John R. Hollenbeck’s research while affiliated with State of Michigan and other places

Team performance is contingent on nuanced approaches to risk management—demanding both risky and cautious strategic orientations. However, research surrounding how teams navigate this balance is limited. We argue that both positive and negative affective diversity can aid team performance, through affective diversity's impact on the team's risky and cautious behaviors. Furthermore, we argue that team trait regulatory focus strengthens these relationships. Using a controlled laboratory setting with 58 teams in a complex, uncertain team task that requires both risky and cautious strategies for successful performance, results indicate that positive affective diversity relates to team performance through promoting risky behavior, while negative affective diversity relates to team performance through promoting cautious behavior. Teams high in trait prevention‐focus are more attuned to the information signals in teams with negative affective diversity, but we did not find that promotion focus impacted outcomes of positive affective diversity.

Some leaders tend to use their intuition to think and make decisions more than others do. This individual difference (i.e., an intuitive cognitive style) may have important implications for the collectives of people they lead. Unfortunately, scholars lack a clear understanding of the conditions under which intuition is effective, especially in the context of large and complex organizational structures such as multiteam systems (MTSs). We argue that the effects of leaders’ intuitive cognitive style on MTS performance depends on the amount of information load they face in their roles, as well as their level of introversion: a personality characteristic that is associated with an inward and reflective focus. Using a sample of 222 MTSs comprised of Captains in the United States Air Force, our study demonstrated that the intuitive cognitive style of leaders in high information load roles positively affected MTS performance, especially if they were high in introversion. In low information load roles, however, an intuitive cognitive style had a negative effect on MTS performance, especially for leaders low in introversion. We also argued and found that MTS coordination effectiveness played a key mediating role. Our study advances research in multiple areas of work, including intuition, MTSs, and leadership.

This reflective essay reviews the research career of John R. Hollenbeck, focusing on the constructs, theories, samples, and collaborations that stand out upon reflection after a 40-year career studying teams and groups in the organizational sciences. Several lessons learned and recommendations based upon this retrospective reflection are provided for scholars who may just be starting out on such a career.

Scholars have long wrestled with whether hierarchical differentiation is functional or dysfunctional for teams. Building on emerging research that emphasizes the distinction between power (i.e., control over resources) and status (i.e., respect from others), we aim to help reconcile the functional and dysfunctional accounts of hierarchy by examining the effects of power differentiation on team performance, contingent on status differentiation. We theorize that power differentiation is dysfunctional for teams with high status differentiation by increasing knowledge hiding, which undermines team performance. In contrast, we predict that power differentiation is functional for teams with low status differentiation by decreasing knowledge hiding, which improves team performance. In a field study, we found that power differentiation harmed team performance via knowledge hiding in teams with high status differentiation, but power differentiation had no effect on knowledge hiding or performance in teams with low status differentiation. In an experiment, we again found that power differentiation harmed team performance by increasing knowledge hiding in teams with high status differentiation. However, power differentiation improved team performance by decreasing knowledge hiding in teams with status equality. Finally, in a third study, we confirm the role of status differentiation in making team climates more competitive and examine the effect of power-status alignment within teams, finding that misalignment exacerbates the dysfunctional effects of power differentiation in teams with high status differentiation. By examining how power and status hierarchies operate in tandem, this work underscores the need to take a more nuanced approach to studying hierarchy in teams. Funding: This research is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71572079 and 71872086]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1540 .

Organizations have recognized that effective informal leadership is a source of competitive advantage and invest heavily in leadership development efforts. Moreover, because of historical shifts in the nature of work, this informal leadership often takes the form of inter-unit boundary spanning. Because of these two developments, discretionary boundary spanning (DBS) between units has increasingly become a critical, dynamic, bottom-up activity where individuals lacking formal authority step up and take on informal leadership responsibilities. In this study, we draw upon Simmelian Tie Theory to examine the relationship between different types of DBS and formal leaders' perceptions of a subordinate's informal leadership and performance. We empirically document that a small number of closed task-oriented and closed friendship-oriented DBSs are instrumental in helping individuals demonstrate informal leadership. However, we also show that DBS places constraints on informal leadership when closed ties become too numerous. This results in an inverted-U relationship between the number of closed DBS ties and perceptions of leadership where the apex (i.e., point of over-embeddedness) emerges at a smaller number for friendship-oriented DBS relative to the apex for task-oriented DBSs. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results, as well as the practical implications for managers of organizations.