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This qualitative study investigated how small group communication influences the development of shared mental models in a committee of public librarians addressing a problem-solving task. It examines the influence of communication themes, functions, roles, and rules on the group's development of shared mental models about the task and about team interaction. Data were collected over the course of a year from group meetings, email messages, group documents, and participant interviews and then analyzed using existing coding schemes and qualitative coding techniques. The findings indicate that within the group there was a strong superficial convergence around the task mental model and the team interaction mental model but a weaker convergence at a deeper level. Analysis of the group communication data shows that the group focused discussion on understanding the problem and identifying tasks, enacting group roles and rules that facilitated sharing information. The functions of their messages focused on task communication. The findings suggest that, in this group, communication themes most heavily influenced the development of a shared mental model about the task, while communication roles, rules, and functions were more influential toward the development of a shared mental model about team interaction. Implications for practice include adopting intentional tactics for surfacing mental models at various points in the group life and anchoring the emerging model within the collective cognition of the group through devices such as narratives, objects, or documentary materials.

Parallel two-sided assembly lines are usually designed to produce large-sized products such as trucks and buses. In parallel two-sided assembly lines, both left and right sides of the line are used for manufacturing one or more products on two or more assembly lines located parallel to each other. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new mathematical model for the parallel two-sided assembly line balancing problem that helps to evaluate and validate the balancing operations of the machines such as removal of tools and fixtures and reallocating the operators.

The proposed approach is explained with the help of an example problem. In all, 22 test problems are formed using the benchmark problems P9, P12, P16 and P24. The results obtained are compared among approaches of the task(s) shared, tool(s) shared and both tool(s) and task(s) shared for effect on efficiency as the performance measure. The solution presented here follows the exact solution procedure that is solved by Lingo 16 solver.

Based on the experiments, line efficiency decreases when only tools are shared and increases when only tasks are shared. Results indicate that by sharing tasks and tools together, better line efficiency is obtained with less cost of tools and fixtures.

According to the industrial aspect, the result of the study can be beneficial for assembly of the products, where tools and tasks are shared between parallel workstations of two or more parallel lines.

According to the author’s best knowledge, this paper is the first to address the tools and tasks sharing between any pair of parallel workstations.

Virtual collaboration in teams becomes increasingly popular at work. With the advantages of working in virtual teams come leadership challenges for which the shared leadership theory is discussed as a potential solution. While previous empirical studies investigating shared leadership in virtual teams generally confirm positive effects on team outcomes, this study aims to investigate in detail the leadership behaviors that are typically shared in these settings and how these shared leadership behaviors affect individual level outcomes.

Individuals from different teams participated in a questionnaire study (n = 411). Structural equation modeling was used to assess the effects of shared task- and relations-oriented leadership behaviors on team member’s subjectively perceived productivity and satisfaction with leadership.

Results indicate that shared task-oriented leadership behaviors have a significant positive effect on subjectively perceived productivity and satisfaction with leadership, while relations-oriented leadership behaviors have a significant negative effect. A hypothesis stipulating a moderating effect of task interdependence was not confirmed.

Practical implications include that in virtual teams with hierarchical organizational structures, it may be recommended that task-oriented leadership behaviors are shared among team members, whereas relations-oriented leadership behaviors should remain the responsibility of the official leader.

The findings complement previous research with new insights on behavioral dimensions of shared leadership and their effects on outcomes on the level of the individual.

The purpose of this study is to examine the unique effect that shared metacognition has on negotiation – over and above the effect of simply having similar views.

An experiment was conducted where it was systematically varied whether the negotiators explicitly knew or did not know that their opponent had a similar view of the negotiation task.

Results showed that having shared metacognition promoted: cooperative negotiation, accurate insight into the opponent's point values (which was correlated with increased joint gain), and increased satisfaction regarding the negotiation outcome. Moreover, this was the case across different conditions in which negotiators' negotiation task view and motivation were varied.

The paper suggests that negotiators and mediators can benefit by developing a common understanding of the negotiation and explicitly exchanging this understanding with each other (establishing shared metacognition) prior to engaging in the negotiation. Future studies should examine closely the underlying process of shared metacognition in terms of its impact on negotiation.

Prior research suggests that successful, integrative negotiation depends on negotiators' view of the negotiation task and whether they hold similar views of the negotiation task (shared cognition). Implicit in this research is that the negotiating parties not only had similar views of the negotiation task but also may have explicitly known that they did so (shared metacognition).

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.

Shared leadership is an effective mechanism for managing project teams. Its performance-enhancing benefits have been demonstrated in many studies. Nonetheless, there is an obvious silence about how to promote shared leadership in Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project teams. To address this deficit, the purposes of this study are to investigate the influence of shared leadership on LSS project success and to explore how team psychological safety, project task complexity and project task interdependence influence shared leadership.

A multi-source, time-lagged survey design with a four-month interval was conducted. To do this, the authors collected data from 71 project teams (comprising 71 project managers and 352 project members) using LSS approaches in the manufacturing and service industries.

The findings show that shared leadership positively influences LSS project success. The authors also found that team psychological safety fosters the development of shared leadership and, more importantly, these effects are stronger when the tasks are more complex and more interdependent.

These findings advance our understanding of the factors that enable shared leadership and equip LSS project managers with practical techniques to improve shared leadership for the success of their projects.

This study extends the theory of shared leadership to the context of LSS project management and is among the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to theoretically propose and empirically validate how to promote shared leadership in LSS project teams.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between shared leadership and team performance at the team level. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, the authors examine whether shared leadership is associated with team performance through team positive psychological capital (PsyCap). This study further examines whether task-oriented and relationship-oriented shared leadership affect team performance differently.

Multi-source survey data were obtained from 92 team leaders and 319 employees. An aggregation approach was used to analyze the data at the team level.

A high level of shared leadership positively influences team performance through the mediation of team PsyCap. Moreover, relationship-oriented shared leadership is positively associated with team performance through team PsyCap, while task-oriented shared leadership is negatively associated with team performance without the mediating effect of team PsyCap.

By focusing on the negative effects of task-oriented shared leadership and the positive effects of relationship-oriented shared leadership and team PsyCap on team performance, this study suggests new ways to manage team performance effectively and extends shared leadership literature.

This study applied COR theory to analyze the effect of shared leadership mediated by team PsyCap on team performance. It contributes to shared leadership literature by shedding light on the negative effects of task-oriented shared leadership and on the positive aspects of relationship-oriented shared leadership.

Evaluation of the knowledge that is shared among team members has been found to be a prerequisite for successful collaborative teamwork. In previous research on collaborative learning and work, shared knowledge has mainly been evaluated by researchers, and an individual's own perspective has been omitted. In this study the aim was to investigate how members of a distributed team explain knowledge that they assume to be shared and how an assessment tendency is related to these explanations.

Two distributed teams worked for two months to solve project tasks that demanded discussions and generating new ideas. Subjective explanations of their shared knowledge were studied by means of stimulated recall interviews. The concept of assessment tendency was employed to understand the differences in these explanations. Team members' assessment tendencies were examined with the assessment scale questionnaire.

Qualitative content analyses of interviews showed that explanations of shared knowledge did not focus only on contents or the outcomes of the project tasks. Instead, the distributed team members presumed their shared knowledge in terms of common goals and collaborative working processes. These evaluations were related to the outcomes of the teams. In addition, the results showed those who were proficient at assessment strategies stressed collaborative working as a shared construction process and they aimed for creation of new knowledge.

Interpersonal evaluation of shared knowledge is especially needed to support distributed collaborative work. However, instead of focusing on sharing and managing documents, more attention should be paid to sharing of social processes, such as setting a common goal.

In this paper shared knowledge is conceptualised as knowledge which is developed through situated interrelations between individuals.

This paper aims to examine the influence of shared leadership on team performance in terms of quantity and quality and in addition the moderating effect of task complexity on this relationship.

Data was gathered from 26 teams of students from a major university in Germany who completed a laboratory team decision-making exercise.

The results suggest that teams sharing leadership showed better team performance and made fewer errors. They achieved higher levels of quality of performance. In addition, if the team members viewed the task as highly complex then the quality of their performance was increased.

Therefore for organizations to optimize team performance shared leadership should be promoted, the SNA should be used to develop interventions and training and influencing perceptions of task complexity should be considered as an important strategy to stimulate shared leadership in teams.

This paper has an original approach by testing for the first time how perceived task complexity moderates the relationship between shared leadership and team performance and by developing an original team task to investigate shared leadership.