Teams are commonly celebrated as efficient and humane ways of organizing work and learning. By means of a series of in-depth case studies of teams in the United States and Finland over a time span of ...more than 10 years, this book shows that teams are not a universal and ahistorical form of collaboration. Teams are best understood in their specific activity contexts and embedded in historical development of work. Today, static teams are increasingly replaced by forms of fluid knotworking around runaway objects that require and generate new forms of expansive learning and distributed agency. This book develops a set of conceptual tools for analysis and design of transformations in collaborative work and learning.
Shared Leadership: Reframing the Hows and Whys of Leadership brings together the foremost thinkers on the subject and is the first book of its kind to address the conceptual, methodological, and ...practical issues for shared leadership. Its aim is to advance understanding along many dimensions of the shared leadership phenomenon: its dynamics, moderators, appropriate settings, facilitating factors, contingencies, measurement, practice implications, and directions for the future. The volume provides a realistic and practical discussion of the benefits, as well as the risks and problems, associated with shared leadership. It will serve as an indispensable guide for researchers and practicing managers in identifying where and when shared leadership may be appropriate for organizations and teams.
Past research has focused on understanding the characteristics of work that are fully virtual or fully collocated. The present study seeks to expand our understanding of team work by studying ...knowledge workers' experiences as they were suddenly forced to transition to a fully virtual environment. During the height of the US lockdown from April to June 2020, we interviewed 51 knowledge workers employed on teams at the same professional services firm. Drawing from in situ reflections about teams' lived experiences, this paper explores how the shift to virtual work brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the fundamental activities that team work requires, facilitated and undermined the performance of team activities, and prompted employees to adapt and reflect on their use of digital technology to perform these activities. Using the shift to virtual work as a unique learning opportunity, our findings demonstrate that team work entails several core activities (task, process, and relationship interactions) that require additional adjustments to successfully enact in the virtual (vs. collocated) environment.
•The shift to virtual work created an unprecedented opportunity to study teams.•During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted 51 interviews.•Informants were knowledge workers within the same professional service firm.•Learning from the shift to virtual work illuminated essential team work activities•Informants reflected on and adapted their technology use for team work activities
Despite growing interest in the concept of team work engagement (TWE), relatively little is known about the conditions that allow it to emerge. Based on the literature on work engagement and team ...climate, this study introduces the concept of TWE climate and examines its conceptual attributes. Based on a one-and-a-half-year qualitative investigation of eight Dutch self-steering project teams, we discovered that TWE climate comprises eight attributes, both (a) personal and (b) shared. Personal attributes include team members' commitment and drive toward the team and a personal feeling of being respected within the team. Shared attributes include a shared ability to overcome challenges and a shared sense of accomplishment, community, drive, and focus. Our findings indicate that personal and shared attributes are both critical elements of a team climate conducive to team work engagement. We conclude this paper by discussing what these findings mean for the concept of TWE climate in light of future research and practice.
Team work engagement: A model of emergence Costa, Patrícia L.; Passos, Ana M.; Bakker, Arnold B.
Journal of occupational and organizational psychology,
June 2014, Volume:
87, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Research has shown that work engagement, both at the individual and team levels, is relevant to understand employee performance and well‐being. Nonetheless, there is no theoretical model that ...explains the development of work engagement in teams that takes into consideration what is already known about team dynamics and processes. This study addresses this gap in the literature, presenting a model for the emergence of team work engagement. The model proposes team inputs, outputs, and mediators as predictors of team work engagement and highlights their recursive influences over time. This conceptual work provides a starting point for further research on team work engagement, allowing for distinguishing individual and team constructs.
Practitioner points
The degree of energy and enthusiasm of teams depends on the way they interact.
The affective and motivational dynamics of teams have consequences for their performance and well‐being.
The emergence of team work engagement is better understood within the literature of teamwork.
A growing number of studies have examined the "sharedness" of leadership processes in teams (i.e., shared leadership, collective leadership, and distributed leadership). We meta-analytically ...cumulated 42 independent samples of shared leadership and examined its relationship to team effectiveness. Our findings reveal an overall positive relationship (ρ = .34). But perhaps more important, what is actually shared among members appears to matter with regard to team effectiveness. That is, shared traditional forms of leadership (e.g., initiating structure and consideration) show a lower relationship (ρ = .18) than either shared new-genre leadership (e.g., charismatic and transformational leadership; ρ = .34) or cumulative, overall shared leadership (ρ = .35). In addition, shared leadership tends to be more strongly related to team attitudinal outcomes and behavioral processes and emergent team states, compared with team performance. Moreover, the effects of shared leadership are stronger when the work of team members is more complex. Our findings further suggest that the referent used in measuring shared leadership does not influence its relationship with team effectiveness and that compared with vertical leadership, shared leadership shows unique effects in relation to team performance. In total, our study not only cumulates extant research on shared leadership but also provides directions for future research to move forward in the study of plural forms of leadership.
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7.
Macrocognition in Teams Letsky, Michael P.; Warner, Norman W.; Fiore, Stephen M. ...
2008, 2008-09-01
eBook
Macrocognition in Teams provides readers with a greater understanding of the macrocognitive processes which support collaborative team activity, showcasing current research, theories, methodologies ...and tools. It will be of direct relevance to academics, researchers and practitioners interested in group/team interaction, performance, development and training.
We advance understanding of the role of ability-based emotional intelligence (EI) and its subdimensions in the workplace by examining the mechanisms and context-based boundary conditions of the ...EI-performance relationship. Using a trait activation framework, we theorize that employees with higher overall EI and emotional perception ability exhibit higher teamwork effectiveness (and subsequent job performance) when working in job contexts characterized by high managerial work demands because such contexts contain salient emotion-based cues that activate employees' emotional capabilities. A sample of 212 professionals from various organizations and industries indicated support for the salutary effect of EI, above and beyond the influence of personality, cognitive ability, emotional labor job demands, job complexity, and demographic control variables. Theoretical and practical implications of the potential value of EI for workplace outcomes under contexts involving managerial complexity are discussed.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ
Previous research suggests that employee job crafting is positively related to job performance through employee work engagement. The present study expands this individual-level perspective to the ...team level by hypothesizing that team job crafting relates positively to team performance through team work engagement. In addition, on the basis of social psychological theories about norms, modeling, and emotional contagion in groups, we hypothesize that team job crafting relates to individual performance through (a) individual job crafting and individual work engagement; and (b) team work engagement and individual work engagement. Data was collected among 525 individuals working in 54 teams that provided occupational health services. The results largely supported the hypotheses. Specifically, team job crafting was associated with individual performance via the hypothesized sequential mediation paths. The practical implications of the study are discussed and we conclude that job crafting can be simultaneously used at the team and individual level to improve job performance.
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