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This paper aims to examine the effect of shared leadership on both quantity and quality of team performance, predicting that shared leadership enhances performance by affecting quantity (level of performance) as well as quality (team errors). In addition, this paper also investigates the role of perceived task complexity in moderating the effect of sharing leadership on team performance.

In total, 26 teams (N = 78) were asked to work on an interdependent team-task, where they engaged in a laboratory team decision-making exercise.

Results revealed that teams sharing leadership made fewer errors. They achieved higher levels of quality of performance. As predicted, this effect was stronger when team members perceived the task as highly complex, even though objective task difficulty was constant.

This study extends current literature on shared leadership by documenting that sharing the lead in teams can also improve the quality of team performance and that perceived complexity of tasks is an important moderator of this effect.

Based on the findings, influencing perceptions of task complexity can be considered as an important strategy to stimulate shared leadership in teams.

Using social network approach, the authors showed that shared leadership is an important tool for preventing team errors and offer a new explanation for inconsistent findings from recent meta-analyses by showing that perceived task complexity moderates the effects of shared leadership. Additionally, this study offers an original team task for investigating shared leadership in teams.

As a new human resource management practice, developmental idiosyncratic deals (developmental I-deals) play an important role in attracting, retaining and motivating employees to promote creativity. Based on the social cognitive theory, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of developmental I-deals on team creativity through team creative-efficacy and the moderating role of error management atmosphere in this process.

To reduce the effects of common method biases and causal lag effect, this study was divided into three stages for data collection, with a time interval of a month. A total of 365 employee samples (72 team samples) from seven internet enterprises in Shanghai and Wuhan were selected, and Bootstrap method and Johnson-Neyman method were used to test the hypothesis.

The results of this study show that developmental I-deals positively affect team creativity, and team creative-efficacy mediates the relationship between developmental I-deals and team creativity. Error management atmosphere strengthens the impact of developmental I-deals on team creative-efficacy and further strengthens the indirect effect of developmental I-deals on team creativity through team creative-efficacy.

Based on the social cognitive theory, this study examines the impact of developmental I-deals on team creativity through team creative-efficacy and the moderating role of error management atmosphere in this process. First, the study of I-deals category was further refined. The existing research defines the concept of I-deals in a general way and does not classify it in detail. Second, the internal mechanism of I-deals is revealed. Third, it expands the multi-level research of I-deals.

The purpose of this paper is to present the implementation of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) to reduce medication errors, by using four case examples. The paper will also suggest appropriate Lean and Sigma tools to improve the medication process.

The authors critically analyze four case examples that used LSS projects, to demonstrate the approach, benefits, success factors and lessons learnt.

LSS is a powerful process improvement methodology that could be applied by health-care sectors to reduce medication errors, increase patient safety and reduce operational costs. Common Lean and Six Sigma tools play a significant role in improving and sustaining the medication process.

It is necessary for the project team to select the most appropriate LSS tools to address medication process problems. Adoption of a LSS roadmap could help health-care organizations in the successful implementation of LSS.

The paper is valuable for health-care professionals seeking to reduce errors in the medication process or other processes that need to be improved.

Hospital nurse managers are in the middle. Their supervisors expect that they will monitor and discipline nurses who commit errors, while also asking them to create a culture that fosters reporting of errors. Their staff nurses expect the managers to support them after errors occur. Drawing on interviews with 20 nurse managers from three tertiary care hospitals, the study identifies key exemplars that illustrate how managers monitor nursing errors. The exemplars examine how nurse managers: (1) sent mixed messages to staff nurses about incident reporting, (2) kept two sets of books for recording errors, and (3) developed routines for classifying potentially harmful errors into non-reportable categories. These exemplars highlight two tensions: the application of bureaucratic rule-based standards to professional tasks, and maintaining accountability for errors while also learning from them. We discuss how these fundamental tensions influence organizational learning and suggest theoretical and practical research questions and a conceptual framework.

Successful teams tend to be highly cohesive and team cohesion to be particularly helpful in allowing teams and their members to sustain their success even in the most challenging times. One disillusioning consequence of this reciprocity between cohesion and performance would suggest that failures made by teams and/or their members likely jeopardize their success by preventing them from capitalizing on such virtuous circles associated with team cohesion. Yet, many teams uphold their performance despite the failures they have to cope with, suggesting that the potential vicious circles can be overcome. This chapter aims at illuminating the vicious and virtuous circles associated with team cohesion that are induced by either collective failures of teams or individual failures of their members. It therefore offers a multilevel perspective not only on the emergence and diffusion of failures at the individual and team levels, but also on the critical role that team cohesion plays for a team’s (dys)functional coping across these levels. It is theorized that collective failures triggered exogenously can help build team cohesion, and that whether endogenously-triggered collective failures bring about the vicious or the virtuous circles of team cohesion depends on whether the individual failures developing into collective failures are triggered endogenously or exogenously. The implications of this conceptual work are discussed in light of the literatures on error/failure management and group cohesiveness.

This paper aims to investigate the complex relationship between emotions, coping approaches and learning in error situations in the workplace. The study also examines the influence of individual error orientation, as well as psychological safety, and team learning behaviour as contextual factors.

To measure emotions, coping and learning from errors in situ, a semi-standardised error diary was administered. Individual and contextual factors were measured by standard questionnaires. Totally, 22 young employees participated in the study and recorded n = 99 error situations in a three-week diary period.

Errors typically provoked negative emotions, particularly in cases of “public” errors. Negative emotions provoked emotion-focused coping. However, there was no direct effect of emotions on learning. Learning seems to depend primarily on the in-depth analysis of the error, no matter whether the original coping intention is aimed at problem-solving, self-protection or emotion regulation. A quick error correction does not necessarily result in learning. Furthermore, plausible influences of individual and contextual factors were found, but must be interpreted cautiously.

The small sample size, particularly in person-level analyses, is a major shortcoming of the study.

To overcome shortcomings of common retrospective self-reports such as interviews or questionnaires, this study uses the diary method as an innovative approach to investigate processes in situ.

The purpose of this paper is to find good values of onsite-offshore team strength; number of hours of communication between business users and onsite team and between onsite and offshore team so as to reduce project cost and improve schedule in a global software development (GSD) environment for software development project.

This study employs system dynamics simulation approach to study software project characteristics in both co-located and distributed development environments. The authors consulted 14 experts from Indian software outsourcing industry during our model construction and validation.

The study results show that there is a drop in overall team productivity in outsourcing environment by considering the offshore options. But the project cost can be reduced by employing the offshore team for coding and testing work only with minimal training for imparting business knowledge. The research results show that there is a potential to save project cost by being flexible in project schedule.

The implication of the study is that the project management team should be careful not to keep high percentage of manpower at offshore location in distributed software environment. A large offshore team can increase project cost and schedule due to higher training overhead, lower productivity and higher error proneness. In GSD, the management effort should be to keep requirement analysis and design work at onsite location and involves the offshore team in coding and testing work.

The software project manager can use the model results to divide the software team between onsite and offshore location during various phases of software development in distributed environment.

The study is novel as there is little attempt at finding the team distribution between onsite and offshore location in GSD environment.

Based on a review of previous research of organizational learning from experience, this paper aims to point out the notable gaps and unresolved issues in the research area and proposes a “multilevel integrated model of learning from experience”, which could integrate current research findings and serve as the theoretical framework for further investigation.

This paper is a theoretical review.

From the individual, team, organizational and multiple levels, in an order of the outcome of success and failure, this study reviews previous research about organizational learning from experience down to the last detail and points out some of their limitations, including relative fragmented-wise, lack of grope about the underlying motivations, lack of overall framework, etc. Then, this study proposes the “multilevel integrated model of learning from experience”, which provides a systematic and fine-grained framework for studies in this field.

This paper emphasizes that true underlying motivations impelling learning from experience shall be identified and exploration for the antecedents shall be further deepened. Besides, this study figures out that various factors played their parts in the process and outcome of learning from experience through both subjective perception and objective experience. Thus, future research shall distinguish the influence of learning from experience, respectively, into “knowing” and “doing”.

This study is an attempt to review and integrate current research of learning from experience in multiple levels and further differentiates the influences of different experience outcomes (success vs failure). The proposed theoretical model provides clear suggestions of where future research should be directed.

Teams across a wide range of contexts must look beyond task performance to consider the affective, cognitive and behavioral health of their members. Despite much interest in team health in practice, consideration of team health has remained scant from a research perspective. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues by advancing a definition and model of team health.

The authors review relevant literature on team stress, processes and emergent states to propose a definition and model of team health.

The authors advance a definition of team health, or the holistic, dynamic compilation of states that emerge and interact as a team resource to buffer stress. Further, the authors argue that team health improves outcomes at both the individual and team level by improving team members’ well-being and enhancing team effectiveness, respectively. In addition, the authors propose a framework integrating the job demands-resources model with the input-mediator-output-input model of teamwork to illustrate the behavioral drivers that promote team health, which buffers teams stress to maintain members’ well-being and team effectiveness.

This work answers calls from multidisciplinary industries for work that considers team health, providing implications for future research in this area.

This paper synthesizes the extant geographically distributed work literature, focusing on how geographic distribution affects coordination and communication, knowledge sharing, work design, and social identity. Geographically distributed audit arrangements, such as group audits and offshoring, are becoming increasingly prevalent in audit practice. However, little empirically is known about how working across cities, countries, and continents affects auditors, the audit process, or audit quality. To this end, the synthesis seeks to stimulate research investigating the implications of geographically distributed work arrangements in auditing, by surveying the extant literature within the management and social psychology disciplines and developing eighteen research questions for future audit research to consider. The synthesis reveals that geographically distributed audit work is likely to be very different from work performed in more traditional arrangements and therefore cannot be treated by audit researchers, practitioners, or standard setters as replications of domestic processes abroad. As a result, the synthesis focuses on building a greater understanding of the changes in day-to-day auditing, the consequences of such changes, and interventions that may moderate the challenges encountered in geographically distributed audit arrangements.