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Are global business teams (GBTs) nothing more than just a group of individuals collaborating across cultural and geographic distances? We argue that such a view represents a gross simplification of the reality, since every GBT member also represents the knowledge and interests of an organizational unit. Recognizing the broader strategic context within which teams are embedded, we advance a typology of GBTs. We argue that different types of GBTs impose different motivational structures on team members as well as different coordination challenges. We also examine how the salience and consequences of various emergent and designed team characteristics will differ across different types of GBTs.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the extent to which team processes vary between team types, as well as the relative importance of these processes for different team types.

A survey study evaluated a sample of 316 members of various work teams that were classified as either intellectual (e.g. executive team) or physical (e.g. production team) teams. Independent samples t‐tests, paired samples t‐tests, and confirmatory factor analysis were used to evaluate hypotheses.

Confirmatory analysis indicated transition and action oriented process behaviors were distinct from one another. Intellectual teams were found to value transition processes (planning and strategizing) more highly than physical teams. Intellectual teams also valued transition processes (planning and strategizing), more than action processes (monitoring and coordinating).

Research on team processes tends to focus upon a “one size fits all” approach to teamwork, but this approach has yielded inconsistent frameworks. This study provides evidence that these inconsistencies are due to the changing nature of teamwork. This study was limited in that only two broad types of teams and two types of process competencies were assessed.

Differences in the importance of certain processes for specific team types should be taken into account when implementing systems for team selection, performance appraisal, and training.

This paper provides empirical support for previous theoretical suppositions that different team types differ in the level of importance they place on certain processes.

States that the use of work teams is becoming more and more prominent in organizations today, and that these work teams are empowered to formulate and solve an organization’s problems and thus involve the naturally occurring dynamic of conflict. Explains that conflict is perceived as negative but with positive qualities that are beneficial to the organization. Focuses on the dynamic of conflicts; its effect on work teams’ decision‐making process; and the types of conflict, A‐type and C‐type, and their effects on the decision‐making process of work teams. Finds that C‐type conflict focuses members’ discussion of differences on issues related to the task at hand; fosters creativity, open and honest communication; and utilizes members’ skills and abilities. Claims that this creates a desirable environment for C‐type conflict to exist and impact the decision‐making process. Presents an eight‐step technique through which C‐type conflict can be managed noting that, as the use of work teams increases, the effectiveness of those teams will come into question. Argues that the ability to understand the different types of conflict and to manage it successfully will give work teams the competitive edge.

Develops a model of the theoretical impact of individual personality differences on the productivity of information systems (IS) development teams, then illustrates that impact by presenting a case example. Following a discussion of team composition and MBTI personality types, analyses the attributes of two IS development teams based on age, intelligence, problem‐solving ability, task responsibility, and personality‐type composition. In this case there were no significant differences in the two teams other than the differences in personality‐type composition. Determines that the differences in team performance were primarily caused by differences in the personality‐type composition of the two teams.

Online medical teams (MTs), involving collaboration between remote healthcare workers, can provide comprehensive and rapid healthcare to patients. The growth in MTs is continuing, with popularity growing among doctors and patients, but some MTs disband, which could break the continuity of healthcare services provided. We aim to address this pressing issue by exploring the effects of team diversity and leadership types on team status (i.e. team disbandment (TD)). This paper systematically investigates the influences of team diversity, including separation, variety and disparity diversity and the effects of leadership types, including strong, equal and weak types.

A data set consisting 1,071 online MTs was collected from the Good Doctor website, a leading Chinese online health community (OHC), on January 10, 2018. The data captured included 206 teams which disbanded after 3 months collaboration. Logistic regression and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) were used to examine their effects.

The results show that variety diversity, related to departments, positively affects TD, but disparity diversity, referring to clinician titles, negatively affects TD. Separation diversity, in terms of team member attitudes, exerts a negligible influence on disbandment. Although strong and equal leadership types negatively influence TD, they are seen to strengthen the positive effect of variety diversity, suggesting stable structure combinations of strong or equal-type leadership and low department diversity, as well as the match of weak-type leadership and high department diversity.

This paper extends the current understanding of virtual teams and OHCs by examining the role of leadership types and team diversity, and their influencing role on team status. The pairwise combinations are obtained to effectively reduce the disbandment probability of medical teams operating in OHCs, which could help platform managers, team founders and those connected with MTs deal with the team-disbandment crisis, providing both theoretical and practical implications to healthcare providers and researchers alike.

This paper aims to add to the current knowledge about conflict management by examining the relationships between conflict type, conflict expression intensity and the use of the conflict management approach.

The authors test theory-based hypotheses using a field study of new product development teams in an interdisciplinary Masters program (Study 1) and an experimental vignette study (Study 2).

Results show that people are more likely to respond to task conflict and conflicts expressed with less intensity using collectivistic conflict management approaches (i.e. problem-solving, compromising and yielding), and to relationship conflicts and conflicts expressed with higher intensity through forcing, an individualistic conflict management approach. Information acquisition and negative emotions experienced by team members mediate these relationships.

Knowing how the characteristics of the conflict (type and expression intensity) affect conflict management, managers can counteract the tendency to use dysfunctional, forcing conflict management approaches in response to high intensity conflicts, as well as to relationship conflicts and support the tendency to use collectivistic conflict management approaches in response to low intensity conflict, as well as task conflicts.

The authors examine an alternative to the prevailing view that conflict management serves as a moderator of the relationship between conflict and team outcomes. The research shows that conflict type and intensity of conflict expression influence the conflict management approach as a result of the information and emotion they evoke. The authors open avenues for future research on the complex and intriguing relationships between conflict characteristics and the conflict management approach.

This research focuses on examining the dynamics of task and interpersonal conflict related to the creativity of teams over five stages of a project's life cycle. Data were collected from 142 respondents of information system development project teams of a service‐driven type, and from 106 respondents of new product development teams of a technology‐driven type. Results indicate that interpersonal conflict has a negative impact on creativity for a service‐driven project team. However, task conflict has a positive impact on creativity for a technology‐driven project team. The findings suggest that managing different types of project teams necessitates concern with the variations of conflict and creativity over a project's life cycle.

The composition of author teams is a significant factor affecting the novelty of academic papers. Existing research lacks studies focusing on institutional types and measures of novelty remained at a general level, making it difficult to analyse the types of novelty in papers and to provide a detailed explanation of novelty. This study aims to take the field of natural language processing (NLP) as an example to analyse the relationship between team institutional composition and the fine-grained novelty of academic papers.

Firstly, author teams are categorized into three types: academic institutions, industrial institutions and mixed academic and industrial institutions. Next, the authors extract four types of entities from the full paper: methods, data sets, tools and metric. The novelty of papers is evaluated using entity combination measurement methods. Additionally, pairwise combinations of different types of fine-grained entities are analysed to assess their contributions to novel papers.

The results of the study found that in the field of NLP, for industrial institutions, collaboration with academic institutions has a higher probability of producing novel papers. From the contribution rate of different types of fine-grained knowledge entities, the mixed academic and industrial institutions pay more attention to the novelty of the combination of method indicators, and the industrial institutions pay more attention to the novelty of the combination of method tools.

This paper explores the relationship between the team institutional composition and the novelty of academic papers and reveals the importance of cooperation between industry and academia through fine-grained novelty measurement, which provides key guidance for improving the quality of papers and promoting industry–university–research cooperation.

Previous research on workplace meetings identified critical design features, leader behaviors, group dynamics, post-meeting actions, and other factors which help determine the effectiveness of the meeting. But as much as the authors acknowledge that meetings may differ from each other, much of the research appears to assume that it is meaningful to talk about “the meeting” as a single, generic entity (most commonly, the regularly scheduled staff or department meeting). In fact, though, there are several common types of meetings which vary among themselves in terms of a number of measurable parameters such as structure, meeting members, meeting leader, timing and duration, and scope. It is a gratuitous assumption that what the authors know about workplace meetings based on one especially common type applies to all workplace meetings. This chapter offers a historical review of previous attempts to classify meeting types; it then overviews several common types which deviate from the standard staff meeting paradigm, including project team meetings, debrief meetings, committee meetings, site-wide meetings, shift change meetings, and crew formation meetings. In comparing these types to the staff meeting, the authors identify some of the critical differences, thereby providing a first step toward a true taxonomy of meetings.

Past conflict research and theory has provided insight into the types of conflict and styles of conflict resolution in organizations and groups. A second generation of conflict research is now needed that recognizes that the type of conflict present in a group relative to the other types present (proportional conflict composition) and the amount of conflict perceived relative to the amount perceived by other members (perceptual conflict composition) may be critical to group functioning. Therefore, we propose two types of conflict composition in teams and investigate the links between proportional and perceptual conflict composition conflict, and team effectiveness (i.e., individual and team performance, commitment, cohesiveness, and member satisfaction) in two organizational samples. We find group conflict compositions consisting of high levels of task‐related conflict compared to relationship and process conflict (proportional task conflict) are high performing, satisfied teams. In addition, when team members disagree about amounts of conflict present (high perceptual conflict), we find evidence of negative group outcomes. Implications for managers and group members are discussed.