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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.

This chapter examines the miners’ occupational culture of planisa at the level of supervisor–worker relations. The chapter presents a tale of two frontline production supervisors or shift-bosses as they were called on the mine – Jimmy and Lee. In this context, the ability of the production supervisor to make a plan in ways that enhance the social organisation of the production process and people management is crucial to the development of a reciprocal working relationship. The chapter argues that planisa also entails a valuable social organisational skill through which frontline supervisors could effectively use to manage work group dynamics and team performance associated with teamworking, intra-team conflict, effort-bargain and resistance.

The chapter reveals that by ‘getting on and getting by’ with his charges – going an extra mile to making plan for his mining teams wherever possible – Jimmy created a working environment that enabled his subordinates to achieve their production targets and increase their capacity to earn the much-desired productivity and safety bonuses. The case of Jimmy and his charges highlights the role of the frontline supervisor as a vital agent of workplace change that elicits worker cooperation and support for new work processes, not for the sake of pleasing management but in ways that benefit and make sense to them – going above and beyond organisational requirements to achieve the organisational performance goals at the point of production. On the contrary, the case of Lee, another frontline supervisor, demonstrates the opposite and highlights the harmfulness of poor supervisor–worker relations to the achievement of organisational, employee and team performance goals.

Maintaining and protecting employee well-being and health is of paramount importance for organizations in order to prevent financial losses due to illness, absenteeism, and fluctuation. This chapter discusses the role of team meetings for employee well-being. As the contemporary workplace is shaped by team work, team meetings increasingly shape employees’ experiences at work. As such, team meetings may also have a major influence on employee well-being as they consume large amounts of time and thus strongly influence workers’ schedules. While previous research has predominantly focused on negative aspects of meetings and mainly considered them as a workplace stressor, this chapter advances a positive perspective on meetings as opportunities for boosting rather than impairing employee well-being. Upon reviewing the extant evidence about linkages between workplace meetings and well-being, the authors highlight the role of team dynamics during meetings for individual well-being and suggest new perspectives for future research. The authors also discuss actionable implications for structuring and facilitating meetings in order to avoid negative and increase positive effects of team meeting interactions on employee well-being.

As part of the globalizing work environment, new forms of organizations have emerged, ranging from international to multinational and transnational organizations. These forms of organizations require high levels of cross-national interdependence, and often the formation of multicultural teams (MCTs), nested within multinational organizations. Employees who operate in the global multinational context should share common meanings, values, and codes of behaviors in order to effectively communicate with each other and coordinate their activities. What helps global multicultural team members create the social glue that connects them to each other, above and beyond the national cultures to which they belong? We propose that a more macro-level meaning system of a global work culture, which is the shared understanding of the visible rules, regulations, and behaviors, and the deeper values and ethics of the global work context, that is formed outside of the level of national cultures, binds members of MCTs. At the individual level, the representation of these global work values in the self leads to the emergence of a global identity, which is an individual's sense of belonging to and identification with groups (such as MCTs), operating in the global work environment of multinational organizations. The chapter focuses on the potential influence of a global work culture, and of a global identity on the effectiveness of MCTs.

Most research on the work conditions and family responsibilities associated with work-family conflict and other measures of mental health uses the individual employee as the unit of analysis. We argue that work conditions are both individual psychosocial assessments and objective characteristics of the proximal work environment, necessitating multilevel analyses of both individual- and team-level work conditions on mental health.

This study uses multilevel data on 748 high-tech professionals in 120 teams to investigate relationships between team- and individual-level job conditions, work-family conflict, and four mental health outcomes (job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, perceived stress, and psychological distress).

We find that work-to-family conflict is socially patterned across teams, as are job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Team-level job conditions predict team-level outcomes, while individuals’ perceptions of their job conditions are better predictors of individuals’ work-to-family conflict and mental health. Work-to-family conflict operates as a partial mediator between job demands and mental health outcomes.

Our findings suggest that organizational leaders concerned about presenteeism, sickness absences, and productivity would do well to focus on changing job conditions in ways that reduce job demands and work-to-family conflict in order to promote employees’ mental health.

We show that both work-to-family conflict and job conditions can be fruitfully framed as team characteristics, shared appraisals held in common by team members. This challenges the framing of work-to-family conflict as a “private trouble” and provides support for work-to-family conflict as a structural mismatch grounded in the social and temporal organization of work.

New Ways of Working practices like activity-based working and home-based work lead to different behaviors of employees. Due to these NWW practices, employees choose their own preferred times and places to work – albeit to a certain extent and within certain boundaries. This might have an impact on the possibilities for teamwork. Therefore, we suppose that teamwork and teamwork behaviors might moderate the relationship between NWW and outcomes. Does teamwork behavior have an influence on the relation of NWW and productivity or organizational commitment? And how, is it a positive or a negative influence on these relations? This chapter reports the results of an explorative study on the relationship between NWW practices, teamwork behavior, productivity, and organizational commitment. Quantitative data from the questionnaire will illustrate the main issues: the complex linkages between the four components of NWW, the outcome variables, and the effect of different components of teamwork behavior. This chapter describes the issue of teamwork and provides new data on the actual use and effectiveness of the different components of teamwork behaviors.

Global virtual teams (GVTs) – composed of members in two or more countries who work together primarily using information and communication technologies – are increasingly prevalent in organizations today. There has been a burgeoning of research on this relatively new organizational unit, spanning various academic disciplines. In this chapter, we review and discuss the major developments in this area of research. Based on our review, we identify areas in need of future research, suggest research directions that have the potential to enhance theory development, and provide practical guidelines on managing and working in GVTs.

The design of work has been shown to influence a host of attitudinal, behavioral, cognitive, well-being, and organizational outcomes. Despite its clear importance, scholarly interest in the topic has diminished over the past 20 years. Fortunately, a recent body of research has sought to reenergize research into work design by expanding our view of work design from a narrow set of motivational work features to one that incorporates broader social and contextual elements. In this chapter we seek to review the literature on work design and develop a framework that integrates both job and team design research. We begin by briefly reviewing the history of work design in order to provide needed historical context and illustrate the evolution of job and team design. We then define work design, particularly as it relates to incorporating job and team design elements and transitioning from a view of jobs to one of roles. Following this, we identify a comprehensive set of work design outcomes that provide the basis for understanding the impact that different work characteristics can have on individuals and teams. We then offer an extended discussion of our integrative model of work design, which includes three sources of work characteristics (task, social, and contextual) and the worker characteristics implied by these characteristics. Having defined the range of work and worker characteristics, we then discuss some of the fit and composition issues that arise when designing work, as well as discuss the mechanisms through which the work characteristics have their impact on outcomes. Finally, we discuss research into informal forms of work design.