Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

In the context of the current uncertain, complex, and interdependent work systems, teams have become organizations’ substantial working unit, which in turn challenges the traditional view of employee performance and ultimately results in the emergence of team member work role performance. Employee team-oriented work role behaviors with proficiency, adaptivity, and proactivity, which are integrated by the new construct, are so crucial to team effectiveness that many organizations keenly expect to achieve team member (...) class='Hi'>work role performance through implementing a dispersed pay-for-performance plan within a team. This study seeks to address the organizational practitioners’ main concern that whether pay dispersion among team members could actually help realize team member work role performance and further examines why and when an employee could respond to HPD within a team by engaging in team member work role behaviors from the perspective of the performance-shaping basis and team member’s workplace benign envy. Drawing on emotion-related theory, social comparison theory, legitimacy theory, expectation theory, and relative deprivation theory, it proposes that performance-based HPD could not only positively impact team member work role performance via workplace benign envy but also exert a direct-positive effect. Moreover, the activating effect of performance-based HPD on workplace benign envy and the mediating role are much stronger when a team member’s pay position is higher. The multi-source data including objective information and subjective perception among 362 ordinary employees within 66 Chinese organizational teams primarily supported the moderated mediation model. Yet, the direct-positive effect was not established. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the continued circulation and use of retracted science as a complex problem: Multiple stakeholders throughout the publishing ecosystem hold competing perceptions of this problem and its possible solutions. We describe how we used a participatory design process model to co-develop recommendations for addressing this problem with stakeholders in the Alfred P. Sloan-funded project, Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science (RISRS). After introducing the four core RISRS recommendations, we discuss how the issue of retraction-related stigma (...) gives rise to recommendation #4, Educate stakeholders about retraction and pre- and post-publication stewardship of the scholarly record. This recommendation is important for training publishing professionals and realizing this recommendation will require further collaborative design work across scholarly communications. We highlight ongoing stakeholder work which is now re-starting the design cycle. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing activities facilitating uptake and refinement of RISRS research and the implementation agenda. (shrink)

Self-managing teams have been predicted to break down organizational hierarchies and sex-segregated functional divisions. Based on participant observation and interviews with 39 men and women in service-oriented self-managing teams, the authors found that the metaphor of family emerged in interviews as a popular way to describe teams' interaction and social relations. The ways that team members used the family metaphor revealed that women were often perceived in familial roles that the authors argue encourage emotional labor. Although relational tasks may (...) not directly reproduce traditional gender power relations in teams, women can face difficulties taking on more instrumental team tasks. The authors propose that the persistence of family metaphors sustains the organizational gender categorization that self-managing teams as work-based, cross-functional groups were supposed to help eliminate. To the extent that this is the case, it suggests the importance of exploring the gendered organizational cultures that exist alongside structural arrangements. (shrink)

Over the last decade, the increased use of work teams within organizations has been one of the most influential and far-reaching trends to shape the business world. At the same time, corporations have continued to struggle with increased unethical employee behavior. Very little research has been conducted that specifically examines the developmental aspects of employee ethical decision-making in a team environment. This study examines the impact of a team leader’s perceived integrity on his or her subordinates’ behavior. (...) The results, which came from a survey of 245 MBA students functioning for 2 years in a work team environment, indicate an interaction between leader integrity and team member ethical intentions. (shrink)

This paper presents and evaluates a methodological approach aiming at analysing some of the complex interaction between patients and different health care practitioners working together in teams. Qualitative health care research describes the values, perceptions and conceptions of patients and practitioners. In modern clinical work patients and professional practitioners often work together on complex cases involving different kinds of knowledge and values, each of them representing different perspectives. We need studies designed to capture this complexity. The methodological approach (...) presented here is exemplified with a study in rehabilitation medicine. In this part of the health care system the clinical work is organized in multi-professional clinical teams including patients, handling complex rehabilitation processes. In the presented approach data are collected in individual in-depth interviews to have thorough descriptions of each individual perspective. The interaction in the teams is analysed by comparing different descriptions of the same situations from the involved individuals. We may then discuss how these perceptions relate to each other and how the individuals in the team interact. Two examples from an empirical study are presented and discussed, illustrating how communication, differences in evaluations and the interpretation of incidents, arguments, emotions and interpersonal relations may be discussed. It is argued that this approach may give information which can supplement the methods commonly applied in qualitative health care research today. (shrink)

Digital communication technologies led to a revolution in how people interact at work: relying on computer-mediated communication technologies is now a must, rather than an alternative. This empirical study investigates how colleagues in a virtual team use synchronous online communication platform in the workplace. Inspired by the conceptualisation of web-based communication platforms as tool, place or context of social construction, we explore the discursive strategies that contribute to the construction of the team’s shared sense of purpose and (...) identity, a collegial atmosphere and consequently lead to effective collaboration. The close analyses of real-life data from a multinational workplace provide insights into the everyday communication practices of virtual team members. Our findings supplement organisational literature based on etic observations of the effectiveness of virtual work and provide a basis for further theorisations about how communication technologies affect the ecology of and discourse practices in computer-mediated communication at work. (shrink)

Many organizations have adopted an organizational ethics program to prevent unethical behavior within the organization. Decoupling the adoption of ethics programs from their implementation has been identified in the literature as an explanation for the ineffectiveness of such programs. In addition to this so-called policy–practice decoupling, means–ends decoupling may also occur when a well-implemented ethics program is nevertheless ineffective. This study investigates whether team ethical culture (TEC) acts as a coupling mechanism that mediates the effects of a well-implemented ethics (...) program on unethical behavior in teams. We conducted a survey of 202 teams working in a business organization in the UK. The results of a structural equation analysis support the claim that TEC mediates this relationship. Based on this team-level case study, we argue that organizations that aim to implement an effective ethics program should acknowledge and manage TECs to avoid means-ends decoupling. (shrink)

Teams are more or less structured in function. Whether team structure is beneficial or harmful for the teams entail debates in current literature. Past studies mainly investigate the effects of team structure through learning or creativity. In this study, we tend to examine the effect of team structure on team performance through team coordination. We conducted two independent field studies with samples of 56 and 67 work teams to test our hypotheses. In both two (...) substudies, we found team structure positively affect team performance by improving team coordination. Moreover, we found team longevity was able to moderate the relationship between team structure and team performance through team coordination, such that the positive relationship between team structure and team coordination were more significant when team longevity was high rather than low. (shrink)

There are hardly any instruments to measure teamwork behaviors from an individual approach. This applies both in interprofessional teams or not, and in teams involved in health, social care, and other areas. The Individual Behavior Analysis scale measures efficacious behavior in work teams. It is one of the few instruments proposed in the literature to measure personal skills necessary for teamwork. Only a previous exploratory analysis of the scale was informed in another study. This article analyzes its internal structure (...) using different confirmatory factor analyses and its internal consistency, with a sample of 815 employees working for Spanish social organizations in the geriatric field, both private and public. The results of the definitive version adapted to Spanish, referred to as Individual Behavior Analysis −25, indicate a good fit of the model to the data and good reliability. Factor analysis confirmed the existence of two factors: Communication skills and Acceptance, with good internal consistency coefficients. This scale is a useful instrument for assessing, based on the reviewed literature, two of the most important individual skills an efficacious team should have. (shrink)

Coping with stress has been primarily investigated as an individual-level phenomenon. In work settings, however, an individual’s exposure to demands is often shared with co-workers, and the process of dealing with these demands takes place in the interaction with them. Coping, therefore, may be conceptualized as a multilevel construct. This paper introduces the team coping concept and shows that including coping as a higher-level team property may help explain individual-level outcomes. Specifically, we investigated the effects of exposure (...) to danger during deployment on burnout symptoms in military service members and examined to what extent this relationship was moderated by individual-level and team-level functional coping. We hypothesized that the relationship between individuals’ exposure to danger and burnout is contingent on both. In line with our predictions, we found that service members who were highly exposed to danger, and did not engage in much functional coping, suffered most from burnout symptoms, but only when their teammates did not engage in much functional coping either. When their teammates did engage in much functional coping, the effect of exposure to danger on burnout was buffered. Hence, team members’ coping efforts functioned as a resilience resource for these service members. (shrink)

Cognition in work teams has been predominantly understood and explained in terms of shared cognition with a focus on the similarity of static knowledge structures across individual team members. Inspired by the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, as well as by empirical data and pragmatic concerns, we offer an alternative theory of team cognition. Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) theory posits that (1) team cognition is an activity, not a property or a product; (2) team (...) cognition should be measured and studied at the team level; and (3) team cognition is inextricably tied to context. There are implications of ITC for theory building, modeling, measurement, and applications that make teams more effective performers. (shrink)

Teams have been a ubiquitous structure for conducting work and business for most of human history. However, today’s organizations are markedly different than those of previous generations. The explosion of innovative ideas and novel technologies mandate changes in job descriptions, roles, responsibilities, and how employees interact and collaborate. These advances have heralded a new era for teams and teamwork in which previous teams research and practice may not be fully appropriate for meeting current requirements and demands. In this article, (...) we describe how teams have been historically defined, unpacking five important characteristics of teams, including membership, interdependence, shared goals, dynamics, and an organizationally bounded context, and relating how these characteristics have been addressed in the past and how they are changing in the present. We then articulate the implications these changes have on how we study teams moving forward by offering specific research questions. (shrink)

BackgroundThe intensive care unit entails working as a team in rescuing patients from life-threatening conditions. The care being given by the team could also be done by nurses and other health professionals through the coordinated use of all medical practices.ObjectiveTo determine the opinion of nurses on the ethical problems they experienced while working as a team in the intensive care units of a university hospital.MethodThe descriptive research was conducted on nurses working in intensive care units. A 56-item (...) data collection form consisting of two parts developed by the researchers was used. Frequency and median were evaluated, and statistical calculations were used for group comparisons.ResultsOut of the 82 nurses who participated in the study, 65 were university graduates. About 52 of the participants were female with a mean age of 28.12 ± 5.84; 26 had intensive care certification, and 54 had ethical training. The internal intensive care unit nurses were less satisfied with their jobs, able to use tools, said that they had the right to refuse the patient compared to the surgical intensive care unit nurses. Discussion and conclusions: It is a positive situation for the participants to score low with ethical problems based on suggestion as the probability of meeting with their teammates. However, it is important that the problems that affect the motivation of the nurses are different according to the intensive care unit and the employees. (shrink)

A growing body of research reveals that abusive supervision may have negative impacts in organizations. The purpose of the present study is to expand the knowledge regarding the impacts of this dysfunctional leadership behavior by examining its relationship with innovation in work teams. Specifically, we investigate the process through which abusive supervision may undermine team innovation by taking into account the mediating role of team proactive behavior. Moreover, we propose a boundary condition of the negative effect of (...) abusive supervision by considering leader–members interdependence as a moderator. Using a multisource approach, data were gathered from 394 members and 82 immediate supervisors in a public safety organization. Results of path analyses reveal that the relationship between abusive supervision and team innovation is mediated by team proactive behavior. Furthermore, we found that the relationship between abusive supervision and team proactive behavior is moderated by leader–members interdependence, such that this relationship is stronger when the level of interdependence is high. Taken together, the findings of this study improve the understanding of why and under what circumstances abusive supervision may impair team innovation. (shrink)

Drawing on team creativity literature and social comparison theory, we investigate how leader-member exchange differentiation influences team creativity. Using a survey based on 91 R&D teams from Chinese companies, we observe that LMX differentiation is negatively related to team creativity. More importantly, we demonstrate that team behavioral integration mediates the relationship between LMX differentiation and team creativity, and team emotional intelligence moderates the relationship between LMX differentiation and team behavioral integration, such that LMX (...) differentiation has a weaker negative influence on team behavioral integration when TEI is higher. These results provide relevant suggestions for organizational team building, management, and development. (shrink)

Relying on interviews and fieldwork observations, the article investigates the choice of signs made by guide dogs and their visually impaired handlers while the team is on the move. It also explores the dependence of the choice of signs on specific functions of communication and examines the changes and development of sign usage throughout the team’s work. A significant part of the team’s communication appears to be related to retaining the communicative situation itself: to the establishment (...) of intrateam contact; to keeping the other prone to receive messages and to establish adequate sign relations; to giving and receiving feedback. The signs used for the purpose of retaining contact are analyzed in the article mainly with the handler in the role of the addresser. Signs also vary according to the character and aim of the team’s referential communication. Searching for objects and places, orientation and avoidance of obstacles can be discerned as three major functional frames that determine the choice of signs. As the team’s cooperation evolves, so also do the means of communication. The analysis shows that intrateam communication becomes less segmented and the signs used in referential communication shift from symbolic to symptomatic signs and become harder to detect for an outside observer. (shrink)

We investigate the relationship between subgroup splits, subjectively perceived subgroups, and team identification and emotional exhaustion. Based on the job demands-resources model and on self-categorization theory, we propose that faultline strength and perceived subgroups negatively affect emotional exhaustion, mediated by team identification. We further propose that subgroup identification moderates the mediation such that subgroup identification compensates low levels of team identification. We tested our hypotheses with a two-wave questionnaire study in a sample of 105 participants from 48 (...) teams from various contexts. We found an effect of perceived subgroups on emotional exhaustion mediated by team identification, but no direct or indirect effect of faultline strength on emotional exhaustion. We also could not find that subgroup identification moderates the effect of team identification on emotional exhaustion. We discuss the need for further research on the link of subgroup splits in work teams and the rise of psychological health issues and derive that measures to prevent burnout should primarily focus on avoiding or reducing subgroup perception whereas affecting the actual demographic composition of work team should be of lower priority. (shrink)

Complex work in teams requires coordination across team members and their technology as well as the ability to change and adapt over time to achieve effective performance. To support such complex interactions, recent efforts have worked toward the design of adaptive human-autonomy teaming systems that can provide feedback in or near real time to achieve the desired individual or team results. However, while significant advancements have been made to better model and understand the dynamics of team (...) interaction and its relationship with task performance, appropriate measures of team coordination and computational methods to detect changes in coordination have not yet been widely investigated. Having the capacity to measure coordination in real time is quite promising as it provides the opportunity to provide adaptive feedback that may influence and regulate teams’ coordination patterns and, ultimately, drive effective team performance. A critical requirement to reach this potential is having the theoretical and empirical foundation from which to do so. Therefore, the first goal of the paper is to review approaches to coordination dynamics, identify current research gaps, and draw insights from other areas, such as social interaction, relationship science, and psychotherapy. The second goal is to collate extant work on feedback and advance ideas for adaptive feedback systems that have potential to influence coordination in a way that can enhance the effectiveness of team interactions. In addressing these two goals, this work lays the foundation as well as plans for the future of human-autonomy teams that augment team interactions using coordination-based measures. (shrink)

Group work is a very common practice in higher education when it comes to developing key competences for students’ personal and professional growth. The goals that students pursue when working in teams determine how they organize and regulate their behavior and how they approach the tasks. The academic goals are a relevant variable that can condition the success of the group, as they guide and direct the students towards involvement in the task, the effort they make, and the desire (...) to increase their academic competence, and their learning. Thus, the need arises to create new evaluation instruments to help us understand the importance of academic goals when students work as a team. The purpose of this paper is to corroborate the construct validity of the Questionnaire on Teamwork Learning Goals (QTLG) based on the Achievement Goal Questionnaire (3x2 AGQ) of Elliot, Murayama & Pekrun (2011) in the context of teamwork, and to determine if the model 3X2 offers a better fit to the data than other models, such as: 2x2; Trichotomous; Definition; Valence, among others. The results obtained from a sample of 700 students from 6 Spanish universities confirm that, in the context of teamwork, the 3x2 model fits the data better than the rest of the models subjected to confirmatory analysis, with contrasting evidence of validity and reliability. Therefore, we considered it a useful instrument for studying motivation in the group work context. The QTLG has practical applications, allowing us to explore in detail the academic goals of university students. (shrink)

With the knowledge that team work is not always associated with high(er) performance, we draw from the Multi-Level Theory of Psychological Contracts, Person-Environment Fit Theory, and Optimal Distinctiveness Theory to study shared perceptions of psychological contract (PC) breach in relation to shared perceptions of complementary and supplementary fit to explain why some teams perform better than other teams. We collected three repeated survey measures in a sample of 128 respondents across 46 teams. After having made sure that we (...) met all statistical criteria, we aggregated our focal variables to the team-level and analysed our data by means of a longitudinal three-wave autoregressive moderated-mediation model in which each relationship was one-time lag apart. We found that shared perceptions of PC breach were directly negatively related to team output and negatively related to perceived team member effectiveness through a decrease in shared perceptions of supplementary fit. However, we also demonstrated a beneficial process in that shared perceptions of PC breach were positively related to shared perceptions of complementary fit, which in turn were positively related to team output. Moreover, best team output appeared in teams that could combine high shared perceptions of complementary fit with modest to high shared perceptions of supplementary fit. Overall, our findings seem to indicate that in terms of team output there may be a bright side to perceptions of PC breach and that perceived person-team fit may play an important role in this process. (shrink)

This research assessed how the performance and team skills of three-person teams working with an Intelligent Team Tutoring System on a virtual military surveillance task were affected by feedback privacy, participant role, task experience, prior team experience, and teammate familiarity. Previous work in Intelligent Tutoring Systems has focused on outcomes for task skill training for individual learners. As research extends into intelligent tutoring for teams, both task skills and team skills are necessary for good (...) class='Hi'>team performance. This work includes a brief review of previous research on ITTSs, feedback, teams, and teamwork, including the recounting of two categories of a framework of teamwork performance, Communication and Cognition, which are relevant to the present study. This research examines the effects of an intelligent agent, as well as features of the team, its members, and the task being undertaken, on team communication and team situation awareness. Thirty-seven teams of three participants, each at their own computer running a multiplayer surveillance simulation, were given just-in-time private or public performance feedback during four 5-min trials. In the fourth trial, two of the three participants switched roles. Feedback type, teamwork experience, and teammate familiarity had no statistically significant effect on communication or team situation awareness. However, higher levels of role experience and task experience showed significant and medium-sized effects on communication performance. Results, based on performance data and structured interview responses, also revealed areas of improvement in future feedback design and a potential benchmark for feedback frequency in an action-oriented serious game-based ITTS. Among the conclusions are six design objectives for future ITTSs, establishing a foundation for future research on designing effective ITTSs that train interpersonal skills to nascent teams. (shrink)

PurposeAs a new human resource management practice, idiosyncratic deals are personalized employment arrangements negotiated between employees and employers and intended to benefit them both. It plays an important role in attracting, retaining and motivating employees to promote breakthrough innovation. Based on the input-process-output model, this paper examines the relationship between team idiosyncratic deals and team breakthrough innovation, the mediating role of team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing, and the moderating roles of team transactive memory systems and team (...) cognitive flexibility.Participants and methodsIn order to reduce the effects of common method biases and causal lag effect, this study is divided into three stages for data collection, with a time interval of 1 month. Eighty teams from six enterprises in Shanghai and Hangzhou were selected as samples, and the hypothesis test was carried out by hierarchical regression analysis, bootstrap, and Johnson-Neyman method.ResultsThe results show that higher team idiosyncratic deals are associated with higher team breakthrough innovation through higher team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing, and that team transactive memory systems and team cognitive flexibility positively moderate the mediating effect of team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing in the relationship between team idiosyncratic deals and team breakthrough innovation in the first stage and the second stage, respectively. Under the joint effect of high team transactive memory systems and high team cognitive flexibility, the mediating effect of team exploratory-exploitative knowledge sharing is stronger.ConclusionThe research results break through the previous research framework of social exchange theory, and I-P-O model to explore the influence mechanism of team idiosyncratic deals, in order to promote the sustainable growth of team breakthrough innovation through this non-standard work arrangement. It is hoped that this research can inspire modern enterprises to create team idiosyncratic deals for valuable teams engaged in breakthrough innovation, which are more conducive to give full play to their heterogeneous talents, and finally help enterprises break through the industry bottleneck and win the market competition. (shrink)

The authors, one a trained geneticist and the other a trained ethicist, designed and team-taught a bioethics course where nineteen third- and fourth-year undergraduate students were enrolled at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, during the fall 2016 semester. The syllabus, including democratically-chosen ethical debate topics, peer-led student working groups, and varied assessment methods were novel aspects of the course. The students, being either philosophy or biology majors or minors, successfully completed the course and indicated being highly satisfied with (...) the course at its completion. Although there were limitations to a course such as this one, educators at similar small liberal arts institutions could offer a bioethics course by following our suggestions, including collaborative teaching and assessment and incorporating students’ preferences into the scheduled curriculum. (shrink)

There is a long history, dating back to the 50s, which examines the manner in which team roles contribute to effective team performance. However, much of this work has been built on ad-hoc teams working together for short periods of time under conditions of minimal stress. Additionally, research has been conducted with little attention paid to the importance of temporal factors, despite repeated calls for the importance of considering time in team research (e.g., Mohammed, Hamilton, & (...) Lim, 2009). To begin to understand team roles and how temporal aspects may impact the types of team roles employed when teams are working in extreme mission critical environments, the current manuscript uses a data-driven, bottom-up approach. Specifically, we employ the use of retrospective historical data as our input and a historiometric approach (Simonton, 2003). Source documents consist primarily of autobiographies, memoires, biographies, and first-hand accounts of crew interaction during spaceflight. Critical incidents regarding team interaction were extracted from these source documents and independently coded for team roles by two trained raters. Results of the study speak to the importance of task and social roles within teams that are predominantly intact and operating in extreme environments where mistakes can be life threatening. Evidence for the following task (i.e., coordinator, boundary spanner, team leader, evaluator, critic, information provider, team player, and innovator) and social roles (i.e., team builder, nurturer, harmonizer, entertainer, jokester, and the negative roles of attention seeker and negativist) were found. While it is often task roles that receive the greatest attention, results point to the importance of not neglecting the socioemotional health of the team (and the corresponding roles). Results also indicated that while some roles were consistently enacted independent of temporal considerations (e.g., mission length), the degree to which others were enacted varied across missions of differing lengths. Additionally, based on the current sample we see the following trends: (1) increased enactment of the team builder role as mission duration increases, (2) prominence of the entertainer role, and (3) increased emphasis on the visionary/problem solver role on missions over two years. (shrink)

This paper addresses theoretically the question how virtual communication may affect cooperation in work teams. The degree of team virtualization, i.e. the extent to which interaction between team members occurs online, is related to parameters of the exchange. First, it is assumed that in online interaction task uncertainties are higher than in face-to-face contacts. Second, the gratifying value of peer rewards is assumed to be lower in online contacts. Thirdly, it is assumed that teams are different in (...) the extent to which members depend on their peers for positive affections, operationalized by the extent to which team members are interested in social relationships for their own sake, independently from their work interactions. Simulation results suggest both positive and negative effects of team virtualization on work-cooperation. (shrink)

Drawing both on cultural-historical activity theory and on a dialogical approach to discourse, this article expands a method of analysis developed by Engeström & Sannino to capture discursive manifestations of contradictions in an activity system. The data consist of recorded meetings of an interprofessional team working with persons living with both a mental handicap and psychiatric disorders. The mission of this team is to coordinate socio-educative and psychiatric work. A sequence taken from one of these meetings was (...) submitted to a step-by-step discourse analysis and examined how the participants negotiated and managed the obstacles met with in their daily work. The analysis showed how an initial obstacle presented as a conflict was gradually turned into a critical conflict and finally into a dilemma between two rules: professional confidentiality and transparency towards the patient. It showed how the participants collectively coped with this dilemma, and came to define it as a problem related to work organisation, and not only to interpersonal relationships. The study shows the importance of discourse processes in collaborative work and in fostering professional learning and focus upon discourse processes through which team members deal with obstacles in their daily work and to provide a fine-grained analysis of systemic contradictions. (shrink)

In interprofessional clinical teams, the patients have interpersonal relationships with several practitioners. The aim of this study was to explore patients’ and practitioners’ perceptions of how such relationships may contribute to promote the whole team’s respect for the patient’s autonomy, as interpersonal patient–provider relationships may contribute to enhance patient autonomy. Sixteen qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 12 informants, including patients, nurses, physiotherapists, and physicians from three rehabilitation teams. Data were analysed according to Grounded Theory procedures. The informants discussed (...) interpersonal relationships as an integral and significant part of the team work. The practitioners tried to adjust their professional approach to the patients’ genuine opinions and let patients decide the teams’ goals. Close relationships with patients could be important to accomplish this, particularly described by nurses and physiotherapists, who could facilitate the communication with the rest of the team. (shrink)

The ethical decision making of researchers has historically been studied from an individualistic perspective. However, researchers rarely work alone, and they typically experience ethical dilemmas in a team context. In this mixed-methods study, 67 scientists and engineers working at a public R1 (very high research activity) university in the United States responded to a survey that asked whether they had experienced or observed an ethical dilemma while working in a research team. Among these, 30 respondents agreed to (...) be interviewed about their experiences using a think-aloud protocol. A total of 40 unique ethical incidents were collected across these interviews. Qualitative data from interview transcripts were then systematically content-analyzed by multiple independent judges to quantify the overall ethicality of team decisions as well as several team characteristics, decision processes, and situational factors. The results demonstrated that team formalistic orientation, ethical championing, and the use of ethical decision strategies were all positively related to the overall ethicality of team decisions. Additionally, the relationship between ethical championing and overall team decision ethicality was moderated by psychological safety and moral intensity. Implications for future research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

It is common in contemporary sport to liken the notion of the team to that of the family. That is, the family is used to evoke team life. Portraying the team as a family usually implies a positive evaluation. Despite its prevalence, the team as a family equation has not been analyzed in the sport philosophy literature. Thus, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it explores whether the team is to be equated with (...) the family. To discuss the nature of the family and the team, I draw together the work of several sport philosophers with that of Laura Wildemann Kane. Second, and considering what characterizes the team, this article investigates whether teammates have special responsibilities to one another by virtue of their relationship and the value attached to it. I propose that the team as a family equation does not align with the constitution of these two social groups and that teammates have special responsibilities to one another, but such responsibilities are different from those observed in the family. (shrink)

The relationship between humans and animals is complex and influenced by multiple variables. Humans display a remarkably flexible and rich array of social competencies, demonstrating the ability to interpret, predict, and react appropriately to the behavior of others, as well as to engage others in a variety of complex social interactions. Developing computational systems that have similar social abilities is a critical step in designing robots, animated characters, and other computer agents that appear intelligent and capable in their interactions with (...) humans and each other. Further, it will improve their ability to cooperate with people as capable partners, learn from natural instruction, and provide intuitive and engaging interactions for human partners. Thus, human−animal team analogs can be one means through which to foster veridical mental models of robots that provide a more accurate representation of their near-future capabilities. Some digital twins of human−animal teams currently exist but are often incomplete. Therefore, this article focuses on issues within and surrounding the current models of human−animal teams, previous research surrounding this connection, and the challenges when using such an analogy for human−autonomy teams. (shrink)

In clinical practice, decision-making is not performed by individual knowers but by an assemblage of people and instruments in which no one member has full access to every piece of evidence. This is due to decision making teams consisting of members with different kinds of expertise, as well as to organisational and time constraints. This raises important questions for the epistemology of medicine, which is inherently social in this kind of setting, and implies epistemic dependence on others. Trust in these (...) contexts is a highly complex social practice, involving different forms of relationships between trust and reasons for trust: based on reasons, and not based on reasons; based on reasons that are easily accessible to reflection and others that are not. In this paper, we focus on what it means to have reasons to trust colleagues in an established clinical team, collectively supporting or carrying out every day clinical decision-making. We show two important points about these reasons, firstly, they are not sought or given in advance of a situation of epistemic dependence, but are established within these situations; secondly they are implicit in the sense of being contained or nested within other actions that are not directly about trusting another person. The processes of establishing these reasons are directly about accomplishing a task, and indirectly about trusting someone else’s expertise or competence. These processes establish a space of reasons within which what it means to have reasons for trust, or not, gains a meaning and traction in these team-work settings. Based on a qualitative study of decision-making in image assisted diagnosis and treatment of a complex disease called pulmonary hypertension, we show how an intersubjective framework, or ‘space of reasons’ is established through team members forging together a common way of identifying and dealing with evidence. In dealing with images as a central diagnostic tool, this also involves a common way of looking at the images, a common mode or style of perception. These frameworks are developed through many iterations of adjusting and calibrating interpretations in relation to those of others, establishing what counts as evidence, and ranking different kinds of evidence. Implicit trust is at work throughout this process. Trusting the expertise of others in clinical decision-making teams occurs while the members of the team are busy on other tasks, most importantly, building up a framework of common modes of seeing, and common ways of identifying and assessing evidence emerge. It is only in this way that trusting or mistrusting becomes meaningful in these contexts, and that a framework for epistemic dependence is established. (shrink)

Scholars have studied collective teacher efficacy mainly at the school level. The present study also focuses on collective teacher efficacy expectations, but it emphasises the collaborative teaching of two teachers working together in one classroom. This study investigates personal, contextual, and systemic factors that may influence collective self-efficacy expectations of Co-teacher teams. For the present study, 264 teachers who were part of a Co-teaching team finished an online questionnaire. Results from multiple regression analysis indicated that team characteristics influenced (...) the subjective evaluation of efficacy expectations in teams much more than individual characteristics or the social context in which Co-teaching teams worked. (shrink)

In the digital age, the global software development sector has been a forerunner in implementing new ways and configurations for remote teamwork using information and communication technologies on a widespread basis. Crises and technological advances have influenced each other to bring about changes in the ways of working. In the 70’s of the last century, in the middle of the so-called oil crisis, the concept of teleworking was defined using remote computer equipment to access office equipment and thus avoid moving (...) around using traditional vehicles. Then from the 90s, with the advent of communications and the widespread use of the Internet, the first virtual work teams were implemented in software development companies that already had some of the important characteristics needed to work in this way, such as, cultural diversity, characterized tasks, geographical distribution of members, communication, interdependence of tasks, leadership, cohesion, empowerment, confidence, virtuality. This manuscript groups the main factors into different models proposed by the literature and also analyzes the results of a study conducted in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis on 317 software development teams that had to work in virtual teams. The results of the quantitative methodology with structural equation modeling based on variance using the partial least squares route method are analyzed. The results of the research focus on some determinants that can directly affect the performance of the virtual team. A first determinant is communication in relation to the tasks. The second is trust in relation to leadership, empowerment and cohesion. The results of virtual teams provide information that can serve as a basis for future research lines for the implementation of virtual work strategies in post-pandemic work. (shrink)

This study explores how peer advising affects student project teams’ discussions of engineering ethics. Peer ethics advisors from non-engineering disciplines are expected to provide diverse perspectives and to help engineering student teams engage and sustain ethics discussions. To investigate how peer advising helps engineering student teams’ ethics discussions, three student teams in different peer advising conditions were closely observed: without any advisor, with a single volunteer advisor, and with an advising team working on the ethics advising project. Micro-scale discourse (...) analysis based on cognitive ethnography was conducted to find each team’s cultural model of understanding of engineering ethics. Cultural-historical activity theory analysis was also conducted to see what influenced each team’s cultural model. In cultural model, the engineering team with an ethics advising team showed broader understanding in social implications of engineering. The results of CHAT analysis indicated that differences in rules, community, and division of labor among three teams influenced the teams’ cultural models. The CHAT analysis also indicated that the peer advisors working on the ethics advising project and the engineering team working on engineering design project created a collaborative environment. The findings indicated that collaborative environment supported peer ethics advising to facilitate team discussions of engineering ethics. (shrink)

This study explores the integration of data journalism within three European legacy news organisations through the lens of organisational structure and professional culture. Interviews with data journalists and editors suggest that professional routines resonate with established data journalism epistemologies, values, and norms that appear to be constitutional for an inter-organisational data journalism subculture. At the same time, organisational structure either integrates the journalistic subculture by increasing levels of complexity, formalisation, and centralisation or rejects it by not accommodating it structurally or (...) culturally. The three data teams work along epistemologies of computer-assisted reporting, investigative journalism, and data journalism but differentiate themselves through nuanced understandings of data journalism practice, driven by individual journalists. After a structureless episode, one team sets itself apart as it diverges from data-driven routines and orients itself towards technological and interdisciplinary interactive journalism. The findings show an interdependence of individual efforts, varying conceptualisations of data journalism practice, and interplay between organisational structure and professional culture. (shrink)

As teams become increasingly common for organizations to accomplish key objectives, improving team performance is a critical challenge for both practitioners and researchers. As researchers have converged on the notion that team performance is strongly influenced by subgroups, scholars have begun to explore how perception of subgroups influence team performance. Thus, in this study, we examined how perceived subgroups influenced the team transactive memory system (TMS), and hence team performance. We also proposed the moderating role (...) of guanxi perception on the relationship between perceived subgroups and TMS. Utilizing two-wave multi-source data from 87 working teams in a Chinese central government-owned corporation, and based on multiple (moderator) hierarchical regression analyses, our results demonstrated that perceived subgroups were a negative predictor of TMS and team performance and TMS mediated the negative relationship between perceived subgroups and team performance. That is, perceived subgroups inhibited team performance by blocking the development of a robust TMS. In addition, guanxi perception acted as a positive moderator, mitigating the negative relationship between perceived subgroups and TMS. Furthermore, the moderated mediation analysis of the integrative model revealed that the indirect effect of perceived subgroups on team performance via TMS was contingent on guanxi perception. Overall, our findings identified the pivotal role of perceived subgroups, TMS, and guanxi perception in working teams in the Chinese context. (shrink)

Multiple team membership is a form of work organization extensively used nowadays to flexibly deploy human resources across multiple simultaneous projects. Individual members bring in their cognitive resources in these multiple teams and at the same time use the resources and competencies developed while working together. We test in an experimental study whether working in MTM as compared to a single team yields more individual performance benefits in estimation tasks. Our results fully support the group-to-individual transfer of (...) learning, yet the hypothesized benefits of knowledge variety and broader access to meta-knowledge relevant to the task in MTM as compared to single teams were not supported. In addition, we show that individual estimates improve only when members are part of groups with low or average collective estimation errors, while confidence in individual estimates significantly increases only when the collective confidence in the group estimates is average or high. The study opens valuable venues for using the dynamic model of G-I transfer of learning to explore individual learning in MTM. (shrink)