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Suyang Ye,1 Min Chen2 1School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2School of Business, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Min Chen Email xuancm@gmail.comPurpose: The uncertainties in the market have led to an increasing number of uncertainties and unexpected situations in the work environment of organizations. Based on information processing theory, we investigate how teams can dynamically integrate the expertise of their members to better respond to an uncertain market environment. We propose an important team cognition: team expertise location awareness and point out its unique impact on knowledge integration and thus on improvisation capabilities. In addition, we argue that shared leadership facilitates the use of team recognition resources by teams.Methods: This study adopts a multi-source design approach and collects data from an information technology (IT) company that provides apps of voice socialization and game for foreign markets in southern China. Our sample comprised 86 IT teams, and hierarchical regression and bootstrapping methods are also employed to test the hypotheses.Results: This study reveals that (1) team’s expertise location awareness positively influences the team’s knowledge integration ability which in turn enhances the team’s improvisational ability; (2) team’s knowledge integration mediates the effect of team’s expertise location awareness and team’s improvisational ability; (3) shared leadership moderated this above mediation effect.Conclusion: In this paper, we introduce information processing theory into team improvisation research to understand why some teams can effectively utilize and integrate their members’ knowledge and information and further contribute to effective team improvisation. These results’ theoretical and practical implications for team expertise location awareness, team knowledge integration, shared leadership, and team improvisation are discussed.Keywords: team expertise location awareness, shared leadership, team knowledge integration, team improvisation

Under the background of economic globalization and industrial revolution, team entrepreneurship has drawn increased attention. Team entrepreneurship is considered to be advantageous in its capability of integrating more abundant resources and of sharing knowledge, information, and complementary skills among members of the entrepreneurial team, enabling entrepreneurial enterprises to successfully adapt to the highly uncertain entrepreneurial environment. In recent years, the relationship between the heterogeneity of the entrepreneurial team and its decision-making quality has attracted much attention in the management research field. However, the research results on such topic are quite inconsistent. Based on the information processing theory, the greater the market uncertainty the entrepreneurial team faces, the stronger information integration ability a team will be required to possess. This study investigates the mechanism and boundary conditions of the impact of expertise heterogeneity of the entrepreneurial team on entrepreneurial decision-making. It points out that team knowledge integration and team reflexivity have significant impacts on the relationship between entrepreneurial team expertise heterogeneity and entrepreneurial decision-making. This study adopts the multi-source design approach and collects data from 419 academic entrepreneurial teams in the University Science and Technology Park in Zhejiang Province. Hierarchical regression and bootstrapping methods are also employed for data analysis. The results show that team knowledge integration mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial team expertise heterogeneity and entrepreneurial decision-making, whereas team reflexivity moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial team expertise heterogeneity and team knowledge integration. In the final part, the practical implications for entrepreneurial team are discussed.

From the perspective of entrepreneurial team processes, this study examines the effect of a dynamic team environment on entrepreneurial team innovation. Through applying uncertainty reduction theory, it proposes the influence mechanism and boundary condition of the relationship between dynamic team environment and entrepreneurial team innovation. By analyzing a sample of 270 entrepreneurial teams in China, it is found that a dynamic team environment can evoke entrepreneurial team innovation via triggering team members' agreement-seeking behavior and then promoting team knowledge integration. In addition, team centralization of decision making can weaken the relationship between agreement-seeking behavior and team knowledge integration. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of entrepreneurial teams' reactions to dynamic environments and the multistep mechanism that transfers the impact of a dynamic team environment to entrepreneurial team innovation through team members' reactions and team interactions.