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Team cohesion and other team processes are inherently dynamic mechanisms that contribute to team effectiveness. Unfortunately, extant research has typically treated team cohesion and other processes as static, and failed to capture how these processes change over time and the implications of these changes. In this chapter, we discuss the characteristics of team process dynamics and highlight the importance of temporal considerations when measuring team cohesion. We introduce innovative research methods that can be applied to assess and monitor team cohesion and other process dynamics. Finally, we discuss future directions for the research and practical applications of these new methods to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of team cohesion and other processes.

This commentary describes (1) the role of group communication research in Communication Departments and (2) reflects my personal experiences in conducting group and team research with international and interdisciplinary group scholars. I describe the challenges associated with research funding, research space, participant pools, and research technology. Additionally, I address international and interdisciplinary influences (i.e., team science, university/government/industry collaboration) on communication research. This chapter concludes by identifying interdisciplinary contexts for group and team communication research including children and teens' groups, healthcare teams, and robot–human teams.

Teamwork has become increasingly prevalent both in undertaking research projects and in preparing papers for publication. While there are some reflections on the process of teamworking in the organisational studies literature, there is little published work in the area of entrepreneurship. Most existing studies distinguish between problems associated with task-based conflict and relationship-based conflict. In this chapter, the author provides an ethnographic account of a team involved with preparing a proposal and, subsequently, undertaking a small firm research project. The Evolution of Business Knowledge (EBK) was a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) initiative which funded 13 distinct projects. During the nine-month period of preparing and refining the research proposal, the team worked together extremely effectively. There were periods of intense knowledge sharing, which enabled the team to develop an impressive and successful bid to study the ‘EBK in 90 small firms’. A major dispute between team members, during the early stages of the fieldwork, led to a period of both task-based and relationship-based conflicts, which threatened to undermine the project. As a result of my first-hand experiences with the EBK project, the author suggests that accounts such as this will help those who find themselves operating in dysfunctional teams make sense of the underlying tensions associated with ‘academic knowledge creation’.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how research teams serve as building blocks for collaboration at a field level, and how these building blocks are assembled by a network of interacting organizations. The field setting is a medical sciences consortium in Australia established to encourage collaborative and entrepreneurial research among government, industry, research centers and university units. This consortium is examined as a case study. The analysis demonstrates how collaboration evolved at three interacting levels: research team, organization and interorganizational field.

The main findings are: (1) Intellectual property (IP) acts as the key orienting agent in this field to align the behavior of various stakeholders and leverage collaborative and entrepreneurial activity. (2) Tensions between the different ways that the commercial and public sector actors value IP serve to structure the interfaces among the consortium, the member organizations and the research teams. (3) The consortium is a key infrastructural element in the creation of collaborative capital in the Australian biotechnology field studied. The main contribution of the study is to highlight the nature of collaborative capital at a field level and begin to explore its implications.

The field of global leadership has flourished and advanced in the preceding decade. However, in contrast to the term global leadership, which enjoys conceptual clarity enabling accumulative progress, the construct of global leadership effectiveness is comparatively undertheorized, with instances of definitional ambiguity and disjointed methodological operationalizations across studies. The purpose of this chapter is, thus, to provide a systematic review of the global leadership effectiveness literature. In doing so, our contributions are fourfold. First, we offer an inclusive, comprehensive definition of global leadership effectiveness. Second, we map its construct domain. Third, we review research findings at the individual, group, and organizational levels. Finally, we integrate extant insights and offer suggestions for future research, organized within the typology of the content domain along the identified dimensions of global leadership effectiveness. Together, our goal is to build a foundation for future research examining the roles of leadership and the global context as antecedents of global leadership effectiveness.

Although some researchers have recognized that context can play an important role in explaining the mixed findings of past diversity research, to date a comprehensive framework for specifying these contextual influences has been lacking. In order to address this gap, we propose a framework for future research that incorporates contextual variables at extra-organizational, organizational, and team levels. We consider how these various aspects of diversity influence categorization-based or elaboration-based diversity outcomes. We also present findings of a literature review that identifies aspects of diversity context that have received attention directly or indirectly in research conducted between 1999 and 2007.

The characteristics of individual members and how the members are assembled in a group are critical foundations for various group processes and outcomes and often determine important staffing and hiring decisions in organizations. This chapter offers an overview of the history of group composition research across multiple disciplines and identifies three distinct approaches to studying group composition with an emphasis on the role of communication. Scholars treat group composition as a cause that leads to group outcomes, a consequence that results from social and psychological processes, or a process in response to dynamic team environments. A synthesis of previous research reveals that studying group composition as a cause has dominated the field and that the role of communication in group composition has gained little attention. The chapter concludes with a set of future research directions targeting the new digital environment, the role of communication, and research methodologies with special attention to the consequence- and process-oriented approaches.

Global virtual teams (GVTs) – composed of members in two or more countries who work together primarily using information and communication technologies – are increasingly prevalent in organizations today. There has been a burgeoning of research on this relatively new organizational unit, spanning various academic disciplines. In this chapter, we review and discuss the major developments in this area of research. Based on our review, we identify areas in need of future research, suggest research directions that have the potential to enhance theory development, and provide practical guidelines on managing and working in GVTs.

The design of work has been shown to influence a host of attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, well-being, and organizational outcomes. Despite its clear importance, scholarly interest in the topic has diminished over the past 20 years. Fortunately, a recent body of research has sought to reenergize research into work design by expanding our view of work design from a narrow set of motivational work features to one that incorporates broader social and contextual elements. In this chapter we seek to review the literature on work design and develop a framework that integrates both job and team design research. We begin by briefly reviewing the history of work design in order to provide needed historical context and illustrate the evolution of job and team design. We then define work design, particularly as it relates to incorporating job and team design elements and transitioning from a view of jobs to one of roles. Following this, we identify a comprehensive set of work design outcomes that provide the basis for understanding the impact that different work characteristics can have on individuals and teams. We then offer an extended discussion of our integrative model of work design, which includes three sources of work characteristics (task, social, and contextual) and the worker characteristics implied by these characteristics. Having defined the range of work and worker characteristics, we then discuss some of the fit and composition issues that arise when designing work, as well as discuss the mechanisms through which the work characteristics have their impact on outcomes. Finally, we discuss research into informal forms of work design.