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This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Teams with greater cognitive diversity are more like to engage knowledge sharing. Teams that share knowledge have greater team innovation. Diverse teams are more effective at knowledge sharing in a team climate that encourages and creates space for knowledge sharing practices.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The purpose of this paper is to trace and understand informal knowledge sharing networks for various competencies in project teams. This will help establish a baseline and thereby enable further knowledge management interventions to be outlined.

Two project teams were identified for this study. While one of the teams had a semi‐structured knowledge management system already in place, the other had not adopted any knowledge management practices. The knowledge network analysis was rolled out for both the teams for the competencies that they were working on. This was more of an exploratory study. The results are compared across both the teams and inferences are made on the knowledge networks for the teams.

The various measures involved in social network analysis can help from a knowledge management perspective to: identify experts; provide indicators to the extent of knowledge sharing for various competencies; and baseline current knowledge management practices in a team.

This methodology would not be very feasible for large teams with more than 500 people.

This is a very useful diagnostic tool for managers to know more about the knowledge sharing dynamics in their teams. This may help them design interventions to build the capabilities of key team members along specific knowledge areas.

The paper provides indicators on the capability of the teams and their knowledge repositories based on the interactions between them.

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.

In a variety of domains, teams represent the main mechanism for dealing with change, complexity, and uncertainty in organizations. Consequently, teams need to be able to adapt and effectively use shared and complementary cognitive processing while collaborating to deal with these challenges.

A conceptual review is provided that addresses this type of complex collaborative cognition via discussion of macrocognition and the processes contributing to effective team problem-solving.

Despite extensive research on problem-solving, research and theories regarding how problem-solving changes over time as teams develop is missing. With this review, we extend research on team problem-solving and team development through integration of existing theory and concepts from the team literature.

This review provides a theoretical foundation for understanding and studying the developmental dynamic of team problem-solving.

A team problem-solving development model is described which outlines the degree to which the primary elements of team development are likely to affect macrocognitive processes within problem-solving phases. A set of propositions is offered in order to guide research on team development in collaborative problem-solving.

Due to geographic dispersion and reliance on technology-mediated communication, developing collaborative capital can be a challenge in a virtual team. Knowledge sharing is one form of collaborative capital that has been identified as critical to virtual team success. This chapter develops a theoretical model that proposes that shared leadership in virtual teams is positively related to knowledge sharing between team members, and that this relationship will be partially mediated by trust. The model also shows that a team's degree of reliance on technology-mediated communication will moderate the relationships in the model.

Strategy scholars have long argued that breakthrough innovation is generated by recombining knowledge from distant domains. Even if firms have the ability to access and absorb knowledge from distant domains, however, they may fail to pay attention to such knowledge because it is seemingly irrelevant to their tasks. We draw attention to this problem of knowledge relevance and develop a theoretical model to illuminate how ideas from seemingly irrelevant (i.e., peripheral) domains can generate breakthrough innovation through the cognitive process of analogical reasoning, as well as the conditions under which this is more likely to occur. We situate our theoretical model in the context of teams in order to develop insight into the microfoundations of knowledge recombination within firms. Our model reveals paradoxical requirements for teams that help to explain why breakthrough innovation is so difficult.

Drawing on job demands and resources theory and the challenge-hindrance stressor framework, this study aims to investigate the effect of team knowledge complexity on team information sharing and information searching and examine whether team learning goal orientation mediates these effects.

The authors conducted two studies. Study 1 used a field survey study conducted among 374 employees positioned in 68 new product teams. Study 2 used a three-wave online survey study conducted among 208 leaders to investigate the teams they managed.

The findings of the two studies reveal that team knowledge complexity has a positive direct effect on team information sharing and information searching. Furthermore, team learning goal orientation mediates these two relationships.

The findings indicate that team knowledge complexity is generally beneficial for the team information process. Therefore, instead of fearing an increase in the knowledge complexity of the projects, organizations should dare to present challenge demands to team members to enhance their engagement in information processing. Organizations could also pay attention to team member selection during team composition processes. For example, selecting team members with a high level of learning goal orientation is helpful in facilitating team information processing.

Although previous studies have found that knowledge complexity is beneficial for team output, less is known about how knowledge complexity influences team processes. This study clarifies the relationships between team knowledge complexity, information sharing and information searching and examines team learning goal orientation as a vital mediator.

This study aims to explore the influence of social interaction processes on transactive memory system (TMS) practice, the mediation of knowledge integration to the relationship between TMS and team performance and the moderation of team psychological safety to the relationship among TMS, knowledge intentions and team performance.

The authors collected data from a sample of 366 team members from 55 research and development (R&D) teams in Taiwan and conduct the analysis using the partial least squares method.

The results of this study indicate that social interaction processes have a positive effect on a TMS; a TMS can foster team performance, but knowledge integration mediates the relationship between the TMS and team performance; and team psychological safety can moderate the relationship between the TMS, knowledge integration and team performance.

Existing studies not only fail to explore the influence of social interaction processes on a TMS practice but also lack empirical analyses to explore knowledge integration as a mediator and team psychological safety as a moderator. This study fills that gap by developing a model that includes these types of relationships and suggests the importance of the TMS in the context of R&D.

Although the literature has somewhat discussed social capital and knowledge sharing, the mediating and moderating mechanisms that influence team workers to move from connecting with one another to building social capital and consequently engaging in knowledge sharing still remain largely understudied. For that reason, this study aims to develop a holistic research framework that links social capital to knowledge sharing with positive affective tone as a mediator and hypercompetition as a moderator.

Drawing upon the social capital theory and the affective events theory (AET), this study proposes a research framework to assess how social capital factors influence knowledge sharing with the mediation of positive affective tone and the moderation of hypercompetition in high-tech teams. This study obtains survey data based on 330 questionnaires of working professionals from 66 high-tech teams in Taiwan, in which each team comprises four members and their team leader.

The empirical results of this study show that social interaction, shared vision and trust are positively related to knowledge sharing via the mediation of positive affective tone. Moreover, hypercompetition has positive moderating effects on the relationships between social interaction and positive affective tone as well as between trust and positive affective tone.

This study expands the previous literature to study through what mediating mechanism the effects of different social capital factors on knowledge sharing can be effectively realized and whether there exists any critical moderator that influences these effects.

The purpose of this paper is to study how the software outsourcing teams, namely, vendors, transfer effective knowledge to enhance team performance; it reports on a study of transactive memory system (TMS) theory and makes deep analyses and discussions about the influence of the cooperative behaviors of TMS on software outsourcing team’s performance under the framework of three behavioral characteristics dimensions – specialization, credibility and coordination.

This paper is an empirical study based on investigation interviews to 28 software outsourcing teams and data of questionnaire surveys on 124 software outsourcing teams; structural equation model is used to test the data we collected.

This paper finds that both credibility and coordination have a significantly positive impact on knowledge transfer and project success, whereas specialization has a significant negative impact on project success. The results of data analysis show that TMS is an effective coordination mechanism.

The conclusion of the study can help us understand the coordination mechanism of knowledge transfer in software outsourcing team and provide theoretical support and paradigm reference for vendors in China to accumulate knowledge and improve the success rate of projects in the context of software project development.