Promotes Performance via Team Creativity

The antecedents of team creativity and their effects on team task performance are explored in this study, with a particular focus on how leader humility promotes team creativity and when team creativity can be converted into performance. Hypotheses were tested via a multiple-source and time-lagged study with 341 employees and 104 teams from five different organizations in China. The results showed that leader humility promotes team creativity through team creative efficacy, and leader conscientiousness moderates this indirect effect. Furthermore, team creativity is more positively related to team task performance when teams are more future oriented. The theoretical contributions and management significance of these findings are discussed, followed by a discussion of limitations and directions for future research.     

Transformational leadership and team performance in sports teams: A conditional indirect model

This study tests how transformational leadership fosters team performance through team cohesion and how that relationship is moderated by previous team performance and leadership consensus. We computed a moderated-mediation model based on a sample of 690 professional players in 59 top professional teams in interactive team sports leagues (basketball, handball, roller hockey, and indoor football/soccer) in Spain. Our findings suggest that transformational leadership indirectly influences objective team performance through the mediation role of team cohesion and that this indirect effect is more prominent when the level of previous performance is higher. We also found that the indirect effect of transformational leadership on team performance via cohesion is stronger in teams with higher consensus regarding their coaches' leadership. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of integrating dispersion and contextual variables into research models, in particular, previous performance and leadership consensus.     

Types of Creativity and Visualization in Teams of Different Educational Specialization

This research is the first to examine different types of creativity dimensions in relation to different types of visualization on a team level, by comparing adolescences’ teams of different specialization (visual artist, scientists, and humanities) during a complex creative task in an ecologically valid educational setting First, the difference between all teams’ creative outputs (drawings) was compared in terms of their visual characteristics and represented content based on parameters derived from the content analysis of visual media. Second, the teams’ creative performance was compared using evaluations of experts from different professional domains. Based on the evidence from examination of teams’ creative products (final drawings) and their evaluations by professionals, this research suggests that object visualization is related to artistic creativity and spatial visualization is related to scientific creativity on the team-level. Furthermore, the findings provide a clear indication that assessing general creativity independently of the domain, as it has been done so far in most team creativity literature, might be somewhat limited.     

Esprit de corps: the possibility for the best care a hospital can provide

What is best for the hospitalized patient? How do we increase the prospects that a patient will receive the best care a hospital can provide, and how is this accomplished? It has been argued that what is best for the patient is to be in the care of highly functioning collaborative teams, teams with certain unique qualities, teams that have esprit de corps. But how do we get there? In furtherance of this discussion, the author, in a Quintilian-like spirit, deliberates about "necessity" and "possibility" in what is best for the hospitalized patient and the challenges these teams must navigate: responsibility, accountability, team relationships, leadership, moral distress, dissent, and personal and professional risk.     

Message in a ballad: the role of music preferences in interpersonal perception

How is information about people conveyed through their preferences for certain kinds of music? Here we show that individuals use their music preferences to communicate information about their personalities to observers, and that observers can use such information to form impressions of others. Study 1 revealed that music was the most common topic in conversations among strangers given the task of getting acquainted. Why was talk about music so prevalent? Study 2 showed that (a) observers were able to form consensual and accurate impressions on the basis of targets' music preferences, (b) music preferences were related to targets' personalities, (c) the specific cues that observers used tended to be the ones that were valid, and (d) music preferences reveal information that is different from that obtained in other zero-acquaintance contexts. Discussion focuses on the mechanisms that may underlie the links between personality and music preferences.     

Helping Teams to Help Themselves: Comparing two Team‐Led Debriefing Methods

Team‐based structures have become more widely used in organizations. Therefore, it is important for team members to perform well in their current team and to build skills and enthusiasm for working on future teams. This study examined team debriefing, an intervention in which team members reflect on recent experiences to prepare for subsequent tasks. Prior researchers have shown that facilitated team debriefs work, but they have not examined how to enable teams to conduct their own debriefs or studied how debriefs affect individual level outcomes. Therefore, we compared 2 team‐led debriefing techniques: (a) an unguided debrief and (b) a guided debrief designed to incorporate lessons learned from prior debriefs. We collected data from 174 business students who were members of 35 teams from 9 sections of a Strategic Management course. Class sections were randomly assigned to one of the debriefing conditions, and teams completed 4 business cases over 10 weeks. A multilevel design was employed and a multistage model building approach was used to test the hypotheses using hierarchical linear modeling techniques. Results of this cluster randomized, quasi‐experimental design suggest that the team‐led guided debrief intervention resulted in superior team processes as compared to the unguided debriefing method. Team processes, in turn, related significantly to greater team performance and increased individual readiness for teamwork and enthusiasm for teaming. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.     

Key Accounts and Team Selling: A Review,Framework, and Research Agenda

As sales organizations increase their reliance on sales teams, they must learn how organizational and interpersonal relationships influence sales teams, how sales teams play a learning role for organizations, and what makes sales teams effective. Presenting a model of interrelationships among members of the selling firm and between the selling and buying firms, we identify five key team selling relationships between (1) members of the same team, (2) members of different teams within the firm, (3) the selling team and the buying center, (4) the selling team and other groups in the selling firm, and (5) the selling team and the firm’s strategy. This model leads to a conceptual framework highlighting relationship drivers, factors, and outcomes instrumental to team selling success. After presenting propositions for future research, theoretical and methodological suggestions are included to facilitate research in this area. We conclude with perspectives on the future of research and practice in key accounts and team selling.     

Twelve steps to heaven: Successfully managing change through developing innovative teams

In this article we propose that work teams implement many of the innovative changes required to enable organizations to respond appropriately to the external environment. We describe how, using an input?–?process?–?output model, we can identify the key elements necessary for developing team innovation. We propose that it is the implementation of ideas rather than their development that is crucial for enabling organizational change. Drawing on theory and relevant research, 12 steps to developing innovative teams are described covering key aspects of the team task, team composition, organizational context, and team processes.     

A Multilevel Model of Team Cultural Diversity and Creativity: The Role of Climate for Inclusion

We developed a multi‐level model to test how team cultural diversity may relate to team‐ and individual‐level creativity, integrating team diversity research and information‐exchange perspective. We proposed that the team climate for inclusion would moderate both the relationship between cultural diversity and team information sharing and between cultural diversity and employee information elaboration. We collected time‐lagged data from 384 members and their leaders within 57 multicultural work teams. The results showed that team cultural diversity was positively related to both team creativity and individual creativity through team information sharing and employee information elaboration, respectively. We also found that the indirect positive relationship with team creativity and individual creativity was stronger for team cultural diversity when climate for inclusion of multicultural work teams was stronger.     

Twenty-First Century Science as a Relational Process: From Eureka! To Team Science and a Place for Community Psychology

In this paper we maintain that twenty-first century science is, fundamentally, a relational process in which knowledge is produced (or co-produced) through transactions among researchers or among researchers and public stakeholders. We offer an expanded perspective on the practice of twenty-first century science, the production of scientific knowledge, and what community psychology can contribute to these developments. We argue that: (1) trends in science show that research is increasingly being conducted in teams; (2) scientific teams, such as transdisciplinary teams of researchers or of researchers collaborating with various public stakeholders, are better able to address complex challenges; (3) transdisciplinary scientific teams are part of the larger, twenty-first century transformation in science; (4) the concept of heterarchy is a heuristic for team science aligned with this transformation; (5) a contemporary philosophy of science known as perspectivism provides an essential foundation to advance twenty-first century science; and (6) community psychology, through its core principles and practice competencies, offers theoretical and practical expertise for advancing team science and the transformation in science currently underway. We discuss the implications of these points and illustrate them briefly with two examples of transdisciplinary team science from our own work. We conclude that a new narrative is emerging for science in the twenty-first century that draws on interpersonal transactions in teams, and active engagement by researchers with the public to address critical accountabilities. Because of its core organizing principles and unique blend of expertise on the intersection of research and practice, community psychologists are well-prepared to help advance these developments, and thus have much to offer twenty-first century science.     

The experiences of high-performance coaches in the management of difficult athletes

Although research on effective coaching strategies is well documented, researchers are still learning how coaches effectively manage problematic athletes. The purpose of this study was to investigate how high-performance coaches managed difficult athletes. We interviewed eight experienced ice hockey coaches from the premiere development stream in Canada for athletes who aspire to play professionally. Through our analysis of the data, we found that these coaches identified problem athletes early, fostered relationships, provided clear expectations and roles, and transformed their behaviors to match the team culture (although this was not always possible). We also found that managing difficult athletes takes a great deal of patience, introspection, and emotional intelligence on the coach’s behalf. Our findings contribute to a limited understanding of the knowledge and strategies used by coaches to manage difficult athletes and maintain a positive team climate.     

Emotional intelligence research in Australia: Past contributions and future directions

Emotional intelligence (EI) is an intriguing and popular area of research, focusing as it does on individual differences in qualities at the intersection of intelligence and emotion. Research to date has focused on three key questions: (a) How to define EI? (b) How to measure EI? and (c) What is EI good for? This review describes the key contributions of Australian researchers to these questions before outlining the current focus and future directions of EI research in Australia. Australian research teams have been instrumental in clarifying the definition of EI, developing innovative measures of EI and examining the life domains EI influences. We suggest that with the contributions of Australian research to the earlier definitional and measurement questions, Australian researchers are now able to address questions about the processes and mechanisms by which EI translates into positive outcomes in diverse life domains.