Search

One of the great challenges in information-sharing and knowledge management in teams is the sharing of expertise. In this paper, a model of expertise in teams is suggested that conceptualizes expertise not only as professional knowledge but also as expert role from a status perspective. The model predicts that experts will reduce their contributions to the team goals if their expert status is threatened in any way, but will increase their knowledge sharing behaviour if their status in the team is confirmed. The hypotheses were confirmed in two experimental studies (N1=98, N2=144), showing that explicitly declaring status differences increased expert contributions. These contributions could be further enhanced by giving individual performance feedback to experts, and were decreased under team feedback conditions. The findings are consistent with recent research showing that diversity can contribute to team performance if the diversity is recognized within the team.

Being innovative means being willing ‘to go the extra mile’ beyond routine tasks in teams. It also means that team members are willing to consider different perspectives in heterogeneous teams and to share information. Important antecedents of team innovation are successful information sharing and helping behaviour among team members. Although the importance of information sharing for innovation is seemingly self-evident, we still know very little about the group processes that support team innovation (West, 2002). Information sharing is a group process that is an indispensable part of team integration. Team roles and team tasks need to be discussed to successfully achieve team goals. In heterogeneous teams with members from different occupational backgrounds integrating processes such as information sharing are even more important. To date, research on information sharing has focused mainly on the type of information that is shared or unshared (Brodbeck, Kerschreiter, Mojzisch, Frey, & Schulz-Hardt, 2002; Stasser, Stewart, & Wittenbaum, 1995) and on antecedents of information sharing, such as trust (Butler, 1999), task and reward interdependence (Moser & Wodzicki, 2007), or how person perception might affect information exchange (de Bruin & Van Lange, 2000). The link between output measures of group performance, such as innovativeness, and information sharing has always been implied and has been explored theoretically to some extent (Diehl & Ziegler, 2000), but empirical studies that go beyond organisational case studies (Basadur & Gelade, 2006) are still scarce. If we define innovation as the introduction of new ideas and new ways of doing things at work as suggested by West (2002), then sharing information about these new ideas and developing ideas further in the team through information sharing is a prerequisite for team innovation. However, the role of information is likely to be very different for routine team tasks and for team innovation. Especially in heterogeneous teams with members from different occupational backgrounds, task interdependence is likely to be lower for new and innovative processes than for established procedures and routine tasks. This means that information sharing is ‘nice to have’ and would be expected to affect team innovation, but is at the same time not indispensable for completing routine team tasks. This distinction is important, because under low task interdependence different social processes come into play in groups (Moser & Wodzicki, 2007). Information sharing under low task interdependence can be defined as a form of prosocial behaviour at work. It means that team members are willing to put in an extra effort and ‘go the extra mile’ to discuss their perspectives on the team task with colleagues from a different disciplinary background. In the studies presented here we argue that the importance of information sharing and helping behaviour for team innovation should therefore increase if occupational diversity is high and team size is large. The hypothesis was tested in two independent samples of health care teams (N1=72 breast cancer care teams, N2=113 community mental health teams), using team innovation rated by independent experts as outcome variable. Multiple regression analysis showed that helping behaviour had a significant independent effect on innovation for both team types, while information sharing only had a significant association with innovation for breast cancer teams. The interaction effects of team size and occupational diversity were tested with moderated regression analysis for both helping behaviour and information sharing. Both team processes showed strong main effects, which were even stronger if occupational diversity was high. There was also a main effect of team size on innovation, which is increased especially if helping behaviour in the team is strong. The interaction effect with team size could thus be confirmed for both teams, while the interaction with team size was only found for the mental health care teams. The partially different results for the two different team types could be explained by the differences in task and team structures. While mental health teams have stable membership and meet less regularly than breast cancer teams, breast cancer teams are cross-functional teams with multiple team memberships. In conclusion, it can be said that especially helping behaviour seems to be crucial for team innovation. If teams are large, and helping behaviour among team members is strong, the capacity for innovation seems to be greatly increased. Implications for understanding the psychological processes underlying team innovation and for managing knowledge sharing in teams are discussed.

Despite the increasing implementation of virtual work arrangements (e.g., global virtual teams, online communities, technology-mediated collaboration) in modern organizations, virtuality (i.e., reliance on technology rather than face-to-face communication) can pose many potential challenges to effective group functioning and outcomes. Although, researchers have recognized the importance of having clear and shared group norms for behavior in order to facilitate more effective virtual work, this research area remains relatively underdeveloped. In this symposium, we convene an international group of researchers whose work extends this critical, but still nascent, research domain. The papers include both theoretical as well as lab and field empirical studies that examine how different types of group norms or norm- related constructs work in conjunction with virtuality to impact important dynamics and outcomes in different types of virtual work environments. Collectively, the studies offer significant research extensions and new directions for understanding the role of group norms in facilitating effective virtual work.

In this symposium we address the tension between working remotely ‘anytime, anywhere and with anyone’ and the individual embeddedness of the collaborators in a specific local physi-cal, social, cultural, mental and symbolic space. In virtual work, there are two main reasons why the importance of context increases and adds further layers of meaning to context: a) the variety of locations collaborators work from, and b) the dynamic of changing locations while working that is made possible by mobile devices and wireless connections. However, so far the role of context has not been explicitly addressed as a concept relevant to theorizing and researching vir-tual work. The role of context can be approached from three perspectives: Firstly, we suggest that a re-consideration of conventional views of technology may help us to more effectively study the multiple, emergent, and dynamic socio-material configurations that constitute contemporary or-ganizations and their practices. Secondly, developments in mobile technologies and infrastruc-tures enable increasingly flexible ways of working. Thirdly, we would like to propose Lewin’s idea of ‘life space’ (Lebensraum) as a way of understanding the multiple layers of meaning of ‘context in virtual work’. The four papers and the critical review by the discussant expand our understanding on the role of context by addressing the different layers relevant to context in virtual work: The rele-vance of a physical place in mobile work, familiarity as a feature of social space in teamwork, the cultural and social space of status cues in communication, and the symbolic space of linguis-tic markers.

Today, almost all work-related interactions and communications are at least partially supported by electronic media and thus virtual to some degree for both distributed and co-located teams and employees. There is already a substantial body of research on the effects of virtual vs. face to face collaboration indicating that the social processes groups and organisations rely on to coordinate their activities and develop their relationships can be harder to perceive, infer and apply in virtual environments. One of the key processes regulating cooperation and communication in groups and organisations are social norms. Although existing literature points to the importance of developing shared norms in virtual collaboration and there is some work on norms within on-line communities, there is little research focusing specifically on how different types of norms operate in virtual collaboration. This symposium therefore focuses on the role that social norms play in virtual collaboration and performance outputs. ...