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Organizations increasingly rely on virtual teams to access geographically dispersed expertise. Yet, team dispersion introduces challenges to team communication that may negatively influence team performance. Using a sample of 53 innovation teams representing a variety of geographic dispersion configurations from completely collocated to highly dispersed, we examined the moderating role of transformational leadership on the relationship between team dispersion, team communication, and team performance. Our findings suggest that while transformational leadership is effective in reducing the negative effects of dispersion in collocated teams or ones with low levels of geographic dispersion, it is less effective helping improve the performance of highly dispersed teams. This effect may be due to a transformational leader's difficulty in facilitating team communication in highly dispersed teams, where his or her influence might actually have counterproductive effects. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, future research, and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have recently devoted increasing attention to employee helping behavior at the work group level of analysis. Despite this surge in interest, possible moderators of the relationship between group helping norms and individual helping behavior have not been empirically examined. In a study of 147 employees and their supervisors working in 30 groups of a telecommunications company, we found that when individuals are more attracted to the group, group helping norms were more strongly related to individual helping. Contrary to expectations, when individuals’ role ambiguity is lower, employees are more likely to align their behavior with group norms, but when ambiguity is higher, they exhibit an intermediate level of helping regardless of the norms. Implications and areas for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the role of age-based faultlines in relation to the perceived productive energy of work teams and transformational leadership as a potential moderator of this relationship. Based on social identity and social categorization theory, teams that have strong age-based faultlines- defined as age subgroup formation that is reinforced by internal alignment with other demographic characteristics (tenure and sex)-should show a lower level of perceived productive energy than do teams that have weak faultlines. In teams with high levels of perceived transformational leadership, this effect should be reversed. Study hypotheses were tested on a sample of 664 individuals in 72 teams from a multinational company. Results showed a marginally significant negative relationship between age-based faultlines and teams' productive energy, although the moderation effect of transformational leadership was found to be significant. These results point toward transformational leadership as a promising strategy for overcoming the negative effects of age-based faultlines in team settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]