Search results

This two-part study aims to contribute to the body of knowledge on team development by examining the development of self-managing teams (SMTs) in healthcare. Based on an exploration of the team development literature, a perspective on SMT development was created, which suggested that SMTs develop along a non-sequential pattern of three processes–team management, task management and boundary management and improvement–that is largely the result of individual, team, organizational and environmental-level factors.

The perspective on SMT development was assessed in a Dutch mental healthcare organization by conducting 13 observations of primary mental healthcare SMTs as well as 14 retrospective interviews with the self-management process facilitator and advisors of all 100 primary mental healthcare SMTs.

Empirical results supported the perspective on SMT development. SMTs were found to develop along each of the three defined processes in a variety or possible patterns or simultaneously over time, depending on many of the identified factors and three others. These factors included individual human capital, team member attitudes and perceived workload at the individual level, psychological safety, team turnover, team size, nature of the task and bureaucratic history at the team level, and management style and material and social support at the organizational level.

This study provides a non-sequential model of SMT development in healthcare, which healthcare providers could use to understand and foster SMTs development. To foster SMT development, it is suggested that cultural change need to be secured alongside with structural change.

Even though various team development models have been described in the literature, this study is the first to indicate how SMTs in the healthcare context develop toward effective functioning.

Research has demonstrated that varying degrees and combinations of individual traits, behaviors and characteristics influence the emergence of leaders in teams. While existing models have shown that such variables affect leader choice independently and interactively, the overall findings suggest that there is still a lack of research on a potentially significant factor, the impact of personal reputation on leader selection in autonomous work teams (AWTs), an increasingly ubiquitous team practice in organizations. This preliminary review thus aims to offer a general overview of personal reputation and its effects on leader emergence in the context of AWTs.

By surveying extant literature on team leader emergence, this review has identified that the potential impact of personal reputation on leader selection in teams is significant yet largely ignored.

Models of leader emergence in teams should incorporate the realistic assumption that teams formed in organizations are often comprised of individuals who have information on others either directly or indirectly. Personal reputation based on an individual’s history thus moderates how one’s behaviors or traits exhibited become contextualized in the overall assessment of leader desirability and selection in teams.

Based on a review of existing research on leadership emergence and personal reputation, this work contends that the external validity and predictive value of leader emergence models would greatly benefit from the inclusion of employee reputations as a moderating variable in the future assessment of the leader emergence process in AWTs.

By designing models that explain the potential effects of personal reputations on leader emergence in self-managed teams, team members and managers can be better elucidated and ultimately improve their understanding of the process of the evaluation and selection of team leaders.

Despite the prolific research on leader emergence, there is still a paucity of studies examining personal reputational effects on leader selection, especially in the context of AWTs. This work is the first review piece calling for the inclusion of personal reputation, a substantive factor overlooked and excluded in previous models, to enhance the current understanding of leader emergence in AWTs.

This study aims to introduce an alternative model, “volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), Virtue and Vice” (3V’s), to unleash leadership skills, promote organisational collaborative change and impact sales performance during an unprecedented crisis.

The methodology outlines action research based on the 3V’s model and its application in an international business-to-business sales organisation during Covid-19. It explores alternative paths informed by play-at-work and Plato’s philosophy applied to work-based-learning. Each action/iteration adds to the model, which becomes more likely appropriate for various situations.

The 3V’s boosted change implementation and improved sales performance. The 3V’s conceptualised an invitation to immerse oneself in the constant “river of change” (VUCA) and a means of understanding the role of leadership in navigating this change by embracing simple rules: searching for justice (Virtue) and overcoming the barrier of public opinion (Vice).

The 3V’s model is grounded in leadership literature and a sole application, providing real international data relevant to organisations and leaders. This has yet to be evaluated further.

3V’s can enhance the understanding of a leading collaborative change and re-frame team dynamics in post-pandemic times for the broader public.

The approach advocated is a practice of “swimming alongside the team”, which should enable empowerment and collaboration rather than a top-down direction. Focussing on leaders who are moral people, this approach becomes a differentiator in a digital world.

This study examines Plato’s philosophy, play-at-work and other leadership theories in a model which prepares organisations to respond to crisis by providing the ability to reflect on human aspects and straightforward, transferable skills.

The efficiency of each of an organization’s individual workers determines its effectiveness. The study aims to explore the relationship between human resource management (HRM) practices and organizational effectiveness with employee performance as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 800 police officers in the Greater Accra and Tema regions. The data were supported by the hypothesized relationship. Construct reliability and validity was established through confirmatory factor analysis. The proposed model and hypotheses were evaluated using structural equation modeling.

The results show that career planning and employee performance were significantly related. Self-managed teams and employee performance were shown to be nonsignificantly related. Similarly, performance management and employee performance were shown to be nonsignificantly related. Employee performance significantly influenced organizational effectiveness. The results further indicate that employee performance mediates the relationship between HRM practices and organizational effectiveness.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research’s police service focus and cross-sectional data.

The study’s findings will serve as valuable pointers for the police administration in the adoption, design and implementation of well-articulated and proactive HRM practices to improve the abilities, skills, knowledge and motivation of officer’s to inordinately enhance the effectiveness of the service.

By evidencing empirically that employee performance mediates the relationship between HRM practice and organizational effectiveness, the study extends the literature.

This paper aims to determine the impact of perceived virtuality on team dynamics and outcomes by adopting the Input-Mediators-Outcome (IMO) framework. Further, it also investigates the mediating role of team processes and emergent states.

The authors collected survey data from 315 individuals working in virtual teams (VTs) in the information technology sector in India using both offline and online questionnaires. They performed the analysis using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM).

The authors investigated two sets of hypotheses – both direct and indirect (or mediation interactions). Results show that psychological empowerment and conflict management are significant in managing VTs. Also, perceived virtuality impacts team outcomes, i.e. perceived team performance, team satisfaction and subjective well-being.

The interplay between the behavioural team process (conflict management) and the emergent state (psychological empowerment) was examined. The study also helps broaden our understanding of the various psychological variables associated with teamwork in the context of VTs.

Findings from this study will aid in assessing the consequences of virtual teamwork at both individual and organisational levels, such as guiding the design and sustainability of VT arrangements, achieving higher productivity in VTs, and designing effective and interactive solutions in the virtual space.

The study examined the interplay between behavioural team processes (such as conflict management) and emergent states (such as psychological empowerment). The study also theorises and empirically tests the relationships between perceived virtuality and team outcomes (i.e. both affective and effectiveness). It may serve as a guide to understanding team dynamics in VTs better.

This exploratory study attempts to enhance the current understanding of the research and practice of VTs within a developing economy.

Scale-ups have a crucial role in our society and economy, are known for their fast growth and high performance and undergo significant organizational change. Research on the organizational elements that ensure scale-ups sustaining high performance is limited. This empirical study aims to investigate the organizational culture in scale-ups using the Competing Values Framework, including the clan, adhocracy, the market, hierarchy cultures and its relation to performance.

Quantitative and qualitative data were collected in five scale-ups. Surveys provided data of 116 employees on organizational culture, assessed using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) and perceived performance. The aggregate outcomes and performance measures were analyzed using correlation analysis. Interviews were held with ten top managers and mirrored against the quantitative data.

The results show that top managers and employees have different perspectives on the culture scale-ups are supposed to have. Top managers perceive market culture as more and hierarchy culture as less present in their organizations than employees. The clan and adhocracy culture are positively correlated to performance and are preferred by employees. Market and hierarchy culture types are negatively correlated to performance and are least preferred by employees.

It enables scale-up leaders to specifically intervene when cultural elements are experienced by employees that will not drive performance and fit the high performance and fast-growing scale-up environment.

This study is the first that showed that organizational-wide surveys, combined with in-depth interviews, are suitable for top managers of scale-ups to diagnose the organizational culture and the effect on the organization's performance.

A leader plays an important role in the growth of an organization. The leader is a person who influences the standards, structure, culture and behaviour of the individuals employed in the organization. A leader also has effects on the result and productivity of teams. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of transformational leadership style on team performance. This paper will also analyze the existence of a relationship between transformational leadership style and team performance.

For this study, the researcher collected the data from 354 individuals employed in IT organizations in Pune. The team members answered questions asked about the transformational leadership style, and the team leaders answered questions related to team performance. The data has been analyzed using the latest available version of Statistical Product and Service Solutions.

The results of this examination suggest that there is strong and positive relationship between the transformational leadership style and team performance. Further, it was also found that transformational leader helps in a great way in improving team performance which in turn increases the organization’s productivity.

Few limitations of this research work are that the data collected for this research work is non-cognitive in nature and simultaneously respondents may incline to evaluate the positive facets of opinion poll more propitiously than negative facets. Secondly, the data have been collected only from companies located in Pune.

This research study provides empirical data that will be helpful for human resources department of an organization, as it can help them in the development of policies and practices. It will also provide help leaders to support employees who are seeking effective ways to support struggling employees in context to their team performance.

The present study can be differentiated from past studies, as it thinks over an ensemble of transformational leadership style as an essential antecedent of team performance and also enhances the knowledge of the researchers and practitioners about the leadership style that upshot to the team performance. This will also help the managers, researchers, organizational development specialist and employees who are seeking effective ways to support struggling employees in context to their team performance.

The purpose of this study is to explore the extent to which teamwork (developed either during an initial training phase or during a subsequent deployment phase) is influenced by the nature of the team’s environment (extreme vs non-extreme) and the extent to which teamwork is one of the explaining mechanisms for team performance.

Data was collected from 60 teams at 2 time-points: training phase in The Netherlands or Germany and deployment phase (in locations such as Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina).

This study’s results indicate that when teams consider working in extreme environments, they develop higher levels of teamwork as compared to teams expecting to work in non-extreme environments. These differences remain stable also during the deployment phase, such that teams operating in extreme environments will continue to have higher levels of teamwork as compared to teams operating in non-extreme environments.

With this study, the authors contribute to the teamwork quality research stream by empirically studying how teamwork quality develops in unique military contexts such as extreme environments. Studies in such contexts are relatively rare.

The purpose of this study is to apply the concept of organizational ambidexterity as a conceptual lens to increase the understanding of tensions between exploitation (continuity) and exploration (change) in Agile software development (ASD) project teams, and particularly the balancing (ambidextrous) strategies utilized.

A conceptual framework was constructed from interdisciplinary sources on ambidexterity. A literature review of publications on ambidexterity in ASD was then performed, and the results from the selected publications were classified according to an extension of the conceptual framework.

Contextual ambidexterity in ASD is affected by the four basic coherent concepts: time, task, team and transition. The study found that most ambidextrous factors and strategies were task and team-related. In addition, a mixture of hard (performance) strategies and soft (social) strategies is needed in order for people/teams to (be able to) become ambidextrous.

To provide a better understanding of ASD, it is important to identify a broader set of ambidextrous factors and strategies that can impact ASD project teams. The expanded conceptual framework can serve as a basis for future empirical research and provide insights to practitioners on how to strengthen ambidexterity in ASD projects.

The contribution is of great importance for ASD research and practice, as ASD methods are a popular method for managing projects within ASD and in other nonsoftware organizations. In addition, as more and more organizations struggle to deal with rapidly changing environments, interest in the phenomena of paradoxical tensions and the strategy (ambidexterity) to deal with these tensions increase.

Although the importance of teamwork competencies and effective conflict management in entrepreneurship education is recognised, we have limited knowledge of how these factors interact to influence performance in entrepreneurial teams. This research explores teamwork competencies as a predictor of entrepreneurial team performance and the moderating effect of emerging cognitive and interpersonal team conflict as levers in entrepreneurship learning.

A time-lagged survey method was used to collect data from 49 teams (156 individuals) of undergraduate students in an experiential new venture creation course. A predictive model of entrepreneurial team performance through hierarchical regression analyses and moderated-moderation analyses was tested.

Results reveal that teamwork competencies have a significant and direct influence on entrepreneurial team performance and that intragroup conflict strengthens that relationship when high levels of cognitive conflict and low levels of interpersonal conflict emerge.

The findings have implications for the design of entrepreneurial training programs, which will benefit from interventions aimed at teamwork competency development that incorporate strategies promoting constructive cognitive conflict while preventing the emergence of interpersonal conflict.

This study is a step forward in entrepreneurship education research from the perspective of social and interpersonal processes by identifying the patterns of intra-team conflict that lead to more effective entrepreneurial teams and more productive use of teamwork competencies in a learning-by-doing entrepreneurial context.