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Wow! It was about this time of year – but about sixteen years ago – that we held our first Research on Managing Groups and Teams conference. The first one was held at Stanford but we moved the location between the East and West coasts for 14 years. As homage to where we met and as the touchstone to where so many of the participants in our conferences and the authors in our volumes were trained, taught, or visited, we returned to the Kellogg School of Management, our intellectual spawning ground. With generous and facilitating support from the Kellogg dean Sally Blount (who, not coincidentally, was the thematic editor of the RMGT Volume 5: Time in Groups), about 60 of us convened to present our ideas, engage in good-natured roasting of our colleagues, and remember how we and the field had changed – and the part that we all have played in that transformation. When Beta and I said our last good-byes at the conference, we left Evanston, not with sadness at the ending of the conferences, but with a sense of accomplishment and collegiality. We have watched young assistant professors transform into leaders in the field. We had seen our own research fortunes, responsibilities, and accomplishments ebb and flow over the 16 years. And now – we move on to new adventures, new horizons, and, with luck, a few more successes.

The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

This study examines the association between the use of strategic management accounting (SMA) practices and competitive advantage and the moderating role of four aspects of organisational culture – teamwork orientation, outcome orientation, innovation orientation and attention to detail orientation – on this association. Online survey data were collected from 408 accountants in Australian business organisations, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the data. The results indicate a positive association between the use of SMA practices and competitive advantage with such an association positively moderated by one cultural dimension, teamwork orientation. Specifically, the findings indicate that the positive effect of SMA practices on competitive advantage is dependent upon the fit between the use of SMA practices and teamwork orientation with more (less) teamwork-oriented organisations exhibiting a stronger (weaker) association between the use of SMA practices and competitive advantage.

The very first issue of the Research on Managing Groups and Teams volume in 1998 was on the topic of Group Composition. As an inaugural topic that choice reflected the importance of the issue of composition in the study of groups and in the changing American and global landscape. Now, 10 years later, the topic of the volume, Diversity and Groups, has emerged again at an opportune time in the research, managerial, and societal dialogue on this issue. One of my very first publications was a chapter in that inaugural issue of Research on Managing Groups and Teams with Charles O’Reilly and Sigal Barsade titled “Group Demography and Innovation: Does Diversity Help?” So as you can see, this topic is one that has been central to my own research agenda since its inception. When Maggie and Beta asked me to be the volume editor for this issue on Diversity and Groups I was excited to have the opportunity to bring together an interdisciplinary set of scholars thinking about the questions of when, why, how, and for what theoretical reasons does diversity affect individual and group functioning.

This article presents a comprehensive and qualitative review of how levels of analysis issues have been addressed in the diversity and demography literature. More than 180 conceptual and empirical publications (i.e. book chapters and journal articles) in this field are reviewed and coded regarding the specific incorporation of levels of analysis in theory and hypothesis formulation, representation of levels of analysis in measurement of constructs and variables, appropriateness of data-analytic techniques given the explicit or implied levels of analysis, and alignment between levels of analysis in theory and data in regard to drawing inferences and conclusions. Although the body of diversity and demography literature continues to grow, levels of analysis issues are rarely considered. Only a few reviewed studies address levels of analysis issues in theory development, and no reviewed studies employ appropriate multi-level data analytic techniques. Implications for future research are discussed, and recommendations for incorporating levels of analysis into diversity and demography research are provided.