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The purpose of this study is to show that the presence of strong personality traits in management teams may have limiting effects on the teams' ability to adapt to critical changes in their business environments.

The financial operations characterizing ten management teams have been traced over three years, and the personalities of all managers were measured during the first phase of the project. A critical incident in the market signalled a need to adapt after about 20 months. The ensuing adaptation was analysed and related to the presence of strong personality traits, plotting all data in two‐dimensional space to visualize the relationship between personality and business operations.

The intra‐team maximum traits were systematically related to a tendency to perform habitual business in the teams. Only intelligence and stability were related to better performance after the crisis, suggestion that other strong traits may impose rigidity.

The sample is limited to ten management teams, but these are followed for three years through 33 observation points. Also, a visualization technique based on factor analysis is used in addition to regression equations as one of the main methodological tools.

Managers composing teams should observe the presence of strong traits and take action to prevent obstructing adaptation after crises. This knowledge may induce efforts to overcome rigidity and understand the value of reflection‐in‐action for teams.

The paper presents a new way of conceptualizing the role of personality in management teams and shows its immediate impact on business performance in a real‐life setting.

The purpose of the paper is to report a study of knowledge sharing practices in the clinical research organization in a major pharmaceutical company. While knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer is often conceived of in terms of codification and storage in databases accessed through information technology, there is less experience in industry from working with knowledge sharing in face‐to‐face communication settings.

A collaborative research methodology including academic researchers, consultants and company representatives was used to examine and develop a knowledge‐sharing model. Interview and participative observations were used as data collection methods.

The study suggests that the use of so‐called knowledge facilitators, organizing and leading knowledge sharing seminars among clinical research teams, needs to develop the capacity to interrelate heedfully, that is, the dispositions to act with attentiveness, alertness, and care, to fully explore the insights, experiences, and know‐how generated in the clinical research teams. Heed precedes successful sharing of knowledge.

It is concluded that the literature on knowledge sharing needs to pay closer attention to the practices on the micro level in knowledge sharing, in the day‐to‐day collaborations between different professional groups.

The paper applies the concept of “heedful interrelation” in a practical knowledge management project in a major pharmaceutical company.

This paper aims to examine the interaction between formal and informal organisation of work inside the pit, with reference to the informal working or coping strategy of “making a plan” (planisa).

The research for this paper was ethnographic in nature and the participant observation was the main research technique used in the field.

The underground gold miners make a plan or engage in planisa to offset the production bottlenecks which affected their capacity to achieve their production targets and increase their bonus earnings. They “get on and get by” underground in order to cope with organisational constraints and management inefficiencies.

The paper highlights the limits of formal organisation of work and the significance of gold miners’ informal work strategy of making a plan (planisa) as an existing and alternative working practice that shapes their subjective orientation, agency and resilience to work structures and managerial strategies. Any strategy designed to improve the health, safety and productivity of underground miners must recognise, elaborate and systematically articulate the workplace culture of planisa as an existing work practice in the day‐to‐day running of the production process down the mine.

Before I embark on the economic cooperation experience among the Islamic countries, members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, I would like to dwell briefly on the history of OIC and its organisational set‐up.

The paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of the intellectual bandwidth model (IB model) and expand its basic foundation to the bioscience industry.

A case study of a real work example from the bioscience industry is presented.

The study discusses an end‐user information system and reveals that the information assimilation dimension can be meaningfully extended, adding automated utilization and implementation.

The vertical research approach does not provide certainty that the case is truly representative.

Practical implications of the study include having a useful management tool to plan solutions for complex business problems and investment decisions.

The extension of the IB model is useful to practitioners and organizations seeking to manage scientific networks in knowledge‐intensive and complex collaborative environments.

The study aims to assess medical engagement levels at two teaching hospitals and a 500 bed private hospital in two states operated by the same health care provider and to describe individual and organisational factors that influence and change medical engagement.

A survey was emailed to all junior and senior medical staff, seeking responses to 30 pre-determined items. The survey used a valid and reliable instrument which provided an overall index of medical engagement. Qualitative data were also collected by including an open ended question.

Doctors (n = 810) working at all sites are in the top 20-40 percentile when compared to Australia and the United Kingdom. Two sites in one state were in the highest relative engagement band with the other being in the high relative range when compared to the (UK) and the medium relative band when compared to sites in Australia. Senior doctors working at all three were less engaged on feeling valued and empowered, when compared to having purpose and direction or working in a collaborative culture. This appears to be related to work satisfaction and whether they feel encouraged to develop their skills and progress their careers. Junior doctors at 1 site are much less engaged than colleagues working at another. Since their formal training pathways are identical the informal training experience appears to be an engagement factor.

Despite medical engagement being recognised as crucial, little is known about individual and organisational factors that support doctors to be engaged, particularly for juniors and in the private sector.

A theoretical model of collective learning has been developed based on complex systems theory. The need for collective learning is illustrated by an empirical study of an “unsuccessful” organizational‐renewal project in a Swedish Telecom firm. The conclusion, using chaordic systems thinking as a diagnostic framework, is that its interior was underdeveloped. A suggestion is given for use of collective learning to develop the organizational‐mind domain of the telecom firm in order to make the desired organizational‐behavior change more likely to occur. Collective learning is drawn apart for analytical purposes into four abilities: relationics, correlation, internal model, and praxis. It was possible to operationalize the theoretical model into a questionnaire and the model functioned well when analyzing the answers in a way that could be understood and accepted by the respondents of the questionnaire, and to give a base for work on improvements.

The purpose of the article is to call upon educational leaders to consider the forces that hinder hope‐giving and to consider viewing their work as inspiring warranted hope among their constituents in situations of well‐defined reality.

The author argues that hope is an essential component of leader agency which when unhindered and defined in a multidimensional fashion may be used to transform the experiences of learning communities.

The author argues that leaders who foster warranted hope in constituents will gain transformational leverage to improve educational practice and the experiences of learners and their communities.

The author provides leaders with an overview of the utility of a reality‐based notion of hope that may serve to legitimate and focus constituent energies and make sense of key organizational challenges.

Provides a unique framing and synthesis of the multi‐dimensional concept of hope into the context of educational leadership, association with relevant allied constructs, and the challenges of education in the twenty‐first century.

Braiding organization theory and argumentation theory, the paper seeks to unfold how organizations act as social loci for the production, diffusion and development of arguments.

A Swedish association dedicated to the defense and promotion of nuclear power, Miljövänner För Kärnkraft (approximately Environmentalists for Nuclear Power) serves as a case study, describing the association's argumentative activity with a particular focus on its argument that “nuclear power is environment friendly as it produces no greenhouse gas emissions”.

The manner in which the association contextualizes this key argument illustrates the inter‐relationships that exist between organizing and arguing.

Organizing and arguing belong to each other's conditions of possibility, and it is therefore argued that an understanding of the organized character of argumentation is symmetrical to the argumentative character of organizing.

Several theoretical models have been developed to describe the process of successful team adaptation. Testing the models through empirical research is lacking. This study aims to empirically examine the way teams adapt to unexpected or novel circumstances and investigate the four-phase team adaptation process (i.e. situation assessment → plan formulation → plan execution → team learning), as proposed by Rosen et al. (2011).

To test the positive relationship between the four team adaptation phases and their suggested sequence, a cross-sectional field study was conducted. Data were collected from 23 teams participating during an 8-week team project.

Results from random intercept models confirmed that the team adaptation process consisted of four phases that were positively related to each other. As expected, plan formulation mediated the positive relationship between situation assessment and plan execution. However, team learning was independently related to all three previous phases, and not only to situation assessment as theory suggests.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present study is one of the first attempts to test the theoretical model of the team adaptation process presented by Rosen et al. (2011). Findings illustrated that the team adaptation process is not a simple four-phase sequence, but it constitutes four dynamic phases that are strongly interrelated to each other.