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Why do some teams work effectively and others not? The authors, in examining the attributes of High Performing Teams, show that there are three major areas which team leaders need to concentrate upon. These are example, experience and expertise. There are certain work functions that are critical to success and there is a need for every work team to have a member who can co‐ordinate and integrate these functions. This person performs the “linking” role.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the impact of superleader behaviors in self‐managed work teams, on organization commitment, job satisfaction and organization self‐esteem.

Data were collected on‐site over a period of three days from employees working in a non‐union paper mill located in a small rural community in the northwestern region of the USA. The survey was completed by 141 employees, representing a 9 per cent response rate. Self‐leadership, organization commitment, job satisfaction and organization self‐esteem were all measured using different instruments.

The results indicated that teams groups that were led by a supervisor who exhibited the characteristics of a superleader had higher levels of organization commitment, job satisfaction, and organization self‐esteem.

The study is based on a small sample and relied on self‐report data, thereby allowing for the possibility of same source bias. However, this is a common problem with cross‐sectional designs.

Leading in a self‐managed work team environment requires a unique approach to leadership. The results of this study illustrated that superleader behaviors result in some beneficial outcomes for organizations including enhanced levels of organization commitment, job satisfaction and organization self‐esteem. It behoves organizations to encourage, through training programs, the development of these behaviors.

Introduction All managers and supervisors are dependent on the performance of their team members. Unless these subordinates perform effectively, then the manager or supervisor will be seen in most cases to have failed. As Brown has noted, “the supervisor generally is more dependent on the work group than on the individual employee, because the work group's performance provides a measure of his or her supervisory capabilities”. We have recently been looking at the work of managers and supervisors in relation to the groups that they lead, to try to identify those factors which contribute to the success of a team. We have been able to identify a number of factors which define what we call High Performing Teams (HPTs). One of these factors is the linking factor — that is, all teams need a manager or supervisor who acts as a critical “link person” in getting things done.

Aims to measure the differences which may exist between a number of team aspects for groups working on projects with two different contractual bases: cost‐plus (CP) and fixed‐price (FP). Investigates work groups from engineering companies. Measures team characteristics and their perceived value to team members using self‐report questionnaires. Analyses the primary data obtained using statistical means. The findings show that team members did perceive differences in about half of the team aspects studied. Generally the feeling of “teamness” was higher in the CP project groups. Discusses the implications for management of the impact of the contractual base on the environment of teams, and suggests that the questionnaire may have application elsewhere as a management tool.

Work teams have gained increasing importance as businesses shift to knowledge-based organizational structures. At the same time, advances in information technology have facilitated this change by enabling virtual work environments. To add to this complexity, the increasing demographic diversity of workers is coinciding with the rise in virtual and knowledge-based work environments. Therefore, it is critical that we understand the impact of these changes as they coincide in organizations today.

One of the extolled virtues of work teams is their potential to combine the unique knowledge held by individual workers, integrating these knowledge resources to bear on productive tasks. To effectively utilize their distributed knowledge, work teams have to perform three basic knowledge-processing activities: (a) knowledge acquisition; (b) knowledge integration; and (c) knowledge creation. However, work teams often have difficulty processing their distributed knowledge. The ability of team members, or lack thereof, to work effectively with each other is usually the problem.

The increasing demographic diversity of workers presents similar challenges for organizations. Demographically diverse workers have more unique knowledge, leading to increased knowledge differentiation in work teams. A work team that has high knowledge differentiation is one whose members possess different expertise. The unique knowledge held by individual team members effectively enlarges a work team's pool of knowledge resources. However, the increasing demographic diversity of workers often results in work teams having more difficulty processing their distributed knowledge because team members are not able to work effectively with different others. That being the case, the potential for demographically diverse work teams to more effectively perform productive tasks is lost.

We realize that demographically diverse work teams are a special (and important) case of teams in that they are both high on differentiated knowledge and high on the potential for conflict and other process losses. However, with an increasingly global marketplace, this special case is quickly becoming commonplace. Therefore, it is critical that we find ways to help demographically diverse work teams limit their process losses and realize their full potential.

Virtual work environments only heighten the need for demographically diverse work teams to minimize their process losses. Team members are often separated by both geographic space and time, which makes it even more challenging for them to work effectively with each other. In such environments, team members are often isolated from one another and find it difficult to feel a part of their team. Interestingly, computer-mediated communication has been shown to enhance team performance by helping team members communicate more effectively with each other. In fact, empirical work by Bhappu, Griffith, and Northcraft (1997) suggests that computer-mediated communication can actually help demographically diverse work teams process their distributed knowledge more effectively.

In this chapter, we will discuss the effects of demographic diversity and virtual work environments on knowledge processing in teams. More specifically, we will describe when computer-mediated communication is likely to enhance knowledge processing in demographically diverse work teams and when it is not. In doing so, we hope to provide both workers and managers with a set of guidelines on how to best navigate these organizational changes.

Examines new developments in work group design. Autonomous work groups, also called self‐regulated work groups or self‐managing work teams, have been described as originating primarily from socio‐technical work design. The concept of autonomous work groups has also been described as a more comprehensive application of the methods employed in quality circles. Both of these examples will be shown to be inaccurate descriptions of a truly self‐managed work team. Instead, through the implementation and application of self‐managed work teams, a combination of socio‐technical design is utilized with a concept that goes far beyond that of quality circles‐empowerment. Empowerment is the idea that employees and groups can achieve higher levels of productivity, quality, and team member satisfaction through delegation of more task‐related decisions to the team. However, there are considerations in the implementation of autonomous work groups. These include development of trust, appropriate status and reward systems, senior management support, and the effective management of change. Focuses on the changes and processes that are integral parts of the successful implementation of empowerment.

The received wisdom is that team working is a good thing and is spoken about positively as a means of promoting co‐operation and of making the best use of employees' strengths. This article seeks to examine why this may be and to address the four areas highlighted by ACAS where improvements are made, i.e. productivity, quality, the use of new technology, and motivation.

The paper explores here in the light of the current organisational environment.

The study outlines the lessons learned in introducing teamwork, the need for managerial commitment, the changes in culture that can be promoted by team working and how to go about planning for change.

The paper presents a practical and realistic view. This is the first of two articles on the subject. The second will deal with the issues of establishing and running teams.

We aimed to analyze the impact of the transition to the hybrid model of teamwork and team dynamics from the perspective of the five key challenges, i.e. communication, coordination, connection, creativity and culture.

To achieve the stated aim, we conducted a literature review and then an exploratory qualitative study. We split the research into phases: December 2021 to January 2022 and July to August 2022. In the first phase, we conducted computer-assisted online interviews (CAWIs) with all members of the remote team and an in-depth interview with the manager. After the transition from remote to hybrid work in February 2022, we returned to the team to conduct in-depth interviews with team leaders and the manager.

We identified key findings, i.e. managerial implications of differences across the 5 Cs (communication, coordination, connection, creativity and culture) noted in the functioning of the analyzed team as the team shifted from fully remote work to the hybrid work model.

We concluded that if people do not spend time together and are not impregnated with the unique culture and values of a given organization, they will not feel a connection to its distinctive ethos and may choose to leave. In the longer-term, the last challenge may be the biggest single opportunity for employees post-pandemic and concurrently the single biggest challenge that organizational leadership will need to address, given that sustainable market success depends on talent.

The results showed that team communication, teamwork coordination, social and emotional connections among team members, nurturing of creativity, as well as of the organizational culture were of high importance to the team in the hybrid work model. Thus, we confirmed the findings of other authors. The study contributes to our understanding of the impact of the hybrid work model on teamwork and team dynamics and provides some guidance on how organizations can mitigate these, in particular through the team manager.

We conceptualized the novel phenomenon of COVID-induced virtual teams and its implications and provided researchers with the required information on how to conduct a phenomenon-based study for conceptualizing novel phenomena in relevant ways.

This article stems from phenomenon-based and, thus, theory-building and grounded qualitative research in the German industrial sector. We conducted 47 problem-centered interviews in two phases (February–July 2021 and February–July 2022) to understand how team members and team leaders experienced COVID-induced virtual teamwork and its subsequent developments.

Empirically, we found COVID-induced virtual teams to be characterized by a high relevance of shaping positive team dynamics via steering internal moderators; crisis is a novel external moderator and transformation becomes the key output factor to be leveraged. Work-from-home leads to specific configuration needs and interrelations between work-from-home and on-site introduce additional dynamics. Methodologically, the phenomenon-based approach is found to be highly suitable for studying the effects of such novel phenomena.

This article is explorative. Thus, we advocate further research on related novel phenomena, such as post-COVID-hybrid and work-from-home teams. A model of how to encourage positive dynamics in post-COVID-hybrid teams is developed and lays the groundwork for further studies on post-COVID teamwork. Concerning methodology, researchers are provided with information on how to conduct phenomenon-based research on novel phenomena, such as the COVID-induced virtual teams that we studied.

Companies receive advice on how to encourage positive dynamics in post-COVID teamwork, e.g. on identifying best practices and resilient individuals.

In a country such as Germany that faces labor shortages, our insights might facilitate better labor-market integration for those with care-work obligations and international workers.

We offer a first conceptualization of a relevant novel phenomenon, namely COVID-induced virtual teams. We exemplify the phenomenon-based approach as a suitable methodology that serves to build relevant theory using active categorization.