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This response addresses the central issues raised by the commentaries on our earlier chapter. The intent here is to clarify issues that may have been insufficiently explicated in our original treaties. These include the distinction between core and other employee groups, the importance of horizontal fit among the human resources management (HRM) practices, and the importance of job analysis principles when considering innovative activities throughout firms.

This chapter presents a contextual model of human resources management (HRM). The hallmarks of this model are that (1) the most advantageous HRM practices vary conditionally upon strategic considerations; (2) each organization has multiple substrategies within it, and each substrategy is aligned with a unique bundle of HRM practices; (3) within each organization, three substrategies are associated with three subsystems; and (4) in terms of contributing to sustainable competitive advantage, the innovation subsystem is the most valuable regardless of the organization in question.

Mark D. Agars is an associate professor of psychology at California State University, San Bernardino. He received his Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University in industrial and organizational psychology, where he worked with James L. Farr.

Scholars continue to debate whether planning, in fact, contributes to creativity and innovation. In this chapter, we argue that planning is critical to innovation and will contribute to the generation of viable new ideas. Effective planning, however, must be based on an incremental approach involving a viable portfolio of projects. The implications of this model for the management of innovation at the organizational, group, and individual levels are discussed. Potential new directions for research are considered, along with the model's implications for the management of creative ventures.

This chapter attempts to elucidate the important role that divergent thinking plays in organizational creativity, innovation, and change. We define brainstorming as a systematized method of divergent thinking, review this literature, and advocate for the strategic use of brainstorming to enhance creativity and innovation. We identify contradictory findings in the research literature that have led practitioners and researchers to disregard brainstorming techniques. We suggest that cultural forces embedded in organizations may prevent divergent thinking and brainstorming from becoming established normative organizational processes, thus hampering organizations’ potential for change and innovation. The chapter closes by putting divergent thinking and brainstorming in perspective and provides guidelines for its use.

This chapter seeks to increase our understanding of health care employees' perceptions of effective and ineffective leadership behavior within their organization.

Interviews were conducted with 59 employees working in a diversity of positions within the case study hospital. Interviewees were asked to cite behaviors of both an effective and an ineffective leader in their organization. They were also asked to clarify whether their example described the behavior of a formal or informal leader. Grounded theory data analysis techniques were used and findings were interpreting using existing leadership behavior theories.

(1) There was a consistent link between effective leadership and relationally oriented behaviors. (2) Employees identified both formal and informal leadership within their hospital. (3) There were both similarities and differences with respect to the types of behaviors attributed to informal versus formal leaders. (4) Informants cited a number of leadership behaviors not yet accounted for in the leadership behavior literature (e.g., ‘hands on’, ‘professional’, ‘knows organization’). (5) Ineffective leadership behavior is not simply the opposite of effective leadership.

Findings support the following ideas: (1) there may be a relationship between the type of job held by employees in health care organizations and their perceptions of leader behavior, and (2) leadership behavior theories are not yet comprehensive enough to account for the varieties of leadership behavior in a health care organization. This study is limited by the fact that it focused on only those leadership theories that considered leader behavior.

There are two practical implications for health care organizations: (1) leaders should recognize that the type of behavior an employee prefers from a leader may vary by follower job group (e.g., nurses may prefer relational behavior more than managerial staff do), and (2) organizations could improve leader development programs and evaluation tools by identifying ineffective leadership behaviors that they want to see reduced within their workplace.

Health care organizations could use these findings to identify informal leaders in their organization and invest in training and development for them in hopes that these individuals will have positive direct or indirect impacts on patient, staff, and organizational outcomes through their informal leadership role.

This study contributes to research and practice on leadership behavior in health care organizations by explicitly considering effective and ineffective leader behavior preferences across multiple job types in a health care organization. Such a study has not previously been done despite the multi-professional nature of health care organizations.

Teams should be hotbeds of creativity, yet they may naturally experience many barriers that thwart their ability to generate and select the most creative ideas. We propose that team relational support – a relational process involving the exchange of help, information, advice, and emotional concern – can help teams overcome the barriers that undermine team creativity. The following chapter proposes a process model of relational support and team creativity – identifying the mechanisms through which team relational support aids team creative processes.

To summarize and build on research that explores the influence of culture on team dynamics, particularly over time. Specifically, we explore culture and teams from a dynamic perspective by providing a framework for understanding both how culture influences team dynamics over time, and where interventions should be targeted at different points to maximize the potential benefits of cultural diversity.

Drawing from a prominent model of team development (Kozlowski, Gully, Nason, & Smith, 1999), we provide mechanisms through which culture exerts an influence, as well as the practical approaches that will be best suited for mitigating potential negative effects at different points in time.

We focus on the following phases: team formation, task compilation, role compilation, team compilation, as well as team maintenance. At first, surface-level characteristics and subgroup formation should be closely monitored along with interventions to develop a group identity when teams are being formed. Later on, emergent states (e.g., trust, conflict) can come to the forefront as team members can develop multiple memberships or yet be resistant to performing in an adaptive manner.

We identify key avenues for future research to serve as a foundation for those studying the cultural diversity within teams via temporal lens, including the role of context and going beyond Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.

Albeit research has started to accumulate regarding how culture influences teams through conflict, communication, trust, cohesion, and creativity, this chapter goes beyond current development to address when different cultural elements influence team dynamics.