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Many firms use customer co-creation practices with the aim of benefiting from their customers’ knowledge, skills and resources. This paper aims to explore co-creation processes which involve users with different background characteristics and motivational drivers.

The study builds on an analysis of data from six teams in which users collaborated with in-house professionals for the development of new service concepts. Observations and open-ended questionnaires provided insights into the teams’ development processes. Independent experts rated the generated concepts. The data were analysed using cross-comparison matrices.

The findings suggest that the co-creation process and outcomes can be influenced by numerous intra-team factors, including relationship and task conflicts, participation style, team bonding, team identity and cohesiveness and intra-team collaboration. Their occurrence and influence seem to be linked with a specific team composition. A conceptual co-creation process model and six propositions are used to describe the complex relationships between team composition, intra-team factors and key innovation outcomes.

Research that investigates user involvement in teams needs to consider the complexity of intra-team factors affecting the development process and outcomes. The findings are limited to a specific setting, design task and user sample. Future research should replicate this study in different sectors.

Key to customer co-creation is the systematic recruitment of users based on their background characteristics and motivational drivers. For instance, the involvement of users with very specific innovation-related benefit expectations can cause conflict, leading to narrowly focused outcomes. This, however, can be mitigated by the form of facilitation and roles adopted by in-house professionals. Understanding intra-team dynamics can allow the firm to assemble and facilitate customer co-creation so that generated outcomes can align with set innovation targets.

This paper provides original insights into the “black box” of the customer co-creation process and the complex relationship between team composition, intra-team factors and key innovation outcomes.

This contribution aims to evaluate structural team constellations (STCs) – a team intervention related to the better known family structure constellations.

In total, 67 team members from 14 working teams carried out an STC. They were surveyed at three measuring points by means of a questionnaire on their evaluation of task and relationship conflicts and on their satisfaction with the therapeutic alliance with the constellator.

Stable decreases were shown in both conflict variables. Participants who evaluated the conflict variables more positively over the course of time were also more satisfied with the therapeutic alliance with the constellator.

Given the low time requirements involved, STCs can be considered recommendable compared with other team interventions.

Although constellations are experiencing a boom in German‐speaking countries, there are hardly any studies in English on this method. This paper is one of the first contributions towards the establishment of the method in the Anglo‐American area.

The purpose of this article is to explore the effects of the interaction between team diversity and reciprocated relational preferences on task and relationship conflict in teams.

The paper reports the results of an empirical study conducted on 66 teams, of which 32 were randomly created, while 34 teams were formed through a pair matching strategy (team dating).

The results show that mutual positive preferences attenuated the positive impact of team diversity on relationship conflict within teams.

The results support the theoretical distinction between task and relationship conflict and show that close interpersonal relations within teams have a differential impact on the two types of conflict.

The results reported in the study support the use of the team dating strategy for team design in different organizational settings.

The paper introduces a new method for team formation based on reciprocated relational preferences.

The current study focused on intra‐group conflict by attempting to elucidate individual and situational factors underlying choices along two dimensions of conflict management patterns: engagement versus avoidance and constructive versus destructive. In the study, the role of two types of self‐efficacy (global and social) among group members was investigated, as was the sense of group identification in team dispute resolution preferences modes. Sixty‐seven members of volunteer community service communes in the Israeli Scouting youth movement, 48 females and 19 males, representing 13 intact teams, participated in the study. Self‐report structured questionnaires (previously used and adapted for this study) served as research instruments. Both global self‐efficacy and group identification independently predicted the conflict engagement‐destructive pattern of domination. Social self‐efficacy served as the sole predictor of the preference to manage intra‐team conflict by means of integrating—the engagement‐constructive mode. In contrast, the choice of compromising was also fostered by the joint contribution of social self‐efficacy and group‐identification, beyond the direct effect of social self‐efficacy. The study corroborates the assumption that conflict management patterns within an intact team are related to dispositional variables on the individual level, i.e., global and social self‐efficacy, and to the team‐related variable of group identification.

This paper aims to examine the influence of the level of team virtuality on the effects of intra‐team conflicts on team performance, which have hardly been investigated.

A framework is proposed based on the extent to which team members use communication media to coordinate their actions and execute their tasks, taking into account the extent to which the communication media are synchronous and the extent to which the communication media convey para‐verbal and nonverbal aspects of communication. Data of 49 teams with 172 team members were analyzed using stepwise multiple regression analysis.

The level of team virtuality influences the relation between intra‐team conflict and perceived team performance. The higher the level of team virtuality, the greater the positive impact of task conflict on perceived team performance. In teams with a low level of virtuality task conflict has a negative impact on perceived team performance, and in high virtual teams task conflict has a positive impact. In addition, process conflict has a negative impact on perceived team performance.

The present study provides a framework for the effects of the level of team virtuality that can be used in further research and has implications for practice.

The study shows the effects of the level of team virtuality on team performance, which is important considering the emerging use of virtual communication tools in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to discern the legacies of social divisions, notably protracted social conflict on team members’ relations, collaborative interactions and ways of coping with such work-life reality.

This study constitutes a pilot phase of a research on nationally and ethnically diverse nurses’ teams operating in medical centers. It used qualitative methodology: a semi-structured individual interviews with 12 nurses.

The findings underscore the challenge of engaging diversity in mixed work teams operating in the shadow of protracted conflict. The results indicated inter-group biases, implicit discrimination and tensions due to the salience of social categorization and the faultline phenomenon. These tensions mount in crisis situations, such as violent incidents associated with the national conflict. The major coping pattern was directing the disagreements to a hidden sphere. The findings showed paucity of organizational level efforts to engage diversity and social divisions-related issues. In spite of the complexities associated with diverse workplaces, the nurses revealed high capability of maintaining cooperative interactions and effectively performing their healthcare tasks.

The current study represents a pilot phase of a larger research project. Subsequent stages will extend the sample size and use additional research instruments for data collection.

Human resources managers need to address the organizational issues related to diversity and social divisions, including policy and training activities.

Engaging “otherness” remains a considerable challenge in diverse work setting, especially when team work constitutes the main work pattern. It should be faced by work organizations and social institutions.

The study involves an innovative element as it attempts to elucidate the ramifications of diversity and inter-group tensions in “real-life” circumstances; namely, work setting in the context of a divided society. Most of the previous research examined such phenomena in the laboratory and/or on ad hoc groups.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the nomological network of a relational efficacy construct, transpersonal efficacy, and examine its effect on attitudes and behaviors important for team performance. The authors identify several antecedents to transpersonal efficacy, including task interdependence, agreeableness and conscientiousness. The authors also find that transpersonal efficacy is related to relational attitudes and behaviors in teams.

This study consists of an online cross-sectional survey completed by participants representing a wide range of occupations, team types, contexts and industries. Participants reported on their working relationships with team members and various behavioral outcomes. Participants used the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to describe their teammates’ job requirements and to evaluate each teammate’s ability to complete required tasks. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to test hypotheses.

Findings suggest that people in highly interdependent teams have more confidence in their teammates. Further, transpersonal efficacy predicts relationship, task and process conflict when controlling for team task interdependence and virtualness, along with individual differences including agreeableness and conscientiousness. Transpersonal efficacy also contributes to the prediction of relationship conflict beyond the explained variance of collective efficacy.

This paper contributes to our understanding of individuals in teams by using social cognitive theory, expectancy theory and uncertainty reduction theory as a base for predicting the value of transpersonal efficacy in driving relational team behaviors. The authors uniquely consider efficacy as an interpersonal construct that is related to individual behaviors and attitudes that target specific teammates, rather than the team as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the triple interaction of task conflict, emotion regulation and group temporariness on the emergence of relationship conflict.

A field study was conducted to test the interaction of emotion regulation and task conflict on the emergence of relationship conflict in 43 short‐term (temporary) groups and 44 long‐term groups.

The results show that the highest chance for task conflict to evolve into relationship conflict is when groups (both short‐term and long‐term) have less effective emotion regulation processes, while task and relationship conflict are rather decoupled in long‐term groups scoring high on emotion regulation.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the obtained results in terms of their implications for conflict management in groups. Further research should explore the moderation effects in longitudinal studies in order to fully test the variables in the model.

The paper answers the call for contingency models of intra‐group conflict and tests the moderating effect of two such contingencies in the relationship between task and relationship conflict.

This paper aims to enhance clarity for the conceptualization and measurement of group emotional awareness by defining it as an emergent state. The authors explore the emergence of this state through two studies designed to explore the four characteristics (global, radically novel, coherent and ostensive) of emergent phenomena (Waller et al., 2016).

In Study 1, the authors explore in an experimental setting the formation of group emotional awareness and regulation as emergent states as a result of compositional effects (team members’ self-perceptions of their individual emotional awareness capabilities) and group norms regarding emotional awareness. Study 2 uses an experimental design to explore how pre-existing expectations of group emotional awareness, based on previous dyadic interactions between team members, can prevent conflict escalation (from task to relationship conflict) in project teams.

Individual perceptions of members’ own abilities and group norms interact in the emergence of group emotional awareness. Group emotion regulation can develop only under an optimal level of emergent group emotional awareness; groups that build emotional awareness norms compensate for their members’ low awareness and develop equally efficient regulatory strategies as groups formed of emotionally aware individuals. However, the conjunction of personal propensity towards awareness and explicit awareness norms blocks the development of regulatory strategies. Group emotional awareness (both as a developed state and as an expectation) reduces the escalation of task to relationship conflict.

Designing for the exploration of the four characteristics of emergence allowed us to gain new insights about how group emotional awareness emerges and operates too much awareness can hurt, and affective group expectations have the power to shape reality. These findings have strong implications for practitioners’ training of emotional awareness in organizations.

Research from numerous theories shows teams' information sharing and discussion enhances effectiveness. Likewise, team communication structure can increase information sharing, manage conflict productively and foster creativity. However, the lack of unifying theory hinders understanding of the disparate research findings. Agazarian aims to unify the field with her meta‐theoretical, multi‐level Theory of Living Human Systems (TLHS). Furthermore, her TLHS‐derived Systems‐Centered Training (SCT) presents an innovative structure to improve team performance. The purpose of this paper is to compare the verbal process, productivity, and creativity of pre‐existing work groups using SCT methods or Robert's Rules of Order (RRO), to test TLHS/SCT reliability and validity.

The verbal characteristics, information sharing, productivity, and creativity in SCT and RRO teams were compared using the System for Analyzing Verbal Interaction (SAVI), Group Productivity Scale and Work Group Inventory.

SCT teams, compared to groups using RRO, talked in ways more likely to transfer and integrate task‐related information. Furthermore, SCT teams were more productive, better performing, and more creative.

The study's design does not permit cause‐and‐effect conclusions. Proposals for future research are made.

The results suggest SCT methods improve team communication, productivity, and creativity. Because this study examined “real‐world” teams, the findings may apply to similar groups in various workplaces.

Having the ability to use differences as resources could improve society.

This paper suggests SCT methods offer innovative communication structures that focus teams effectively, perhaps by minimizing off‐task communications and conflict. Also, as SCT operationally defines TLHS, these results support the validity of TLHS.