Search

Networking is a viable career self-management strategy. Most studies so far in the networking domain have focused on long-term consequences and used a between-person trait approach. To address recent calls for more time-oriented approaches in career research, we extend the existing research by conducting a diary study over five consecutive working days (N = 59 employees). Specifically, we examined the within-person relationship between networking and career-related outcomes (i.e., task performance and career optimism). Further, adopting a motivational approach, we investigated whether need for affiliation moderates the daily networking career-related outcomes association. Our findings lend support to the moderating role of the need for affiliation in the relationship between daily networking and both daily task performance and daily career optimism. Our study connects motivation research with networking research by means of a dynamic approach that helps to understand the short-term effects of networking.

As modern work is increasingly characterised by virtual collaboration, leaders have to coordinate teams across multiple work sites. One way to align dispersed team members towards collective goals is to strengthen their identification with the team. However, little is known about how to strengthen identification in virtual teams that do not share a physical environment. We conducted interviews based on the critical incident technique with 26 virtual leaders and 20 virtual team members. Qualitative content analysis revealed six categories of leader behaviour: 1) define the team, 2) strengthen team interdependence, 3) emphasise the team as a whole, 4) empower the team, 5) recognise team effort, and 6) stimulate informal team exchange. By mapping previous research and our findings onto a tridimensional model of social identification, we highlight both, behaviour similar to face-to-face leader behaviour and behaviour unique to the virtual context, and provide concrete behaviours for leadership practice and intervention studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid teamwork, which describes any combination of one's work time spent across organizational and other (typically domestic) work settings, has become a critical aspect of modern work environments. However, despite the rising prevalence and technological support for hybrid teamwork, there is limited understanding of its impact at the team level. Although we still lack research that addresses the dynamic geographic configurations inherent to hybrid teamwork, we believe that much of the extant literature on virtual teamwork can inform our understanding and guide future research. Accordingly, this paper aims to advance knowledge on hybrid teamwork by defining its unique characteristics and critically reviewing three broad classes of theory from the virtual teams literature and their implications for understanding hybrid teamwork. Based on both contributions and limitations of these three theory classes, we conclude this paper by mapping out pressing questions to guide future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this Special Issue show that virtual teamwork is a complex phenomenon that depends on a multiplicity of team, task, and environmental factors. In this editorial, we begin with a short review of the main perspectives through which virtual teams have been studied. From there, we move to an overview of the papers in this Special Issue. To conclude, we discuss potential avenues for future research based on the collection of papers in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal interactions are vital in daily workplace communication, shaping performance, well-being, collaboration, and overall organizational functioning. However, as the ongoing trends of remote and hybrid work present significant changes and challenges to these interactions, supporting remote informal communication (RIC) becomes urgent. To address this pressing issue, we adopt a socio-technical systems perspective to gain in-depth insights into the enabling and constraining factors related to RIC. Our findings of semi-structured interviews with working adults (N=33) reveal important changes and challenges related to informal communication in the remote work context. We identify eleven interrelated socio-contextual, intrapersonal, and technological factors, culminating in a comprehensive conceptual framework of RIC. Based on our findings, we provide practical recommendations to effectively facilitate RIC in organizations and discuss future research avenues for understanding effective RIC in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When competing for scarce resources, groups can behave aggressively toward one another. Realistic conflict theory suggests that intergroup hostility internally ties groups together, thus improving intragroup functioning. In contrast, conflict spillover theory suggests that aggressive behaviors between groups can permeate to the intragroup level and thus worsen intragroup functioning. We reconcile these two opposite perspectives by introducing the relative group size as a moderator that determines when and how targeted verbal aggression from one group harms or improves intragroup functioning in the targeted group. We tested our hypotheses using a sample of in-situ observations of transcribed plenary discussions in the German national parliament and compared intergroup targeted verbal aggression by distinguishing targeted verbal aggression from two social groups (i.e., a new populist smaller party vs. a larger group of veteran parliament members). We measured targeted verbal aggression as a form of hostile intergroup behavior from each social group using computerized text analyses. We analyzed intragroup functioning using a measure of verbal mimicry. Our results show support for our hypotheses. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for the verbal aggression and intergroup relations literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback is a cornerstone of human development. Not surprisingly, it plays a vital role in team development. However, the literature examining the specific role of feedback in virtual team effectiveness remains scattered. To improve our understanding of feedback in virtual teams, we identified 59 studies that examine how different feedback characteristics (content, source, and level) impact virtual team effectiveness. Our findings suggest that virtual teams benefit particularly from feedback that (a) combines performance-related information with information on team processes and/or psychological states, (b) stems from an objective source, and (c) targets the team as a whole. By integrating the existing knowledge, we point researchers in the direction of the most pressing research needs, as well as the practices that are most likely to pay off when designing feedback interventions in virtual teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Team virtuality has been mostly conceptualized as structural features, such as the percentage of time team members communicate via technology. However, the perception of distance and of information deficits (team perceived virtuality, TPV) may be an indispensable construct to understand virtual teams' functioning. The lockdowns imposed on most countries due to COVID-19 created virtual teams with high degrees of structural virtuality. With structural virtuality held constant among teams, we explore configurations of work characteristics (autonomy, interdependence, and organizational support) that influence TPV. With a sample of 296 multinational workers, a Latent Profile Analysis identified four distinct profiles of those work characteristics. Those profiles related differently to TPV. Contrary to previous findings, interdependence seems to play an important role in these teams high in structural virtuality when their autonomy is also high, highlighting the pivotal role of frequent interaction among team members, under conditions of high structural virtuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid changes of work, the ease of mobility, and ubiquitous use of virtual tools have fundamentally changed the way that teamwork in modern organizations is accomplished. Although these developments have elicited a broad range of studies focusing on the phenomenon of team virtuality, the construct itself is still tied to conceptual ambiguities, opposing theoretical underpinnings, and inconsistent findings. The present paper synthesizes the structural and social-constructivist elements of team virtuality in order to introduce the novel concept of team perceived virtuality (TPV), embedded within a theoretical model of its team-level emergence. We define TPV as a cognitive-affective team emergent state which is grounded in collectively experienced feelings of distance and perceptions of information deficits. We further describe how TPV emerges as a function of team members' collectively developed co-constructions and identify antecedents that contribute towards this emergence. By disentangling perceptions from structural properties, the present paper conceptually advances our understanding of team virtuality beyond its structural characteristics. Ultimately, this conceptual work serves as a starting point for future research on team virtuality as a collectively constructed, team-level emergent construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing consensus that the majority of psychological phenomena at work are temporally embedded and highly dynamic, existing research is often based on simplified theoretical and methodological models, which take limited account of process dynamics and especially non-linear growth trajectories. In this paper, we highlight the potentials of using recurrence quantifications analysis (RQA) and an extension of RQA – cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) – for researching process dynamics in organizations. (C)RQA is a powerful technique that can be used to both visualize and quantify time-series data such as repeated measurements of psychological states or sequentially coded dyadic and team interactions. To illustrate the manifold opportunities of (C)RQA, we present three application examples focusing on individuals as systems, dyads as systems, and teams as systems. Specifically, we highlight how (C)RQA can be applied to individual diary data, to leader-follower communication dynamics observed during annual appraisal interviews, and to high-density coded team interactions observed during organizational meetings. We discuss the strengths and limitations of (C)RQA and provide recommendations for researchers interested in using the method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review study aimed to investigate how team work design shapes the impact of team virtuality on team functioning. Based on 48 studies, we identified key work design variables that influence both team functioning, that is, team performance and intermediary outcomes (i.e., team processes and emergent states), under conditions of high virtuality (or in interaction with virtuality). First, while outcome interdependence showed positive effects on the functioning of virtual teams, particularly via motivational increases, task interdependence showed mixed results. Second, high levels of knowledge characteristics (e.g., task complexity) appear to worsen team functioning within virtual contexts, likely because these characteristics add to the demands of an already demanding context. Third, job resources (e.g., feedback) showed positive associations with team functioning, suggesting these variables might buffer the high demands of virtual work. Given these results, more investigations that explicitly examine the interaction between work design and team virtuality are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the notion of task–media fit is inherent to most theories on communication in virtual teams, past studies have largely concentrated on single, isolated tasks—hence neglecting sequential and contextual effects of media use. Building on project management frameworks, this study abstracts from the task level to the broader and more practical level of project phases, linking these to changes in media use. In particular, the study illustrates the weekly use of communication media within 34 student teams during a 3-month project. In line with team process phase models, results showed differences in media use between project phases: While face-to-face communication decreased, the use of leaner media (i.e., telephone and chat) increased in later project phases. Moreover, the variation of media use within the project phases increased over time, emphasizing the temporal dynamics of task–media fit. Finally, implications especially for project managers and recommendations for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both guilt and regret typically result from counterfactual evaluations of personal choices that caused a negative outcome and are thought to regulate human decisions by people's motivation to avoid these emotions. Despite these similarities, studies asking people to describe typical situations of guilt and regret identified the social dimension as a fundamental distinguishing factor, showing that guilt but not regret specifically occurs for choices in interpersonal (social) contexts. However, an experimental paradigm to investigate this distinction systematically by inducing emotions of guilt and regret online is still missing. Here, extending existing procedures, we introduce such a paradigm, in which participants choose in each trial between two lotteries, with the outcome of the chosen lottery (gain or loss) being either assigned to themselves (intrapersonal trials) or to another person (interpersonal trials). After results of both the chosen and the unchosen lottery were shown, subjects rated how they felt about the outcome, including ratings of guilt and regret. Trait Guilt (TG) was determined for all participants in order to take their general inclination to experience guilt into account. Results confirmed that guilt but not regret specifically occurred in an interpersonal context. Percentages of loss averse choices (choosing the lottery with the lower possible monetary loss) were determined as indicators of regulation via guilt and regret avoidance. High TG scorers generally made more loss averse choices than low TG scorers, while trial-by-trial analyses showed that low TG scorers used their feelings of guilt more specifically to avoid the same emotional experience in subsequent choices. Our results confirm the social dimension as the critical factor distinguishing guilt from regret and identify TG as an important moderator determining the way in which guilt vs. regret can regulate their own occurrence by influencing choice strategies.