BUS 271: Business Communication

Teamwork in the Workplace: Bibliography

Aronson, Z. H., & Lechler, T. G. (2021). Project success: What is the role of project team morale and how it can be boosted? International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 18(7). https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219877021500310

• This research presents and validates a model of project team morale and its influence on project success. We operationally define morale in project-based work as a multi-faceted variable encompassing suggested definitions offered in former studies. Unlike past research, we investigate the mediating effects between these facets of morale and success. A structural equation model is proposed and empirically tested to investigate the interdependencies between the facets of project team morale and how they promote project success. The results show that project team morale explains 25% of the variance in project success. Findings provide project leaders with a tool to enhance project success by influencing employees’ morale, rather than solely focusing on traditional project planning and controlling activities. We provide practical implications for project team leadership and performance.

Hoegl, M., & Gemuenden, H. G. (2001). Teamwork quality and the success of innovative projects: A theoretical concept and empirical evidence. Organization Science, 12(4), 435 449. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.12.4.435.10635

• An extensive body of literature indicates the importance of teamwork to the success of innovative projects. This growing awareness, that “good teamwork” increases the success of innovative projects, raises new questions: What is teamwork, and how can it be measured? Why and how is teamwork related to the success of innovative projects? How strong is the relationship between teamwork and various measures of project success such as performance or team member satisfaction? This article develops a comprehensive concept of the collaboration in teams, called Teamwork Quality (TWQ). The six facets of the TWQ construct, i.e., communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion, are specified. Hypotheses regarding the relationship between TWQ and project success are tested using data from 575 team members, team leaders, and managers of 145 German software teams. The results of the structural equation models estimated show that TWQ (as rated by team members) is significantly associated with team performance as rated by team members, team leaders, and team-external managers. However, the magnitude of the relationship between TWQ and team performance varies by the perspective of the performance rater, i.e., manager vs. team leader vs. team members. Furthermore, TWQ shows a strong association with team members' personal success (i.e., work satisfaction and learning).

Moog, P., & Soost, C. (2022). Does team diversity really matter? The connection between networks, access to financial resources, and performance in the context of university spin-offs. Small Business Economics, 58(1), 323-351. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-020-00412-1

• University spin-offs (USOs) are an important driver for innovation, along with economic and social development. Hence, understanding which factors help them perform successfully is crucial, especially regarding their peculiarities in a scientific environment. This study focuses on essential factors such as team composition and diversity in USOs in the biotech sector in 64 founding teams in Switzerland and Germany. By identifying the team composition, and going beyond the usual team characteristics, along with checking in parallel for network and financing effects, the paper adds empirical evidence to the ongoing debate if and how team diversity in USOs affects the performance of this special group of newly founded firms. We test our hypotheses with the partial least squares method (PLS). Our results from the mediation model show how the diversity of teams is related to networks and financial resources and affects the performance. In addition, our study reveals the direct and indirect effects of team diversity on success in USOs. This way we contribute to the ongoing discussion on performance investigating the sources of team effects more in detail.

Omri, A., & Boujelbene, Y. (2021). Team dynamics and entrepreneurial team success: The mediating role of decision quality. Journal of Enterprising Culture, 29(2), 141-160. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218495821500072

• Little research on Entrepreneurial Teams (ET) has sought to understand how team processes may influence organizational outcomes. In this paper, we unite upper echelon theory to provide a deeper understanding of which entrepreneurial team dynamics, directly, or indirectly through decision quality, result in entrepreneurial team success. In order to do so, we build upon data collected from 225 entrepreneurial teams from Sfax region. Based on structural equation modeling, the findings demonstrate that shared leadership among entrepreneurial teams indirectly and positively affect ET success, and that decision quality mediates the relationship between ET communication and ET success. Our research contributes to the upper-echelons theory and ET literature by drawing attention to the team dynamics and social interaction between team members, and their implications for entrepreneurial team success.

O'Neill, T. A., & Salas, E. (2018). Creating high performance teamwork in organizations. Human Resource Management Review, 28(4), 325-331. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2017.09.001

• The adoption of teams continues to increase in almost every domain of modern work life. In the current article we review evidence of the complexity of modern work, industry trends in the use of teams, and the challenges of achieving the full potential of organizational work teams. We aimed to meaningfully move forward the science of high performance teamwork by assembling a focused set of review articles in the present special issue. We consider four themes that capture the articles in this special issue and avenues for achieving the full potential of teams: (1) work across boundaries; (2) build effective team processes and states; (3) manage team development issues; and (4) leverage human capital. Collectively, the contents of this special issue offer important new opportunities for advancing future research and for making a practical difference in the effectiveness of teams in organizations. We identify six areas in which future research efforts in high performance teamwork should be directed based on “realities” that, in our view, need to be addressed.

Salas, E., Cooke, N. J., & Rosen, M. A. (2008). On teams, teamwork, and team performance: Discoveries and developments. Human Factors, 50(3), 540-547. https://doi.org/10.1518/001872008X288457

• Objective: We highlight some of the key discoveries and developments in the area of team performance over the past 50 years, especially as reflected in the pages of Human Factors. Background: Teams increasingly have become a way of life in many organizations, and research has kept up with the pace. Method: We have characterized progress in the field in terms of eight discoveries and five challenges. Results: Discoveries pertain to the importance of shared cognition, the measurement of shared cognition, advances in team training, the use of synthetic task environments for research, factors influencing team effectiveness, models of team effectiveness, a multidisciplinary perspective, and training and technological interventions designed to improve team effectiveness. Challenges that are faced in the coming decades include an increased emphasis on team cognition; reconfigurable, adaptive teams; multicultural influences; and the need for naturalistic study and better measurement. Conclusion: Work in human factors has contributed significantly to the science and practice of teams, teamwork, and team performance. Future work must keep pace with the increasing use of teams in organizations. Application: The science of teams contributes to team effectiveness in the same way that the science of individual performance contributes to individual effectiveness.

Salas, E., Sims, D. E., & Burke, C. S. (2005). Is there a “Big five” in teamwork? Small Group Research, 36(5), 555-599. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496405277134

• The study of teamwork has been fragmented through the years, and the findings are generally unable to be used practically. This article argues that it is possible to boil down what researchers know about teamwork into five core components that the authors submit as the “Big Five” in teamwork. The core components of teamwork include team leadership, mutual performance monitoring, backup behavior, adaptability, and team orientation. Furthermore, the authors examine how these core components require supporting coordinating mechanisms (e.g., shared mental modes, closed-loop communication, and mutual trust) and vary in their importance during the life of the team and the team task. Finally, the authors submit a set of propositions for future research.

Tarricone, P., & Luca, J. (2002). Employees, teamwork and social interdependence - a formula for successful business? Team Performance Management, 8(3/4), 54-59. https://doi.org/10.1108/13527590210433348

• Business expects far more from employees than technical and generic skills. There is a growing emphasis on employees to not just do their job but to contribute to business success. As the emphasis is placed on individuals contributing to the effective, positive perpetuation of the business through the development of professional and work related skills; the team culture of business today places additional emphasis on the ability to work effectively within a team environment. Specifically, this paper will discuss the importance of social interdependence and teamwork and the implications for business success and team success.

Van der Vegt, Gerben S, & Bunderson, J. S. (2005). Learning and performance in multidisciplinary teams: The importance of collective team identification. Academy of Management Journal, 48(3), 532-547. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2005.17407918

• In multidisciplinary teams in the oil and gas industry, we examined expertise diversity's relationship with team learning and team performance under varying levels of collective team identification. In teams with low collective identification, expertise diversity was negatively related to team learning and performance; where team identification was high, those relationships were positive. Results also supported nonlinear relationships between expertise diversity and both team learning and performance. Finally, team learning partially mediated the linear and nonlinear relationships between diversity and performance. Findings broaden understanding of the process by which and the conditions under which expertise diversity may promote team performance.

Carboni, I., Cross, R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2021). No team is an island: How leaders shape networked ecosystems for team success. California Management Review, 64(1), 5-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256211041784

• Today’s organizations rely on networks of dynamic systems of “agile” teams to get work done. Teams are distributed, transient, and loosely bounded in service of responsiveness and innovation. The key to this new way of doing work is managing the networked ecosystem in which teams are embedded. But in the context of leading multiple teams with fuzzy boundaries and shifting membership, the average overwhelmed manager quickly defaults to what is nearest in urgency: managing internal team dynamics and responding to internal customer demands. Drawn from field interviews with 100 top-performing team leaders, this article presents a framework-for-action to leaders who want to engage the networked ecosystem with intention and precision, including specific tactics for identifying and influencing high-leverage stakeholders

Chen, J. S., Elfenbein, D. W., Posen, H. E., & Wang, M. z. (2020). The problems and promise of entrepreneurial partnerships: Decision making, overconfidence, and learning in founding teams. The Academy of Management Review, 47(3).  https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2019.0119

• How should decision-making be organized in entrepreneurial teams when founders exhibit confidence biases? New ventures are commonly founded by teams of entrepreneurs, who must employ a decision-making structure that implicitly or explicitly defines how individual beliefs are aggregated into team decisions. We consider this issue through the lens of organizational economics, which focuses on decision-making governance. Using a computational model, we consider three archetypal decision-making structures: partnership voting, a boss with employees, and a buyout option (partnership convertible to boss structure). We highlight the conditions under which partnership voting is an effective means of governing market entry and exit decisions when teams’ decision-making is informed by efforts to learn about the merits of uncertain opportunities. The promise of partnership voting is realized when entrepreneurs are either unbiased or optimistic about their likelihood of success. Partnership voting is problematic when entrepreneurs differ in their biases or respond too rapidly to new information, in which case a buyout option is better. From a policy perspective, we show that confidence biases may be managed by selectively matching the decision-making structure to entrepreneurs’ biases, and that doing so may substantially improve the performance of new ventures.

Klaic, A., Burtscher, M. J., & Jonas, K. (2020). Fostering team innovation and learning by means of team‐centric transformational leadership: The role of teamwork quality. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 93(4), 942-966. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12316

• Team innovation is an important factor for organizational effectiveness. However, fostering innovation in teams remains a major challenge for team leaders. In particular, we still have an incomplete understanding of (1) the effects of team-centric leadership and (2) the role of teamwork for the relationship between leadership and innovation and learning. Integrating team-centric transformational leadership and the teamwork quality (TWQ) model with frameworks for team innovation, the current study addresses this issue. Specifically, we investigated TWQ as a team-level mediator of the relationship between team-centric transformational leadership, team innovation, and individual members’ learning. We tested our hypotheses using lagged, multi-source data from a sample of 79 scientific teams. Our findings show that team-centric transformational leadership is positively related to both team innovation and individual members' learning. Furthermore, the positive relationship between team-centric transformational leadership and learning is mediated by specific aspects of TWQ. Our study helps to clarify the processes underlying the effects of team-centric leadership on innovation and learning.

Morgeson, F. P., Reider, M. H., & Campion, M. A. (2005). Selecting individuals in team settings: The importance of social skills, personality characteristics, and teamwork knowledge. Personnel Psychology, 58(3), 583-611. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.655.x

• Although work is commonly organized around teams, there is relatively little empirical research on how to select individuals in team-based settings. The goal of this investigation was to examine whether 3 of the most commonly used selection techniques for hiring into traditional settings (a structured interview, a personality test, and a situational judgment test) would be effective for hiring into team settings. In a manufacturing organization with highly interdependent teams, we examined the relationships between social skills, several personality characteristics (Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Emotional Stability), teamwork knowledge, and contextual performance. Results indicate that each of these constructs is bivariately related to contextual performance in a team setting, with social skills, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and teamwork knowledge incrementally predicting contextual performance (with a multiple correlation of .48). Implications of these results for selection in team and traditional settings are discussed.

Walker, J., & Gilovich, T. (2021). The streaking star effect: Why people want superior performance by individuals to continue more than identical performance by groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(3), 559-575. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000256

• We present evidence in 9 studies (n = 2,625) for the Streaking Star Effect—people’s greater desire to see runs of successful performance by individuals continue more than identical runs of success by groups. We find this bias in an obscure Italian sport (Study 1), a British trivia competition (Study 2), and a tennis competition in which the number of individual versus team competitors is held constant (Study 3). This effect appears to result from individual streaks of success inspiring more awe than group streaks—and that people enjoying being awe-inspired. In Studies 4 and 5, we found that the experience of awe inspired by an individual streak drives the effect, a result that is itself driven by the greater dispositional attributions people make for the success of individuals as opposed to groups (Study 6). We demonstrate in Studies 7a and 7b that this effect is not an artifact of identifiability. Finally, Study 8 illustrates how the Streaking Star Effect impacts people’s beliefs about the appropriate market share for companies run by a successful individual versus a successful management team. We close by discussing implications of this effect for consumer behavior, and for how people react to economic inequality reflected in the success of individuals versus groups. 

Zhou, Z., & Verburg, R. M. (2020). Open for business: The impact of creative team environment and innovative behaviour in technology-based start-ups. International Small Business Journal, 38(4), 318-336. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266242619892793

• Rather than the view of the entrepreneur as a ‘lone ranger’, recent work has focused on the importance of teams in bringing a start-up to growth and success. Here, we aim to bridge the gap between the individual characteristics of entrepreneurs and the characteristics of their teams by examining openness of founders in relation to creative team environment (CTE), innovative work behaviour (IWB) and performance. On the basis of upper echelon theory and integrating other complementary theories such as the attention-based view, we develop a theoretical framework and test this using a survey of 322 high-tech entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest a mediating role of CTE and IWB in the relation between openness of entrepreneurs and performance. The implications of the results for managerial practices and future research directions are discussed.

Dennis, A. S., Barlow, J. B., & Dennis, A. R. (2022). The power of introverts: Personality and intelligence in virtual teams. Journal of Management Information Systems, 39(1), 102-129. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2021.2023408

• Teams have increasingly turned to computer-mediated communication (CMC) to work when team members cannot all be in the same physical space at the same time, leading to the need to better understand what influences group performance in these settings. We know that team member intelligence and personality affect team performance when teams work face-to-face, but their effects are not yet clear when teams use text-based CMC, which has different characteristics than face-to-face communication. We conducted a laboratory study of 61 teams working on a decision-making task using text-based CMC. We found that team mean extraversion had a large negative effect, and team mean neuroticism had a medium-sized negative effect on team performance. Team mean intelligence had no effect. We recommend that managers consider the effects of extraversion when selecting team members and focus on selecting more introverted team members if the team is likely to extensively use text-based CMC. Likewise, managers should consider extraversion when designing teamwork processes for virtual teams; if a team has many members who are high in extraversion, the team should use text-based CMC sparingly. We also recommend that researchers use extraversion as a control factor in future research studying text-based CMC because extraversion has a large effect on team outcomes and, left uncontrolled, could increase unexplained error variance and overshadow the focus of the research study.

Varhelahti, M., & Turnquist, T. (2021). Diversity and communication in virtual project teams. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 64(2), 201-214. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPC.2021.3064404

• Introduction: Virtual teams, especially project teams, increasingly rely on computer-mediated communication for interaction when collaborating and completing their tasks. Team members represent various cultures, occupations, and industries. Virtual teams often use English as a business lingua franca in communication. This study investigates critical factors related to virtual project teams that influence computer-mediated communication. Research questions: 1. How is diversity in video meetings experienced by the members of multidisciplinary and multicultural project teams? 2. Do differences in team members' occupational or industrial backgrounds show in their opinions on video meetings? Literature review: The effectiveness of communication has been identified as playing a critical role in the success of virtual projects. Diversity, whether disciplinary or cultural, enriches teamwork by bringing different viewpoints to discussions. On the other hand, diversity can also set some challenges for communicating these viewpoints. Research methodology: Mixed methods were used to analyze data obtained from 104 responses to an online survey. Spearman's correlation coefficient and Kruskall-Wallis nonparametric tests were used for statistical analysis, and open comments were analyzed using thematic content analysis. Results and conclusion: The findings show that linguistic, cultural, and occupational diversity facilitates communication in virtual project team meetings. In addition, applying appropriate features of video meeting tools in different stages of project teamwork leads to better communication in virtual teams. A high level of English proficiency is not required, but clear communication rules are essential. In addition, some occupational or industry-specific differences in opinions on communication could be identified.