Team deep-level diversity,relationship conflict,and team members' affective reactions: A cross-level investigation

Drawing from recent advances in the study of deep-level diversity in work teams and the similarity–attraction paradigm, this study examines the ways in which diversity in personality characteristics and preference for teamwork among team members influences the relationship between relationship conflict and subsequent team member affective reactions. Using a longitudinal, multilevel sample of 53 teams (260 respondents), results reveal that similarity or homogeneity in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability weakens the negative influence of relationship conflict on team member affective reactions, while heterogeneity in extraversion and preference for teamwork also weakens these relationships. A discussion of theoretical and practical implications follows.     

Team challenges: Is artificial intelligence the solution?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a potential growth area for facilitating the improvement and development of teams in the workplace. AI, as used in the team context, is currently underdeveloped and limited, thus reducing the wide-scale adoption and implementation of AI to improve team effectiveness. The use of AI to provide team diagnostics and improvements represents a significant shift in the approach organizations currently use to facilitate and strengthen effective teamwork. We describe the challenges involved in developing team effectiveness in organizations and the potential application of AI to improve teamwork. Further, we report on our experiences using AI in business school student project teams, the important advantages and disadvantages that emerged from this, and insights for future consideration when adopting and implementing AI in the workplace. Based on our use of AI and our experience training high-performing teams, we propose a multistep process for analyzing and improving teams in organizations.     

Creating and sustaining trust in virtual teams

Conventional wisdom assumes that trust develops from a history of interpersonal interactions and communication, through which people come to ‘know and trust’ one another. In virtual teams, however, establishing trust can be complicated: members may have no past on which to build, no future to reference, and may never even actually meet face-to-face. Swift but fragile trust can develop early in a team's life cycle. Yet, if swift trust doesn't develop or even dissipates, members need to find ways of building trust in each other. To this end, an understanding of how trust impacts a virtual team's development will help managers and team leaders to facilitate and improve team success. Herein, we describe the three components of trust (ability, integrity, and benevolence) and identify which of these are critical to each life cycle stage (establishing the team, inception, organizing, transition, and accomplishing the task) of the virtual team. Proposed action steps for each stage show managers and team leaders how to help members develop trust and sustain it through the project's successful completion.     

Legitimacy of team rewards: Analyzing legitimacy as a condition for the effectiveness of team incentive designs

This article illustrates how the legitimacy of pay and evaluation processes in teams affect the effectiveness of team-based incentive designs in organizational work teams. We present a theoretical model of the development of legitimacy in team-based incentive designs and propose that the development of legitimacy for both pay dispersion in teams (i.e., difference in allocations of incentives among team members) and for the use of interdependent evaluations of performance promote team effectiveness. Our model introduces a new perspective to theorize about the conditions under which team rewards are an effective incentive design.     

Developing Cooperative Teams to Support Individual Performance and Well-Being in a Call Center in China

The theory of cooperation and competition, though developed in the West, may be useful to develop and analyze productive teamwork in China. Three hundred and sixty-eight employees from a call center participated in a cooperative teamwork 1-day workshop followed by daily practice. Results support the hypothesis that cooperative teams strengthen relationships, reduce turnover, and improve productivity of individual team members. During the 2-month period, team members increased the number of phones answered by nearly 40%, reduced customer complaints by over 55%, and lowered the turnover by over 20%, while the control call centers had either minor increases or decreases in these measures. These results support that the theory of cooperation and competition can guide the development of effective teams in China and that cooperative teams can improve the performance of individual employees.     

When Success Isn’t Everything – Case Studies of Two Virtual Teams

Researchers have been attempting to identify the factors that contribute to virtual team success. Two virtual teams were studied over six-months using an interpretive approach and qualitative data collection techniques. The outcomes of these teams were outwardly very poor. Yet, team members considered themselves successful in relation to the circumstances in which they found themselves. The team members identified the factors they believed contributed to the outcomes and the rationale for why they were successful despite the outward appearances. The interpretive approach allowed for an exploration of the circumstances, and how these perspectives were derived. The cases indicate that working in distributed mode can be problematic if teamwork issues are not addressed, and a technological focus adopted.     

Empirical investigation of the domain knowledge and team advertising creativity typology: The case of Nescafe coffee

This study proposes and tests a typology of domain knowledge and team creativity by empirically assessing the effects of varying levels of domain knowledge on the creative outcomes of the team members. Two separate studies were conducted to address this inquiry. Study one aimed at determining the level of domain knowledge of each team member in the teams. Eleven groups comprising of thirty-three business students designed eleven advertisements for the products of their own choices. Utilizing the situation judgment test and the grade earned in the advertising course, four teams were formed comprising two balanced and two imbalanced domain knowledge teams. To test the hypotheses of the study, these teams were asked to develop a print advertisement for Nescafe for the summer season (Study Two). Upon creativity assessment of the final ads by twenty-six independent creative personnel in a total of seven advertising agencies in Pakistan, the results revealed that a balanced team with low domain knowledge outperformed the other balanced team with high domain knowledge. Further, unexpectedly, one of the imbalanced domain knowledge teams also outperformed the balanced high domain knowledge team. The study in the light of extant literature presents worthwhile implications for academia and practitioners.     

Building innovative teams: Leadership strategies across the various stages of team development

Globalization, advances in technology, and shifting consumer preferences affect almost everyone. Because of pressures from the external environment, organizations face rapid and constant change. The nature of work has become complicated; it is difficult for individuals to achieve much on their own. Consequently, organizations rely heavily on expert, innovative work teams. These highly evolved teams do not develop overnight; rather, they evolve and develop in stages, and the team’s leadership must change over time. In this article, I present the building blocks of team innovation, outline the internal processes that lie at the core of innovative performance, and provide critical leadership strategies for each stage of team development. I conclude with implications for developing leaders with the capabilities to nurture and build innovative teams.     

Goals,Conflict, Politics,and Performance of Cross-Functional Sourcing Teams—Results from a Social Team Experiment

Strategic sourcing is carried out in cross-functional teams to account for the complexity and multidimensionality of modern procurement decisions. However, such teams not only enable the integration of distinct interdependent skill sets and viewpoints, they are also characterized by functional goal misalignment. We focus on the resulting behavioral challenges, namely conflict and politics, and their effects on team satisfaction and rationality, which ultimately leads to observed outcomes. We test our hypotheses in a structural equation model based on data gathered from 468 participants in a social team experiment. We find a mediated effect of goal misalignment on political behavior via two types of team conflict. Political behavior, in turn, obstructs rational team sourcing decisions and reduces team members’ satisfaction with the process. Our study indicates that behavioral challenges in the framework of Organizational Buying Behavior not only co-occur but affect each other via mediation. Hence, managers need to closely monitor the escalation chains’ origin, task conflict, which constitutes a necessary condition for further emotional dissent and political biasing. We contribute to the understanding of the challenges in cross-functional sourcing teams, thereby providing advice to executives in their pursuit to rationalize and improve sourcing team decisions and their outcomes.     

How should we divide the pie? Equity distribution and its impact on entrepreneurial teams

Drawing on a multiple case study approach and data on eight entrepreneurial teams observed over six months this article develops a dynamic model of the consequences of equity distribution among team members. Perceived justice of equity distribution emerged as a key variable influencing entrepreneurial team interactions and important entrepreneurial outcomes. High perceived justice triggered positive team interaction spirals, whereas low perceived justice triggered negative interaction spirals. Teams exposed to external threats drifted from a positive spiral to a negative spiral despite high perceived justice. We discuss the implications of our study for research on entrepreneurial imprints, justice, and exit.     

Team behavioral integration links team interdependence with team performance: an empirical investigation in R&D teams

Drawing on the input–mediator (a blend of team process and emergent state)–output (IMO) framework, we develop a conceptual model in which team behavioral integration is conceived of as a team-level mediator that links team interdependence (input) with team performance (output). Using a three-wave research design, we test the hypothesized model with the data of 102 R&D teams from three information technology companies in China. Results indicate that team interdependence positively influences team behavioral integration, and that team behavioral integration positively affects team performance. In addition, team behavioral integration is found to mediate the relationship between team interdependence and team performance. The theoretical and managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

Entrepreneurial passion diversity in new venture teams: An empirical examination of short- and long-term performance implications

Empirical evidence is mounting that passion is an important part of entrepreneurship, contributing to behavior and outcomes for entrepreneurs, employees, and ventures. Yet knowledge of the performance implications of passion within new venture teams is sorely lacking. We examine how both the average level of entrepreneurial passion and the diversity of passion within new venture teams contributes to venture performance in both the short- and long-term. We test our model with multi-source, multi-wave data collected from 107 new venture teams participating in an accelerator program. Our findings indicate that average team passion is not significantly related to performance, but passion diversity, particularly intensity separation, is negatively related to performance. These findings have important implications for the literature on passion, new venture teams, and group affective diversity.Executive summaryWhile existing studies have substantially improved our understanding of entrepreneurial passion, its sources, and its subsequent impact, insight into this topic remains limited in at least three ways. First, most new ventures are founded and led by teams rather than individuals, yet existing studies predominantly focus on entrepreneurial passion at the individual rather than team level. Second, while there is a prevailing assumption in existing literature that entrepreneurial passion leads to beneficial outcomes consistent with longstanding work in psychology, there is emerging evidence in entrepreneurship that passion may not always be functional and that it can even be dysfunctional. Despite this, we have limited understanding of what types of passion or when or for whom it is dysfunctional. And third, extant work on entrepreneurial passion for individuals and within teams has focused on behavioral or self-report measures of performance (e.g. Cardon and Kirk, 2015; Santos & Cardon, 2019) as well as venture survival, rather than objective team or firm performance in the short- and long-term.In this paper, we study the influence of team passion on new venture team performance. We draw on theory concerning entrepreneurial passion within venture teams (Cardon et al., 2017) that suggests that different aspects of entrepreneurial passion within teams shape team dynamics and venture outcomes. While generally, theories of passion suggest that entrepreneurial passion is positively related to team outcomes due to the positive emotions it brings about, we find that in teams, the relationships are more complex. While the average level of passion among team members is positively related to team performance when considered alone, this effect is not significant when passion diversity is also considered. Diversity of passion among individual team members has a negative relationship with team performance, including diversity in the level of passion team members experience (intensity separation), as well as diversity in the object of their passion (focus variety). These negatively affect team dynamics due to conflicting emotions and identities among team members associated with passion diversity. We examine these relationships on specific team performance outcomes including evaluation of the business idea in the short-term and venture performance five years after their participation in an accelerator.The sample used in this study includes 107 entrepreneurial teams that were part of an accelerator program in the Netherlands. Teams were evaluated on the quality of their business ideas at the end of the accelerator program and the amount of investment the team had received five years later. Our results provide no support for positive effects of average team passion on the quality of the business ideas and confirm the negative effects of passion intensity separation on the quality of the business idea and the negative effects of passion focus variety on later venture performance.This paper makes several contributions. First, we expand the literature on passion in entrepreneurship, specifically adding to our understanding of passion within new venture teams. More specifically, we contribute to the growing body of evidence concerning potential dysfunctions of passion by uncovering a dysfunctional property of team passion diversity that uniquely manifests itself at the team level of analysis. We contribute to the literature on new venture teams by examining team composition in the form of passion diversity, and its relationship with team performance. Finally, our study extends work on the effects of entrepreneurial passion by looking at objective team performance outcomes in both the short- and long-term.For entrepreneurs, our findings confirm the importance of affect and identity for new venture teams, and specifically our findings indicate that there is a dark side to team passion. While passion is generally positioned as a positive phenomenon, we highlight the negative outcomes that passion can have in the team context. Diversity in the amount of passion team members experience can diminish the quality of the business ideas the team is able to generate in the short-term, while diversity in the focus of team members' passion can diminish the firm's long-term performance. For investors and accelerator communities this research validates the importance of considering entrepreneurial team composition and specifically entrepreneurial passion levels and domains when investing in teams or when supporting venture building.     

Cross-functional interface and disruption in CRM projects: Is marketing from Venus and information systems from Mars?

Because of the inherently cross-functional nature of customer relationship management, the use of cross-functional teams in CRM project implementations is virtually mandatory to achieve critical marketing and sales objectives. This study examines the effects of functional membership as well as team and individual performance evaluations on project members' perceptions of disruption and cooperation during CRM project implementations. The results show that IS project members are more likely to perceive internal volatility and manifest interfunctional conflict and less likely to perceive interfunctional cooperation than project members from either sales/marketing or general management. We also find that team performance evaluations are negatively associated with disruption and positively associated with cooperation, while individual evaluations are negatively associated with internal volatility.     

Individual Priming in Virtual Team Decision-Making

Virtual teams have different interactions than face-to-face teams because they rely on information and communication technologies, which can impede or assist certain human cognitive processes. Past research has shown that although virtual teams exchange more information than face-to-face teams, poor decisions often result, because team members do not consider the unique information they receive from others. Drawing from cognitive psychology, our research explored a unique way to improve team decision-making through the use of cognitive priming. We proposed that priming group members to pay attention to others or to engage in counterfactual thinking would improve team members’ cognition and, therefore, team performance. Prior research with individuals and brainstorming teams has shown these forms of priming to improve performance; however, no research has attempted to use priming to improve the outcomes of virtual team decision-making, which requires deeper interaction and cognitive involvement than brainstorming. We performed two lab experiments using primes that have been found to improve the individual decision-making process. We found that priming had some impact, but it did not significantly improve decision quality. Various reasons are discussed to explain why priming techniques may not be as powerful in teams as in individuals, and future research ideas are suggested to build on our initial work on priming in virtual team decision-making.     

The Effects of Team Flexibility and Emotional Intelligence on Software Development Performance

As both business and technological environments change at an increasing rate, flexibility and emotional intelligence have become critical issues for project management. Even though previous research has examined the relationship between team flexibility and team performance and that between the emotional intelligence of teams and team outputs, there remains a gap in literature in respect to a holistic model. Accordingly in this paper, we examine the relationships among software team flexibility, emotional intelligence, and software project outputs (market success, speed to market, and the functionality of the new software product) using survey data from 86 software development projects. The results reveal positive a relationship between the diversity dimension of software project team flexibility and emotional intelligence. The first dimension of software team flexibility, team autonomy, positively affected market success, speed to market, and software functionality, whereas the second dimension, team diversity, positively affected only speed to market and software functionality. The emotional recognition of team members for both themselves and their teammates appears to be another important factor affecting the speed to market and functionality of the new software products. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.     

Breaking Silos: A Field Experiment on Relational Conflict Management in Cross-Functional Teams

In this paper we investigate how effective conflict management in conflict asymmetry situations impacts the quality of cross-functional management teams’ performance. During a 5-day business simulation, we explore the consequences of the relational conflicts and conflict asymmetry experienced by team members. We use two different measures of conflict asymmetry: the traditional group conflict asymmetry measurement of Jehn (Adm Sci Q 40:256–282, 1995) and a social networks method. We find that when some team members evoke more conflict than others, this affects the evolution of team dynamics (and ultimately the performance of the team) even more than high levels of conflict altogether; however, group emotional awareness can mitigate this negative effect and improve the team performance through the appropriate use of conflict management strategies. Since group emotional awareness can be fostered and trained within teams, this is of practical value to improve the performance of cross-functional management teams.     

Does servant leadership foster creativity and innovation? A multi-level mediation study of identification and prototypicality

The purpose of this multi-level study is to examine how servant leadership affects both employee creativity and team innovation. Drawing from social identity, in particular, relational identification theory, we found on the basis of a two-nation Asian sample of 154 teams that servant leadership promotes individual relational identification and collective prototypicality with the leader which, in turn, fosters employee creativity and team innovation. In addition, our study suggests that the mediated effect of leader identification is strongest when team climate for innovation is high.     

The Effects of Cultural Diversity in Virtual Teams Versus Face-to-Face Teams

Diversity in the national background and culture of team members is common in virtual teams. An experimental study, with short term teams, was undertaken to examine the effect of cultural diversity on team effectiveness and to examine if this effect changes depending if the team worked face-to-face (F2F) or virtually. Heterogeneous teams were created that had greater diversity than homogeneous teams of individualism/collectivism values, different languages spoken, country of birth, and nationality. The teams worked on a desert survival task either F2F or virtually (via audioconference and electronic chat tools). The overall results indicated that heterogeneous teams were less satisfied and cohesive and had more conflict than the homogeneous teams, although there were no statistical differences in team performance levels. However, examining just the heterogeneous teams found that the performance of the virtual heterogeneous teams was superior to that of the F2F heterogeneous teams. The results support Carte and Chidambaram's (2004) theory that the reductive capabilities of collaborative technologies are beneficial for newly-formed diverse teams.     

Three facets of satisfaction and their influence on the performance of innovation teams

This study investigates and demonstrates the mediating effect of job satisfaction between team deftness and team comprehension and the performance of 168 project teams involved in major innovation projects for their companies.The study demonstrates that there are at least three independent facets of job satisfaction: instrumental satisfaction with the way the task is progressing, social satisfaction with the way the team members interact with one another and the organization, and egocentric satisfaction with the individuals' perceived benefits to themselves.Previous studies have shown that innovation team performance is directly correlated with the two antecedents of performance: team deftness, which reflects how effectively the team works to achieve the innovation's purpose and team comprehension, which reflects how the team understands the linkages among key variables driving the innovation outcome. The study argues that these different facets of satisfaction differentially affect the ways in which team performance is affected by deftness and comprehension.There are three major results:

• 1.1. Social satisfaction mediates the relation between team deftness and performance—as social dissatisfaction of the team increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its deftness in accomplishing the project's purpose.
• 2.2. Instrumental satisfaction mediates the relation between team comprehension and project performance—as instrumental dissatisfaction increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its comprehension to accomplish the project's purpose.
• 3.3. Egocentric satisfaction does not appear to mediate the relation between team deftness and project performance.

Some managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

Ethnic-immigrants in founding teams: Effects on prospector strategy and performance in new Internet ventures

We investigated differences in strategy and performance between new Internet ventures with ethnic-immigrant members in the founding team and a matched set of Internet ventures with non-ethnic-non-immigrant team members. Results showed that new ventures with an ethnic-immigrant presence in the founding teams tended to pursue a more aggressive prospector strategy than those with non-ethnic-non-immigrant founding team members. Still, performance of the two groups of ventures was comparable. However, the positive effects of ethnic-immigrant presence on founding teams depended on team size and average age of the founding team members.