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Time and Transition in Work Teams: Toward a New Model of Group Development
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This study of the complete life-spans of eight naturally-occurring teams began with the unexpected finding that several project groups, studied for another purpose, did not accomplish their work by progressing gradually through a universal series of stages, as traditional group development models would predict. Instead, teams progressed in a pattern of "punctuated equilibrium" through alternating inertia and revolution in the behaviors and themes through which they approached their work. The findings also suggested that groups' progress was triggered more by members' awareness of time and deadlines than by completion of an absolute amount of work in a specific developmental stage. The paper proposes a new model of group development that encompasses the timing and mechanisms of change as well as groups' dynamic relations with their contexts. Implications for theory, research, and practice are drawn.
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... These guidelines may enhance group cohesion and students' desire to continue working together (Cohen & Lotan, 1997;Slavin, 1996), a sign of group effectiveness (Hackman & Katz, 2010). This can be achieved by setting clear boundaries for collaboration, providing structured opportunities for inter-group interactions, and monitoring the quality and quantity of external connections (Gersick, 1988;Tuckman, 1965). Nevertheless, further research is needed to explore the specific factors that drive these relationships and to identify optimal levels of internal and external cooperation that maximize learning outcomes and group satisfaction. ...
Scholars have long been intrigued by the relationship between intrateam conflict and team creativity, though findings to date have been mixed. Recent research suggests that traditional conceptualizations of intrateam conflict as a property that is shared uniformly by team members (e.g., averaging members' overall conflict perceptions), rather than a more nuanced phenomenon between individual members with unique network positions, have limited our understanding of its influences. These advances, however, have yet to be substantively applied to the intrateam conflict‐creativity literature. Accordingly, we integrate network views of conflict with creativity theory and group motivated processing models to explore how task and relationship conflicts involving critical members' (i.e., members central to a team's workflow network) influence team creative functioning beyond overall conflict perceptions. We theorize that critical member task conflict is positively associated with team creativity by way of team reflexivity, and this positive indirect effect is accentuated by team shared goals. Further, we posit that critical member relationship conflict is negatively associated with team creativity by way of reduced team cohesion, though this effect is mitigated by critical member emotional intelligence. Analyses of 70 new product development teams support most hypotheses while also highlighting interesting nuance and future research opportunities.
As ventures grow, founders must decide between hanging on to control over venture decision‐making or delegating authority to professional managers. This decision is challenging since founders are typically driven by strong feelings of ownership toward their ventures. Adopting a qualitative research design with a grounded theory approach, we investigate the psychological ownership impacts on self and others within the venture when founders delegate decision rights to professional managers. Our analysis draws on in‐depth interviews with 30 founders and 14 professional managers hired by the founders. We develop the first process model of founders' dynamic venture‐targeted psychological ownership and demonstrate how recalibrating psychological ownership is key to the successful delegation of authority to professional managers. Our conceptual model also outlines a novel relationship between recalibrated psychological ownership and founder identity work. We outline our theoretical contributions to psychological ownership and identity control theory and offer practical advice to founders and their professional managers to help with the successful recalibration of founders' venture‐targeted psychological ownership in support of effective delegation and venture growth.
Instruction about teaching business communication skills has been a long-established tradition in the communication discipline. Recent trends in teaching communication training and development extend a long-held emphasis on business communication skill instruction. Given the classical roots of the communication discipline and the current focus on communication skill instruction, this article suggests that future communication theory and research should focus greater attention on behavioral learning outcomes—specifically communication training. This review identifies relevant communication theory that informs a renewed research agenda focused on enhancing behavioral learning outcomes. In proposing this research agenda, we discuss opportunities to apply our current knowledge of intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, public, organizational, mediated, and intercultural communication to advance the discipline through theoretically driven research about business communication skills.
With the growing complexity of social and environmental issues, there has been a blossoming of hackathons and open innovation challenges. This push to accelerate innovation embraces a perspective of time as clock time—conceived as objective, linear, measurable, and therefore, rather easy to compress. Such a view of time conflicts with the emergent nature of idea generation and the indeterminate process that leads to social impact, which both rely on event time. Drawing on a 40-month ethnographic study of OpenIDEO, an open social innovation platform, I examine how, in designing open innovation challenges, the OpenIDEO team interwove clock time and event time in order to foster idea generation and support social impact. Through inductive analysis, I identify three practices—mapping, stretching, and squeezing time—enacted by the OpenIDEO team to “make time” and thus, continuously engage participants and sponsors in the challenges as well as to allow participants to implement their ideas. My findings demonstrate how organizations can intentionally use time to nurture collaborative innovation and yield sustainable social impact. My study questions the traditional interpretation of clock time as the foundation of all temporalities as it shows how temporal work can be grounded within event time.
Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [NSF VOSS Grant 1122381].
This article examines team conflict in project management. A study of the current literature, the focus of the bodies of knowledge and the perspective of managers in Colombia is presented. Information is collected through a questionnaire about the impact of sources, types of conflicts, dispute resolution mechanisms and progress reports on the final performance of projects carried out recently by the interviewees. The importance of conflict resolution has been validated as a success factor in the management and performance of projects. The chapter aims to increase researcher interest in the subject, as well as to encourage the development and implementation of methodological tools, in order to achieve better results in the implementation and success of projects.
Zusammenfassung
In diesem Beitrag der Zeitschrift „Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. (GIO)“ werden verschiedene Perspektiven auf Teamdynamik, einschließlich der vernachlässigten Eigendynamik von Situationen, unterschieden und anhand ihrer praktischen Implikationen für agile Teams illustriert. Die Popularität agiler Teams führt zu einer Zunahme der Teamdynamik. Bisherige Studien behandeln jedoch entweder nur einzelne Konzepte ohne integrierenden theoretischen Rahmen oder übertragen gruppendynamische Modelle auf Teams, ohne zwischen Gruppen und Teams zu unterscheiden. In diesem Beitrag werden daher verschiedene Modelle der Gruppen- und Teamdynamik aus der Organisationspsychologie und der Systemtheorie im Kontext agiler Teams diskutiert. Die zentrale These dieses Beitrags ist, dass es für die Analyse von Teamdynamiken nicht ausreicht, Teams in ihren Interaktionen mit Teammitgliedern und Organisationen zu betrachten. Denn agile Methoden wie Scrum zeichnen sich durch iterative Prozesse aus, wodurch sich Situationen wiederholen und eine situative Ordnung entsteht, die nicht identisch ist mit der sozialen Ordnung des Teams. Diese Eigendynamik von Situationen wurde in der bisherigen Forschung zur Teamdynamik vernachlässigt. Abschließend werden die diskutierten Perspektiven auf Teamdynamik zusammengeführt. Dies ermöglicht Berater:innen und Führungskräften, die Herausforderungen und Möglichkeiten von Teamdynamik fundiert und praxisorientiert einzuschätzen.
A widely accepted empirical study (Bales & Strodtbeck, 1951)) concludes that “many staff conferences, committees, and similar groups” progress through predictable sequential phases in problem solving. Reexamination suggests that the conclusion is wrong. Only those subject groups that had never before met showed phased movement. The 1951 research may have measured the process of group formation, not problem solving. Well-acquainted small groups—for example, most management teams, task forces, and committees—do not naturally follow sequential phases in problem solving.
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