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The purpose of this paper is to propose that the manager’s perception of the service quality delivered by his/her team acts as a precursor of his/her trust in team members. In turn, the manager’s trust in team members is related to team members’ trust in the manager. Furthermore, engagement and burnout at the individual level are considered outcomes of trust reciprocity.

The authors test this trust-mediated multilevel model with a sample of 95 managers and 754 team members working in services for people with intellectual disability. These services are delivered by team-based structures of workers who perform coordinated tasks.

The findings suggest that service quality delivered by team members is positively and significantly related to the manager’s trust in them. The results also suggest that the manager’s trust in team members leads to the trust that managers received by team members. Finally, team members who trust their managers show less burnout and high engagement.

Previous literature has neglected the reciprocity of trust. In contrast, this research study considered the perspective of both managers and team members and how this reciprocity of trust is related to service quality and well-being at work.

The current study highlights the critical role of service quality and achieving high-quality relationships between managers and team members.

Performance and well-being are compatible because team members’ efforts are compensated by forming relationships with managers based on trust, and the quality of these relationships, in turn, prevents burnout and stimulates engagement among employees.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to verify the predicted relationship between the demographic (i.e. tenure, functional background, etc.) difference and cognitive difference among top managers and examine how such a relationship is affected by the communication among top managers.

The authors hypothesized that there is a positive relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal manager on a TMT, and that such a relationship is mediated by the degree of communication that the focal manager has with other team members on the TMT. Using Structural Equation Modeling techniques, these hypotheses were tested based on a sample of 348 top managers that consist of 28 top management teams.

It was found that the hypothesized relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal top manager was supported with respect to the tenure of a manager, but not the functional background of a manager. Moreover, it was found that communication frequency of a focal manager with other team members mediated the relationship between the tenure deviation and the cognitive deviation of the focal manager and that tenure deviation negatively influenced communication frequency, which in turn, negatively influenced the cognitive deviation of the manager.

These findings imply that: when constructing a competitive top management, practitioners such as boards of directors of a firm should pay more attention to the tenure diversity of a top management team because tenure diversity influences the cognitive diversity of the team; and communication among members of a management team can reduce the cognitive differences among members. However, communication happens more frequently among managers with similar tenure than among managers with dissimilar tenure. To promote consensus, managers need to watch for the forming of group fault lines along tenure within their teams.

As far as is known, this is the first study that uses relational demography to examine the influence of tenure difference on cognitive difference among members of a top management team and to expose a mediating role played by communication frequency.

The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of acculturation in new product development (NPD) teams in a multicultural working environment. This paper provides recommendations for multinational companies (MNCs) in dealing with problems among team members from different cultures.

Data were collected through 24 in‐depth interviews with local middle‐level managers (e.g. R&D, marketing managers) and expatriates working on NPD projects in MNC subsidiaries located in Thailand. A qualitative method was employed to explore and attain insightful information about the acculturation of local NPD members when working with expatriates.

Results show that local NPD team members may acculturate themselves to foreign work culture when they have regular contact with expatriates during the product development process. The acculturation may also affect the team performance and the relationship among team members. Cultural training programs for local NPD team members are recommended.

Since this qualitative pilot research has a rather small sample size of cases, it limits the ability to generalize the findings. The findings from MNCs subsidiaries may not represent all other cultures of MNCs operating in Thailand.

The findings of this study significantly contribute to MNCs from North America and Asia that develop new products in Thailand. Cultural training programs and frequent and two‐way communications are suggested to increase the familiarity of local employees with the foreign work culture, to develop mutual objectives, and to promote shared interests among multicultural NPD team members.

This study extends the application of acculturation of local NPD team members within a multicultural setting, which has been rarely explored. Theoretically, the findings provide an in‐depth understanding of the local managers' acculturation pattern found in NPD teams. Also, it provides recommendations on how to support the local NPD team members more effectively in adopting critical values of the parent firm's culture so as to achieve NPD tasks facing less miscommunication and improving project performance.

This monograph summarises the key influences of leadership behaviour on the transformation process associated with creation of an effective and high performing team. It clarifies the key factors that are relevant to a team at each stage of the transformation process and the leadership roles that each team member can play. The role of an organisation's senior management is considered both in terms of the impact it has on the transformation process within specific teams and in terms of creating the necessary organisational environment to make effective teams the norm. Some reasons why senior management behaviour is often perceived as inconsistent and unhelpful are explored. Specific recommendations are made to help senior managers to adapt their behaviour, and in so doing become more context‐sensitive to the needs of the environment as it changes. Some tools and techniques are presented that have been found in practice to help senior managers adapt their behaviour to that most appropriate at a given time, and to create the organisational infrastructure needed to make effective teams the organisational norm rather than the exception. A case study is presented illustrating the networked nature of leadership and the culture change associated with making effective teams “the way we do things around here.”

This paper aims to examine the effects of task and relationship conflicts on team creativity, and the moderating role of shared leadership in inter-organizational teams. An inter-organizational team normally comprises employees from collaborated organizations brought together to conduct an initiative, such as product development. Practitioners and researchers have witnessed the prevalence of conflict in inter-organizational teams. Despite significant scholarly investigation into the importance of conflict in creativity, a deep theoretical understanding of conflict framework remains elusive.

A questionnaire survey was conducted in China to collect data. Consequently, 54 teams, which comprised 54 team managers and 276 team members, were deemed useful for the study.

By testing our hypotheses on 54 inter-organizational teams, we found that relationship conflict has a negative relationship with team creativity, whereas task conflict has an inverted U-shaped (curvilinear) relationship with team creativity. Furthermore, when shared leadership is stronger, the negative relationship with team creativity is weaker for relationship conflict, whereas the inverted U-shaped relationship with team creativity is stronger for task conflict.

The main limitation is cross-sectional, which cannot establish causality in relationships. Despite this potential weakness, the present research provides insights into conflict, leadership and inter-organizational collaboration literature.

The findings of this study offer some guidance on how managers can intervene in the conflict situations of inter-organizational teams.

Managers are struggling to identify ways to effectively manage team conflict when a team of diverse individuals across organizational boundaries are brought together to solve a problem. The findings of this study offer some guidance on how managers can intervene in the conflict situations of inter-organizational teams.

This paper provides understandings about how relationship and task conflicts affect team creativity in inter-organizational teams.

This article investigates (in)direct relationships between team-level entrepreneurial orientation and team performance, where team entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is measured as a team-level construct, not as concentration of team members' scores. In this article, the authors present and explore how EO-oriented behaviour within a team affect its performance, taking into account the team's trust in a manager and commitment to team and company goals.

This article focuses on a quantitative analysis of 55 teams operating within a large high-tech manufacturing enterprise, gathered through a traditional survey. The conceptual framework for this research was based on the theories of organisational citizenship, extra-role behaviour and social exchange. The authors explain how contextual factors establish a framework which enables team EO transformation towards higher performance of teams.

The results show that (team) performance benefits from EO-related behaviours. However, individual dimensions of EO are not universally beneficial and need to be combined with a mutual trust and/or commitment to team enterprise's goals to achieve high performance.

The findings provide important insight into which team factors may be targeted at the intervention or support of team members, including managers and immediate superiors who lack an active personality and are not willing to take risks at workplace. The authors adopted EO instruments, mutual trust and commitment from an individual scale to a team one, and also offer new opportunities to analyse such phenomena from a new level and evaluate them from the perspective of team managers.

This monograph seeks to summarise the key influences of a role‐based perspective on leadership when making decisions as to how organisational resources can best be deployed.

Application of new frameworks provides insight into the leadership roles executives can adopt when part of formal, informal and temporary groups within the organisation's senior management team and those parts of the organisation for which they are responsible. The methodology adopted is qualitative, focusing on application of previously developed frameworks.

Adoption of an appropriate leadership role, and the timely switch from one role to another as circumstances change, are found to facilitate improvement in the ability of executives to mobilise organisational resources, and in so doing effectively address those challenges with which the organisation is faced.

A one‐organisation intensive case study of a multinational engineering company engaged in the design, development and manufacture of rotating turbomachinery provides the platform for the research. The research intent is to validate two frameworks in a different organisation of a similar demographic profile to those in which the frameworks were developed. The frameworks will require validating in organisations of different demographic profiles.

The concepts advanced, and implications discussed, provide an insight into the role‐based nature of leadership. The practical steps individual executives can take to develop their ability to adopt different leadership roles are highlighted.

This monograph is an investigation into, and study of the contribution of theory that provides insight into, the process by which executives effectively mobilise organisational resources. This differs from the original contributions to theory, which focused on methodology, data gathering and validation in contrast with the current study that is focused on practical application.

As organizations increasingly rely on teams to provide high levels of customer service, one's understanding and research methods related to teams must expand so that multiple hierarchical levels of an organization are analyzed effectively. This study aims to propose and test a model examining multi‐level team relationships.

Survey data from customer contact teams in a banking setting were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), a method appropriate for investigating individual and group level variables within an organization.

Results indicate that team‐member exchange, a group‐level variable, is positively associated with employee performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and explained variance in outcomes above and beyond that explained by the individual‐level relationship between the supervisor and subordinate.

Analyzing both individual‐ and group‐level variables through HLM explicates team processes and outcomes. While this study examines the banking environment, certainly, teams are an area fertile for additional study in a variety of industries.

The results provide support for the importance of team development and training as organizations increasingly use teams to provide critical customer service. Attention to the employee‐manager relationship and team member interactions will improve performance.

The paper extends understanding of important team member outcomes in an environment that increasingly relies upon teamwork to serve customers. It examines team‐member exchange and its effects on employee performance and OCB in the context of customer contact teams. Additionally, investigates leader‐member exchange in the context of team‐member exchange, a relationship that provides a more robust understanding of team processes.

The purpose of this study is to examine how construction project managers’ conflict management styles (CMSs) affect project team resilience from the perspective of social identity theory.

This study adopted a cross-sectional survey design and collected paired data from 110 construction project managers and 474 employees in China. Based on the data collected, the authors tested the proposed hypotheses using hierarchical regression analysis.

The results show that a project manager’s cooperative CMS positively affects team resilience, and a project manager’s competitive and avoidant CMS negatively affects team resilience. Team followership plays a mediating role in this relationship. The team power distance moderates the effects of a project manager’s cooperative and avoidant CMSs on team followership.

This paper enriches the existing literature on conflict management in construction projects and have potential guiding significance and application value for team resilience management practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different team learning activities relate to different types of team performance as rated by team members and managers.

The 624 respondents, working in 88 teams in seven different organizations indicate their perceptions of team learning and their performance ratings of the team. Moreover, managers in the organization are asked to evaluate the team performance.

Team member ratings of effectiveness are positively related to the boundedness and stability of the team and information processing and negatively related to information acquisition. Manager ratings of effectiveness are positively related to boundedness and stability, information processing and information storage and retrieval. Team member ratings of efficiency are positively related to information processing and negatively related to information acquisition. Manager ratings of efficiency are positively related to boundedness and stability and information storage and retrieval. Team member ratings of innovativeness are positively related to information processing, while no predictors are found for manager ratings of innovativeness.

Since the data are cross‐sectional, the authors cannot draw conclusion about the causality between the variables. Longitudinal designs that study the sequence of team learning and team performance are called for. Furthermore, future studies might include more objective performance measures.

As team learning proved to have predictive value for diverse team performance indicators, rated by team members and managers, team should carefully organise their learning process in order to enhance their performance.

Although some studies have proven the significance of team learning for team performance, none have investigated which team learning activities are related to which types of performance ratings.