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Examining dominance in influencing leadership perceptions for men and women has received significant scholarly attention. The studies typically show that dominance is beneficial for men in attaining leadership positions but not for women. However, the studies were predominantly conducted more than two decades ago. Given the developments in gender research, this study extends the dominance line of inquiry by probing the impact of dominance need on leader emergence for men versus women in self-managed work teams. Furthermore, this study aims to examine if team dominance needs dispersion posits as a boundary condition for the combined impact of dominance needs and gender on leader emergence.

The authors conducted a longitudinal study that lasted one semester and involved 44 ad hoc self-managed work teams.

This study found that dominance needs facilitated leader emergence regardless of gender, and team dominance needs dispersion. Furthermore, men with high dominance needs were likelier to emerge as leaders than women with high dominance needs in high dominance needs dispersion teams. By contrast, women low in dominance needs received a harsher penalty in their leadership emergence than men low in dominance needs in low dominance needs dispersion teams

These results depart from the usual findings regarding the backlash effects that dominant women face and paint a rosy picture regarding the use of dominance in shaping leader emergence. However, the findings support the notion in gender stereotypes research that women are judged more critically than men in ascending to leadership positions.

The research on shared mental models (SMMs) focuses on the importance of all team members holding similar mental models to realize team performance. However, for a perceived decomposable task, it is not required for all team members to have similar mental models to achieve team performance. Moreover, unnecessary overlapping mental models among team members may engender information overloading, translating into suboptimal team performance. Absent from the current literature is an understanding of the factors that determine the minimal overlapping mental models required across specific members for team performance. The purpose of this study is to yield an understanding of these issues.

This study highlights that the requirement to hold similar mental models across specific team members depends on the task decomposition mechanisms used: task complexity and decomposability, subtask assigned and layer, task modularity, workflow interdependence type and tool attributes.

Unlike much prior research which measured the relationship between SMMs and team performance at the team level, our conceptualization suggests that the measurement of SMMs and team performance needs to be conducted across a team and subsets of the team or individuals depending on task complexity and decomposability. This current research offers an important viewpoint regarding when team members need to hold similar mental models to realize task performance.

By suggesting new insights into when mental models should be similar across specific team members, this research also provides understanding of why some empirical SMMs studies do not yield positive relationships between similar SMMs and team effectiveness while others do.

Organizations worldwide use virtual teams to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and capitalize on distributed members' unique expertise to accomplish essential tasks. A critical reason that inhibits virtual team members from leveraging each other’s knowledge is a lack of psychological safety. Specifically, individuals are unwilling to speak out for fear of negative repercussions, such as embarrassment to one’s image and rejection from others in their teams. The purpose of this study is to advance the importance of distinct awareness (task knowledge and presence) enabled by information technologies in developing the psychological safety of men and women in virtual teams.

This study tested the hypotheses using a survey study of 94 participants from 19 graduate student virtual teams.

This study found that task knowledge awareness predicted psychological safety for men, whereas it was presence awareness for women. By demonstrating the role of awareness in promoting psychological safety for men and women in virtual teams, this study also sheds light on reducing online gender inequitable issues.

First, organizational managers need to incorporate gender when deciding the awareness type to promote psychological safety in virtual teams. For men, it is task knowledge awareness, whereas for women, it is presence awareness. Second, as there is a wide range of information technologies (ITs) available, managers need to identify if the provided ITs enable virtual team members to develop the specific type of knowledge awareness critical for psychological safety development. Third, managers can incorporate rewards and apply interventions at regular temporal periods to encourage team members to increase their online presence as well as question and share task-related content.

It is imperative to identify ways to encourage men and women working in virtual teams to speak up so that the expertise held by the members can be better leveraged. This study represents an important step in this direction.

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.

Lack of psychological safety among members negatively impacts on the performance of virtual teams. In order to effectively address the problem, firms could utilize relevant information technologies to increase the task presence awareness and presence awareness which can accordingly help increase perceptions of psychological safety of men and women.

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.