Leader productivity and people orientations for cooperative goals and effective teams in China

Researchers have traditionally distinguished leaders by the extent to which they are oriented to people and productivity, and meta-analytic results indicate that these orientations have consistent and practically important effects. But research is needed to understand the dynamics by which these orientations induce team effectiveness. This study empirically relates leader orientations to teamwork by suggesting that productivity- and people-oriented leaders develop cooperative goals among team members that in turn results in team effectiveness. A total of 146 team leaders from 21 organizations in China completed measures of productivity and people orientations and their encouraging cooperative goals among team members; 1067 team members rated their effectiveness. Results of the structural equation analysis support the theorizing that leader productivity and people values when complemented by strengthening cooperative relationships can contribute to making teams effective in China and perhaps in other countries as well.     

Work Teams: Perceptions of a Ready-Made Support System?

Much research on work teams has been focused at the team-level, considering such issues as effectiveness, productivity, and overall interaction. Using qualitative in-depth interviews, the author has asked the question: what is the experience of the individual working within a team? This paper discusses one theme to have emerged, that of perceptions of support being provided within the team. Respondents' accounts presented an expectation that support would be forthcoming from other team members. The discussion considers the experiences of respondents both when this support was received and when it was not, prompting a reconsideration of our understanding of work teams. Further discussion shows how the expectation and provision of this support has implications for how individuals view both teams and organizational work in general, and how consideration of this issue can assist managers in the renewal of employees' energy and well-being.     

团队激励的新策略:生产力测评与提升系统

为了打破传统团队激励策略的局限性,有效激励团队成员,充分调动团队成员的工作积极性,提升团队工作生产力,一种团队激励的新策略———生产力测评与提升系统(ProMES)应运而生。本文概括了生产力测评和提升系统的定义,阐明了生产力测评与提升系统的理论基础,介绍了生产力测评与提升系统的构建与实施方法,探讨了生产力测评与提升系统的作用原理,通过案例分析指出了在实施过程中需要注意的问题,以期更好地指导生产力测评与提升系统的实践。     

Cooperative Goals,Leader People and Productivity Values: Their Contribution to Top Management Teams in China*

abstract This study proposes that when top management team members are convinced that their leader is committed to people and productivity, they conclude that their leader is effective and contribute to making their organization innovative. Cooperative goals among top management team members may be credible evidence that their leader has people and production values. Executives from over 100 organizations in China completed measures of their cooperative, competitive, and independent goals, their leader's people and production values, and their leader's effectiveness. CEOs from these firms rated their organization's innovativeness. Structural equation analysis suggested that cooperative goals among top management teams convince them that their leader values people and production and that these values in turn result in leader effectiveness and organizational innovation. Results, coupled with previous research, were interpreted as suggesting that cooperative goals and leader people and production values are foundations for leader and top management team effectiveness in China.     

The impact of project managers' communication competencies: Validation and extension of a research model for virtuality,satisfaction, and productivity on project teams

Current research continues to establish the importance of communication in the management of projects. However, little is known about the behavioral aspects of project managers' communication competency especially as they relate to crucial outcomes in virtual environments. This article reports on a survey‐based research study of 564 respondents from the Chief Project Officer Web site that validates and extends a research model of project managers' competencies in decoding and encoding communication, the satisfaction and productivity of their team members, and the degree of virtuality present in the project. The findings indicate that project managers' competencies in decoding and encoding communication significantly contribute to team member satisfaction and productivity. In addition, geographic dispersion plays an unexpected and significant role in how project managers' competency in decoding and encoding communication impacts team member satisfaction and productivity.     

Rational and intuitive decision-making in sourcing teams: Effects on decision outcomes

According to dual process theory, individual decision-making can be based on rational procedures and experience-based intuition, and the decision-making approach can influence decision outcomes. We investigate how the application of rational procedures and experience-based intuition affects the outcomes of supplier selection decisions taken by cross-functional sourcing teams. Specifically, we examine whether the selected supplier׳s cost and quality/delivery/innovativeness performance is higher when more team members use a highly rational and/or a highly experience-based decision-making approach. From data on 54 teams, we find that the use of rational procedures enhances cost performance. Conversely, when sourcing team members use their experience-based intuition, the decision is more likely to result in satisfactory supplier performance along all tested performance dimensions.     

基于模糊相似优先比法的高校教学团队成员选择

一个稳定的高校教学团队既可以增加成员的凝聚力,也可以帮助团队成员多出教学成果,提高教学质量。但是如何选择合适的团队成员一直是高校教学团队构建过程中所面临的的一个难题。本文运用模糊相似优先比法对某个教学单位中成员进行识别,在此基础上选择适合于组建教学团队的成员。研究结果表明,该方法适合于团队工作成员的有效识别工作,为团队组建者的教学团队组建提供了一种有效的方法。     

Narcissism and Empowerment: How Narcissism Influences the Trickle-Down Effects of Organizational Empowerment Climate on Performance

The present study proposes a trickle-down model of employee empowerment in which empowerment climate at the organization level is positively related to the empowering leadership of team leaders and ultimately to individual task performance. Importantly, we hypothesize that team leaders’ and members’ narcissism can respectively inhibit and enable the cross-level empowerment process by affecting the intended distribution of decision-making authority and resources between team leaders and members. The analysis of data from 834 team members of 189 teams in 46 organizations reveals that organizational empowerment climate is positively related to team leaders’ empowering leadership when they are less narcissistic. Empowering leadership is positively related to individual task performance when team members are highly narcissistic. Finally, we observe that the combination of less narcissistic leaders and more narcissistic members is a condition under which the indirect effect of organizational empowerment climate on individual task performance through empowering leadership is positive.     

跨团队成员对个人和团队学习力及生产力的影响

跨团队成员作为科层组织外衍生的纵向混合组织,在新产品开发、降低成本及提高组织运营效率等方面,均发挥着积极作用。跨团队成员数量和团队多样性,对团队和个人的生产力和学习力有着不可忽略的影响。因此,企业应该平衡跨团队成员的数量和团队多样性,提高人力资源的周转率和利用率,促进知识共享,从而提高团队和个人的生产力和学习力。为管理跨团队成员提供了全新的思路。     

Enabling Shared Leadership in Virtual Project Teams: A Practitioners' Guide

Many virtual project teams perform better when leadership is shared (rather than centralized with the formal team leader); however, team leaders are often neither prepared to identify shared leadership potential nor to actually share leadership responsibility. Based on a study of 96 globally dispersed software development teams we show that team leaders tend to underestimate the team members’ capacity to lead themselves. As a consequence, these leaders monopolize decision‐making authority and provide insufficient levels of autonomy for team members to tackle their tasks. Preventing the team members from unfolding their true potential, these leaders unconsciously jeopardize virtual team performance. Paradoxically, it is thus team leaders themselves hindering leadership effectiveness in virtual teams.     

Do Individual Preferences Affect the Environmental Decision‐Making Process in Teams? The Role of Participation

Literature on organizations and the natural environment has focused on the importance of individual managers and leaders. However, this literature has scarcely ever focused on individuals in the team context, even when teams have been considered to be key for a firms’ environmental progress. Although teams’ environmental decisions can be enriched by the different contributions of team members, it is necessary that team members actually participate and contribute their preferences during the decision‐making process. We used an adaptation of the legislative dilemma task with 84 students to contribute to environmental management literature by analyzing members’ participation during the team decision‐making process. The results of this paper show how those members with environmentally proactive preferences have a higher participation during the decision‐making process, and as a consequence they have a greater influence on the team decision. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Structural decisions about configuration,assignments, and geographical distribution in teams: Influences on team communications and trust

Managers structure teams in a variety of ways, which are likely to influence the ability of team members to interact and collaborate. We explore the effects of managerial decisions about the structure of teams by configuration, assignment, and geography. In our conceptualization, we consider a team member's psychological distance as a mediator and the richness of social cues and psychological safety as moderators of the effects of the type of team structure on individual perceptions of the team process of communication and the emergent state of trust in other team members. We contribute to the literature by exploring the different underlying mechanisms through which the type of team structure affects a team member's psychological responses and interactions among team members. Noting that physical distance is difficult to change, we focus instead on perceived psychological distance, which offers a framework that facilitates both better understanding and a means to address collaborative challenges.     

价值团队在环境工程项目中的组织设计研究

价值工程是一种研究如何以最低寿命周期成本实现产品或工程项目基本功能的方法。论文探讨了环境工程价值团队的组织形式、团队成员的选择和组成等组织设计问题,以助于价值工程在环境工程项目中有效地运行。     

Sink or Swim: Empowering Leadership and Overload in Teams' Ability to Deal with the Unexpected

The notion of improvisation has recently emerged in managerial studies as a viable solution to flexibly dealing with unexpected occurrences in work environments. However, past research on team improvisation has overlooked the contingencies that allow teams to effectively improvise. Drawing upon demand‐control theory, we investigate how empowering leadership and overload affect the improvisation‐performance relationship in the context of 48 work teams. Our results suggest that empowering leadership positively moderates the relationship between improvisation and performance, while overload attenuates the same relationship. Moreover, we found a joint effect of overload and empowering leadership influencing the improvisation‐performance link, such that improvisation is most positively related to performance when empowering leadership is high and overload is low. Conversely, we found that empowering leadership is particularly detrimental to the improvisation‐performance relationship when team members perceive high degrees of overload. Our findings make important contributions to the extant team literature as well as to the emerging literature on team improvisation. We outline several significant insights for HR managers and team leaders who are responsible for supporting teams that face unexpected events in the work environment. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

IT-enabled awareness and self-directed leadership behaviors in virtual teams

Despite the pervasiveness of self-managing virtual teams, organizations find it particularly challenging to motivate virtual team members to exhibit and manage their leadership behaviors. This study contributes to virtual team leadership literature by specifically shedding light on how distinct awareness forms enabled by information technology (IT) signal important cues to virtual team members to self-lead, that is, self-direct their leadership behavior in their team. Our results reveal that IT-enabled disclosure awareness is key to inducing several leadership behaviors: directive leadership, supportive leadership and interpersonal helping. Further, for directive leadership and interpersonal helping, the relationship is contingent on IT-enabled task knowledge and IT-enabled presence awareness. At low IT-enabled task knowledge awareness or high IT-enabled presence awareness, virtual team members who perceived IT-enabled disclosure awareness employed directive leadership and interpersonal helping. Opposite results were found at high perceived IT-enabled task knowledge awareness and low perceived IT-enabled presence awareness. This research highlights the critical role played by specific awareness forms enabled by IT in motivating virtual team members to engage in self-leadership.     

Linking capacities of high‐quality relationships to team learning and performance in service organizations

This study examines the impact of intrateam and external high‐quality relationships (HQRs) on learning processes and performance. Data collected from 178 teams in the service sector indicate that (a) intrateam HQRs (i.e., between team members and between team members and their manager) are related to psychological safety, which in turn facilitates learning processes; (b) external HQRs are associated directly with team learning; and (c) team learning is positively associated with enhanced team performance. The findings highlight the importance of both internal and external HQRs to facilitate learning and enhance performance in service organizations. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An exploratory study of gender in project management: Interrelationships with role,location, technology,and project cost

This study explores whether gender differences in project managers are related to gender differences in their team members. Gender differences are explored in the context of project managers' and team members' location to one another, the project team's use of technology, and the cost and size of the project teams. Using log‐linear analysis of 563 project team members' responses, several significant findings are reported—including the likelihood of same‐gender project manager and team member dyads as well as gender differences in project contextual factors. Implications for organizational and project management researchers and decision makers conclude the article.     

Equal Pay for Unequal Work: Limiting Sabotage in Teams

We demonstrate the value of "equal pay" policies in teams, even when team members have distinct abilities and make different contributions to team performance. A commitment to compensate all team members in identical fashion eliminates the incentive that each team member otherwise has to sabotage the activities of teammates in order to induce the team owner to implement a more favorable reward structure. The reduced sabotage benefits the team owner, and can secure Pareto gains under plausible circumstances.     

Can leadership compensate for deficient inclusiveness in global virtual teams?

Although the number of global virtual teams has been growing rapidly, it is still a great challenge to achieve internal collaboration across geographic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Two factors that have been identified to improve productivity are inclusive group attitudes in the team and the right leadership from the team leader. Although there are strong indications that each of these concepts would have a favourable effect on team member performance, we set out to explore how they function in combination. More specifically, we hypothesise that inspirational motivation from a team leader can compensate for a lack of inclusive group attitudes in the form of team openness to language diversity. We also predict the positive effects of “inspirational motivation” leadership to be stronger than those of the “management by exception” style of leadership. Using responses from 174 team members and their 23 team leaders in the research and development department of a Danish manufacturing organisation, we confirm our hypotheses. This provides clear guidelines for HRM interventions in organisations using global virtual teams.     

Could unemployment go back to the post‐war heyday?

• ? The current ‘low’ rate of unemployment looks less impressive when compared with the 2–3% rates averaged in the 1950s and 1960s. But both then and now share a common driver of low joblessness – pay growth falling unusually short of productivity gains. While the chances of this continuing look stretching, a return to genuine full employment is not completely implausible .
• ? Why was unemployment so low in the early post‐war period? Given the current uncertainty over how far joblessness can sustainably drop and how this affects monetary policy, our analysis provides useful insights for the situation today.
• ? Several explanations have been mooted. A political commitment to full employment is one, although aspiration alone cannot provide a cause. And demand management using fiscal policy is hard to square with the period's modest budget deficits. Meanwhile, booming post‐war investment and trade and shortages of labour fail to explain why low joblessness did not quickly trigger rapid rises in pay and inflation.
• ? The cause of very low unemployment appears to have sat with wage restraint relative to productivity gains. Unlike most of the last 70 years, real pay growth consistently fell short of productivity rises in the 1950s and part of the 1960s, cutting the cost of workers and ensuring a low ‘equilibrium’ rate of unemployment.
• ? This explanation has parallels with the present day. Since 2010, productivity growth has outstripped real pay rises to an extent not seen since the 1950s. We do not expect this pattern to continue – our forecasts show real pay running slightly ahead of productivity growth over the next five years. But if the factors holding back pay were to persist, alongside a catch‐up in UK productivity, a return to a 1950s/60s‐style jobless rate is possible, if the MPC did not take fright at further declines in unemployment.