Intergroup leadership - leadership of collaborative performance of different organizational groups or organizations - is associated with unique intergroup challenges that are not addressed by traditional leadership theories. To address this lacuna, we describe a theory of intergroup leadership. Firmly grounded in research on social identity and intergroup relations, the theory proposes that eff…
Research on teams have prompted the development of many alternative taxonomies but little consensus on how to differentiate team types. We show that there is a greater consensus on the underlying dimensions differentiating teams than there is on how to use those dimensions to generate categorical team types. We leverage this literature to create a conceptual framework for differentiating teams …
This study examines relationships between group influence activities and the performance of strategic initiatives. Theory suggests that the strength of these relationships is contingent upon the degree of exploration inherent in an initiative's goals. An analysis of 96 initiatives in three large firms supports the moderating role of exploration for the use of formal authority and coalition buil…
This paper articulates the cross understanding construct, a group-level compositional construct having as its components each group member's understanding of each other members' mental model. We describe how the cross understanding construct explains particular inconsistencies in the groups literature, how it provides explanations for specific group outcomes and processes beyond the explanation…
This study explores the relationship between eight distinct brokerage roles of middle managers and their involvement in achieving different strategic goals. The authors argue that each role contributes to different aspects of middle managers' strategic goals and that some roles are more likely to realize brokerage advantages than others. They further suggest that bridging structural holes may n…
Entrepreneurial teams often operate under conditions of novelty - the lack of familiarity. Novelty can undermine team members' ability to develop the relational capital (trust, identification, and mutual obligation) needed for a venture to succeed. Building on research on relational schemas and the governance of interfirm relations, I argue that entrepreneurial teams can counteract the challeng…
Integrating macro and micro theoretical perspectives, we conducted a meta-analysis examining the role of contextual factors in team diversity research. Using data from 8,757 teams in 39 studies conducted in organizational settings, we examined whether contextual factors at multiple levels, including industry, occupation, and team, influenced the performance outcomes of relations-oriented and ta…
In a study of 83 teams from eight organizations, we examined team need for cognition -- the tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive endeavors -- as a moderator of the relationships between both age diversity and educational specialization diversity, and elaboration of task-relevant information, collective team identification and, ultimately, team performance. Age and educational div…
An interview with J Richard Hackman, a leading organizational psychologist, on the five critical conditions that make the difference between success and failure..Printed journal
We developed and tested a cross-level model of individual creativity, integrating goal orientation theory and team learning research. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we found cross-level interactions between individuals' goal orientation and team learning behavior in a cross-national sample of 25 R&D teams comprising 198 employees. We hypothesized and found a nonlinear interaction between i…
Without question, internal collaboration can produce benefits for an organization. This doesn't mean, however, that the more your employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. It may, in fact, be worse off. The author, a professor at UC Berkeley and at Insead, offers a simple method for determining when collaborating on a project makes sense. He calls it calculating the collaborati…
Firms of seemingly equal technical merit often show great differences in the effectiveness of their capabilities. Differences in the management of unit interactions are the likely cause, with deficiencies at such integration resulting in wasted effort - work that is performed but not used. This paper uses a simple model to show that the simultaneous presence of complementary and substitutable t…
We introduce the construct of sleep deprivation to team level management literature by integrating theory and research on sleep deprivation and group behavior. We propose that sleep deprivation has a negative monotonic, but non-linear, influence on team decision-making accuracy and problem solving. We then propose that task, structural, and social characteristics accentuate or attenuate the inf…
Identity is often at the heart of ongoing intergroup conflicts in organizations. Drawing on theories of conflict management, social identity, and organizational identification, this paper develops the Intractable Identity Conflict (IIC) Resolution Model, which delineates a multi-phase process by which the conflicting parties' identities shift in order to permit eventual intergroup harmony..Prin…
Research on the interactions among activities in firms and the extent to which these interactions help create and sustain competitive advantage has rapidly expanded in recent years. In this research, the two most common approaches have been the complementarity framework, as developed by Milgrom and Roberts (1990), and the NK-model (Kauffman, 1993) for simulation studies. This paper provides an …
Research on innovation routinization emphasizes public aspects of this process. The issues such research addresses are important, but do not fully describe routinization processes or account for all the characteristics that generate them. Based on a study of an innovative course, we explore organizational factors that affect the diminished routinization of innovations, the loss of core componen…
Tomorrow's business landscape could well be alien territory for today's business leaders. At many companies, important decision making will be distributed through the organization to enable people to respond rapidly to change. A lot of work will be done by global teams - partly composed of people from outside the institution, over whom a leader has no formal authority - that are assembled for a…
We adopt a multilevel approach to a paradox that arises when research findings on the performance benefits of team boundary spanning are juxtaposed with earlier work demonstrating the role overload of individuals who span boundaries. Results revealed that individual and team-level factors predicted member boundary-spanning behavior, which increases individual role overload, which then negativel…
Over the past few decades, a great deal of research has been conducted to examine the complex relationship between team diversity and team outcomes. However, the impact of team diversity on team outcomes and moderating variables potentially affecting this relationship are still not fully answered with mixed findings in the literature. These research issues were, therefore, addressed by quantita…
Shared leadership refers to a phenomenon where leadership is distributed throughout the team rather than relying on a single, designated leader. We examined antecedent conditions that lead to the development of shared leadership and the influence of shared leadership on team performance in a sample of 59 consulting teams. Both the internal team environment, consisting of shared purpose, social …