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Membership change—adding, replacing, and losing members—is a common phenomenon in work teams and charts a different theoretical space from prior team research that has assumed stable team membership and shared team properties. Based on a comprehensive review of 133 empirical studies on team membership change since 1948, we propose a temporal framework pertaining to the causes and consequences of membership change. Three key theoretical insights emerge from our evidence-based integration: (a) Membership change first disrupts team cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal processes and states (e.g., transactive memory systems, coordination) but can benefit team performance after teams adapt to form new processes and states; (b) whether and to what extent team performance benefits from membership change is contingent on the magnitude of membership change, requirements of team communication, member adaptation-related attributes, change in team knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs), and team knowledge work; and (c) poor team experiences motivate member departure and may make it challenging for newcomers to join and teams to adapt to membership change. Our review moves team research into new avenues that do not presume stable team membership and shared team properties in understanding team functioning and performance, and outlines key directions to advance integrative theory.

Social network researchers have shown that, compared to majority employees, structural constraints can cause minority employees to end up in network positions that limit their access to resources (i.e., social capital), and consequently limit their access to professional opportunities. These findings, however, do not explain why structurally equivalent minority and majority employees achieve differential returns of social capital on their leadership advancement. We propose that majority and minority employees differ in terms of network utilization, which is the extent to which individuals utilize their existing network ties. We theorize why and how network utilization processes—career and work utilization of network ties—can explain employees’ (i.e., actors) influence on their leadership advancement. We also explicate the process through which actors’ direct and indirect network connections (i.e., alters) contribute to such outcomes through both career-supporting utilization and work-supporting utilization with actors. We conclude by outlining the boundary conditions of network utilization theory, a theory that changes the current understanding of how existing social network ties can perpetuate the underrepresentation of minorities in leadership positions.

Research has shown that employees who occupy more central positions in their organization’s network have lower turnover. As a result, scholars commonly interpret turnover as the consequence of social networks. Based on conservation of resources theory, we propose an alternative coevolution perspective that recognizes the influence of changes in individuals’ social network position on their thoughts of quitting (the consideration of turnover), and which also posits that thoughts of quitting shape individuals’ agency in maintaining and changing their social network. Extending previous research, we predict that creation (dissolution) of both friendship ties and advice ties are negatively (positively) related to subsequent thoughts of quitting. We then develop and test the novel hypotheses that for friendship ties, thoughts of quitting are positively related to tie retention and negatively related to tie creation (leading to network stasis), whereas for advice ties thoughts of quitting are negatively related to tie retention and positively related to tie creation (leading to network churn). In a longitudinal network analysis that assessed 121 employees across three time points, we find support for our hypotheses that thoughts of quitting affect network changes, but do not find that network changes affect thoughts of quitting.

Moral forms of leadership such as ethical, authentic, and servant leadership have seen a surge of interest in the 21st century. The proliferation of morally based leadership approaches has resulted in theoretical confusion and empirical overlap that mirror substantive concerns within the larger leadership domain. Our integrative review of this literature reveals connections with moral philosophy that provide a useful framework to better differentiate the specific moral content (i.e., deontology, virtue ethics, and consequentialism) that undergirds ethical, authentic, and servant leadership, respectively. Taken together, this integrative review clarifies points of integration and differentiation among moral approaches to leadership and delineates avenues for future research that promise to build complementary rather than redundant knowledge regarding how moral approaches to leadership inform the broader leadership domain.

Feedback is a ubiquitous management tool. Employing this tool to meet the new challenge of enhancing team creativity, raises the important question of whether positive or negative feedback is more effective. Unfortunately prior research on feedback valence and creativity is limited to the individual level, neglecting team creativity’s interdependent and knowledge-intensive nature. We address this issue and advance the team information processing perspective on team creativity by integrating two heretofore separate research streams to develop a team-specific model about how negative and positive feedback enhance creativity via two alternative information processing routes, contingent on teams’ informational diversity. Negative feedback fuels teams’ systematic effort and attention to external, novel information. In informationally diverse teams, in which members hold different information and perspectives, these efforts promote team creativity through information elaboration. Conversely, positive feedback propels members to flexibly use their information and contribute the resultant divergent insights to the team. In informationally homogeneous teams, where these insights relate to others’ information and perspectives, these divergent insights trigger teams’ generative processing and in turn creativity. Results from a team experiment support the predicted feedback valence by informational diversity interaction on team creativity through elaboration and generative processing.

Despite wide consensus that leader vision is a key vehicle for leaders to motivate followers to support organizational change, it remains far from clear what characterizes an effective vision of change. Research on organizational change that has used a social identity perspective has asserted that one important reason why followers resist change is because change may pose a threat to their subjective sense of continuity of organizational identity. Accordingly, we hypothesize that leaders that communicate visions of change can address this resistance by assuring followers that the essence of the organizational identity will remain unchanged—making their vision of change also a vision of continuity. In line with our proposition that collective continuity is valued because it serves an uncertainty-reduction function, such visions should be more predictive of vision effectiveness the higher follower work-related uncertainty. Across a field study and an experimental study we find support for these predictions.

Disasters mobilize hundreds of organizations, but coordination among them remains a challenge. This is why the United Nations has formed clusters to facilitate information and resource exchange among humanitarian organizations. Yet, coordination failures in prior disasters raise questions as to the effectiveness of the cluster approach in coordinating relief efforts. To better understand barriers to coordination, we developed a grounded theory and augmented the theory with an agent-based simulation. Our theory discerns a cluster lead's roles of facilitating coordination, but also investing in its own ground operations. We find that specifically serving such a dual role impairs swift trust and consequent coordination among cluster members. The additional simulation findings generalize the detrimental effect of the cluster lead's dual role versus a pure facilitator role and specify it against various boundary conditions.

The pervasiveness of multiple team membership in organizations that prioritize team creativity raises the important question of how multi-teaming affects creativity? Unfortunately, prior research on multi-teaming and creativity is limited to a few studies at the individual level. Knowing that the benefits and costs of multi- teaming are not homologous across levels of analysis, we address this question at the team level. We specifically examine key temporal (i.e., time pressure) and informational (i.e., information acquisition from other teams) mechanisms that underlie this relationship. We posit that the effect of multi-teaming on team creativity via time pressure is contingent on focal team synchronicity, and via information acquisition is contingent on focal team information usefulness. Our findings uncover a negative indirect effect of multi-teaming on team creativity via time pressure when the team communicates mostly in a synchronous manner. The informational path proved to be more complex. Though multi-teaming promoted information acquisition, this information resource did not facilitate team creativity when information usefulness is high. However, exploratory analyses revealed distinct effects on creative outcome novelty and usefulness. Our theoretical model was tested using time- lagged surveys in a sample of 92 teams based on 509 students in a university in the Netherlands."

We investigate the pride reactions and coworker-directed behaviors of employees with high leader-member exchange social comparison (LMXSC). An experimental vignette and a time-lagged field study ac...

Existing theoretical models of team innovation emphasize internal team processes and external conditions that facilitate or hinder innovation, but tend to be more suited for incremental than for radical innovation. Teams developing radical innovations face greater uncertainty and risk of failure, and often encounter unanticipated challenges that require concerted efforts of the team as a whole to move the project forward rather than face termination. Drawing on state goal orientation theory, we analyze the motivational drivers that position teams to effectively deal with such challenges. We propose a novel approach for managing team motivational states that involves adapting team goal preferences at key points in the innovation process in order to achieve radical innovation success. We advance a model that highlights teams' ability to dynamically shift shared goal orientations to meet acute 'shocks' that disrupt regular team activities and threaten the survival of the innovation project. The role of ambidextrous leadership and reflexive team processes in achieving goal orientation shifts are identified as important factors in radical innovation success. Although unanticipated challenges related to idea development and idea promotion may occur in both radical and incremental innovation projects, we argue that the effects are stronger the more radical the innovation.

Some people feel compelled to work at jobs that they are overqualified for, where much of their human capital is likely to be wasted. Some have suggested that this undesirable situation is particul...

Hiring managers regularly encounter job applicants with different amounts of experience – i.e., different biological ages, different career ages, different levels of job qualifications, and different amounts of education. Surprisingly, few large-scale studies have revealed how hiring managers react to applicants with more and less experience than is typical for the position. As such, the primary goal of the current study is to examine the relationship between different facets of experience match and the likelihood that applicants will be interviewed and hired for a position. We theorize that human capital theory would predict an uncomplicatedly positive relationship between different facets of experience and applicant hiring – i.e., more experience is better. In contrast, we draw on attribution theory to introduce the concept of the “red flag”, which we suggest would favor applicants with “normal” amounts of experience over those with either less or more than is typical. We compare these dueling predictions using biodata from 59,898 applicants’ resumes applying in 42 organizations. Our results are broadly consistent with the red flag theory. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

For managers, intercultural effectiveness requires forging close working relationships with people from different cultural backgrounds (Black, Mendenhall, & Oddou, 1991). Recent research with executives has found that higher cultural metacognition is associated with affective closeness and creative collaboration in intercultural relationships (Chua, Morris, & Mor, & 2012). However, little is known about the social cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the performance of individuals who score high on cultural metacognition. We propose that one important question for cross-cultural research and training is identifying which metacognitive strategies enable successful intercultural collaborations. We suggest that one such strategy is ¿cultural perspective taking¿¿considering how another¿s cultural background shapes their behavior in a given context. We hypothesized that cultural perspective taking facilitates intercultural coordination and cooperation, and that a manipulation that boosts cultural perspective taking would be especially beneficial for individuals who score low in dispositional cultural metacognition. We found support for the above hypotheses in five studies using both quasi-field and experimental approaches. We discuss the implications of these findings for literatures on expatriate managers, cross-cultural training, cultural intelligence, and intercultural negotiations.

As workforce diversity increases, knowledge of factors influencing whether cultural diversity results in team performance benefits is of growing importance. Complementing and extending earlier research, we develop and test theory about how achievement setting readily activates team member goal orientations that influence the diversity-performance relationship. In two studies, we identify goal orientation as a moderator of the performance benefits of cultural diversity and team information elaboration as the underlying process. Cultural diversity is more positive for team performance when team members' learning approach orientation is high and performance avoidance orientation is low. This effect is exerted via team information elaboration.

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 effective intergroup performance rests on the leader's ability to construct an intergroup relational identity. We describe key leadership actions to establish such an identity.

Research on teams has prompted the development of many alternative taxonomies but little consensus on how to differentiate team types. We show that there is 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 that relies on a dimensional scaling approach with three underlying constructs: skill differentiation, authority differentiation, and temporal stability.

Research on business groups' legally independent firms tied together in various formal and informal ways¿is accelerating. Through meta-analytical techniques employed on a database of 141 studies covering 28 different countries, we synthesize this research and extend it by testing several new hypotheses. We find that affiliation diminishes firm performance in general, but also that affiliates are comparatively better off in contexts with underdeveloped financial and labor market institutions. We also trace reduced affiliate performance to specific strategic actions taken at the firm and group levels. Overall, our results indicate that affiliate performance reflects complex processes and motivations.

We investigate acquisitions of new facilities by manufacturing firms to understand whether green management matters. We advance evolutionary/behavioral routine-based perspective to explain firm's choice of target acquisition based on their environmental performance. Based on Toxic Research Inventory data, we find that firms search locally and choose targets that are proximate in terms of core business and environmental performance. Yet, we also find that firms engage in distant search in terms of environmental performance by selecting those facilities with unrelated routines when they are geographically proximate.

In this study, we formulated and tested a theory about how heterogeneity among subpopulations affects the degree to which organizations in these subpopulations contribute to and benefit from the overall population's legitimacy. Historical data on banking in Shanghai were used. Firms in subpopulations with a higher "grade of membership" were found to contribute strongly to the legitimacy of the general population; firms in subpopulations with a lower grade of membership benefited most from legitimacy spillovers. The concepts of "fuzzy density," "contrast," and public acceptance were applied to measuring legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use meta-analytical techniques to address three central debates in institutional theory: Is organizational behavior the product of social structure or organizational agency? Does conformity to institutional norms enhance or diminish organizational performance? Can organizational field--level factors explain differences in the pull of isomorphic forces across organizational fields? We find that the influence of social structure is weak. Also, the adoption of isomorphic templates improves both symbolic and substantive performance. Finally, we identify several field-level factors that moderate isomorphic processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for institutional theory research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On what basis do hiring professional decide whom to invite for a job interview? In order to address this fundamental but understudied question we draw on applicant tracking data from 48 companies (...

This study examines the relationship between a firm’s product specificity and its CSR activities. In the corporate world, firms often adopt CSR as an effective way (an ex ante signal and an ex post disciplinary mechanism) to reduce information asymmetry with stakeholders. We argue that firms making specialized products benefit more from adopting CSR than do firms making common products. As CSR is endogenous to a firm’s product strategy, we adopt an instrumental variable (IV) approach to test our hypothesis. Using a sample of 2,198 U.S. publicly-listed firms from 2001 through 2010, we find that firms making more specialized products record a higher level of CSR. This effect is stronger for firms with higher financial leverage and for firms operating in more uncertain industries. More importantly, we find that firms with a higher degree of product specificity indeed reap greater financial benefits from their CSR activities.

This study focuses on the impact of hierarchy on identification patterns and well-being in organizations. We predict that workplace identification patterns will vary according to one’s position in an organizational hierarchy with important consequences for well-being. Hypotheses were tested with 790 personnel from 10 Navy ships. In support of our predictions, we find that: a) individuals occupying operational, mid-level and strategic positions within the Navy differentially identify with multiple identity targets; b) the relationship between multiple identifications and well-being vary according to hierarchical position. These findings offer new insights into the nature of hierarchical differentiation in the workplace, providing a deeper understanding of the role of multiple identifications in shaping the well-being of hierarchical subgroups.