Water Practice and Technology

Teams often experience negative affective states during the execution of innovative tasks. Negative group affective tone does not necessarily lead to unfavorable outcomes. Grounded in the theories of affect-as-information and mindfulness, this study proposes that team mindfulness nonlinearly moderates the relationship between negative group affective tone and team innovation through the mechanism of external knowledge acquisition. Data collected from 62 research and development teams were analyzed to test the proposed hypotheses. The empirical findings support our hypotheses. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

When Amy received the invitation to write an essay for Small Group Research, she wanted to collaborate with one of her former students, and Jean-François was thrilled when offered the opportunity. They had followed and contributed to team learning research—separately and together—and both relished the opportunity to reflect on the challenges and opportunities today’s teams (and team researchers) face. Demands for learning have never been greater, and teams have never been more complex. In this article, the authors reflect on team-learning research using a framework that emerged from their collaborative work and share thoughts and propositions for future research.

The concept of Team Emergent States (TES) is gaining significant traction among researchers and practitioners in the field of organizational behavior. Despite the growing interest in TES, there is a notable lack of theoretical consensus among scholars regarding its definition and constituent elements. This situation mirrors similar challenges in the domains of leadership effectiveness, organizational culture, employee engagement, and employee well-being, where the absence of clear definitions and theoretical frameworks has hindered the development of coherent theory and measurement. This paper advocates for a more grounded approach to the study of Team Emergent States, anchoring it firmly within the psychological literature on human needs. We review the leading conceptualizations of TES in the academic literature and argue that they can be distilled into a core set of human needs, each supported by robust research traditions. By proposing a framework that comprehensively enumerates and integrates need concepts, we demonstrate the value of adopting a more structured and theoretically grounded approach over current practices, which tend to accumulate an unwieldy array of dimensions and elements without clear theoretical justification. We consider the impact of setting TES concepts within existing motivational constructs for each of the following: (a) theory, especially the development of emergent state frameworks; (b) methods, including the value of applying a comprehensive, structural approach; and (c) practice, where we emphasize the practical advantages of clear operational definitions.

The purpose of this study is to explore how team members’ Big Five traits might be arranged, determining both the necessary and sufficient conditions for team innovation. Utilizing a two-wave sample of 307 employees from 82 teams across three Italian organizations, the study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and necessary condition analysis (NCA). The results showed that three configurations were conducive to high levels of innovation: high openness to experience, conscientiousness and extraversion; high openness to experience, high extraversion and low agreeableness; and high openness to experience, agreeableness and emotional stability. They also highlighted openness as a necessary condition.

This study compares the performance of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformer-based models (DistilBERT) in classifying utterances as dialogue acts. The results show that transformers consistently outperform RNNs, highlighting their usefulness in coding small group interaction. Furthermore, the study explores the impact of incorporating context, in the form of preceding and following utterances. The findings reveal that adding context leads to modest improvements in model performance. Moreover, in some cases, adding context can lead to a slight decrease in performance. The study discusses the implications of these findings for small group researchers employing AI models for text classification tasks.

This paper investigates the correlation between team future time orientation differences (FTOD) and team performance while exploring potential moderation by team and task characteristics, including task interdependence, commitment to team goals, and collective efficacy. Data were collected via cross-sectional questionnaires from 263 individuals across 73 student teams at U.S. universities to assess the hypothesized relationships. The results indicate a consistent negative association between FTOD and team performance. Moreover, the study reveals that goal commitment mitigates the negative impact of FTOD on team performance. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for managing team performance across different future time orientations.

This study explores how individuals from diverse backgrounds contribute to creating safe environments for constructive intergroup dialogue on divisive issues in community settings. Through an analysis of unique recordings from four real-life conversations, the research reveals how participants’ individual behaviors—personal engagement (such as self-disclosure and risk-taking) and interpersonal engagement (like validating others)—along with group dynamics, foster a positive climate that enables free expression and sustained engagement, even when safety is challenged. The findings offer valuable insights into the processes and dynamics of intergroup dialogue, highlighting participants’ active roles in fostering safe and brave spaces in polarized communities.

This study investigates provided and received social support among team members on meeting-related outcomes based on their person–group fit perspective. It further examines whether this support-based need–supply fit, as indicated by support congruence, relates to their verbal behaviors. Results of cubic polynomial regressions across 303 participants nested in 53 teams reveal that social support congruence predicts team members’ meeting citizenship behavior. Moreover, perceived support congruence functions as a mediator of the relationship between relations-oriented verbal behaviors and meeting citizenship behavior. Theoretical and practical implications for the role of support congruence and verbal behaviors during team meetings are discussed.

Understanding explanatory team processes and emergent states is crucial for facilitating potential benefits and hindering potential pitfalls of team diversity. This systematic review synthesizes research regarding the processes and states related to team diversity since the categorization-elaboration model’s (CEM) introduction, against which we evaluate the literature. According to the CEM, an interplay of social and informational processes shapes diverse teams’ effectiveness. We show that despite the wide recognition of this interplay logic, there is a misalignment between CEM’s theoretical propositions and the actual conceptualizations and measurements of processes and states in primary studies. This misalignment is accompanied by primarily static designs and conceptualizations. Our review expands scholarly understanding of the interplay between social and informational processes and states in diverse teams, advancing knowledge of the diversity–team effectiveness relationship. Finally, we delineate imperatives for future research, embracing the dynamic nature of team processes and states.

Disruptive situations experienced in crises require significant initiative-taking among employees, particularly those in the service sector. Relying on the social information processing theory, this study expounds on how and when team cognitive diversity influences employee initiative-taking through work meaningfulness and perceived subgroup splits during a crisis. Data was collected from 232 hotel employees working within 58 work teams from two sources and in two waves. Results from a multilevel, dual-path parallel mediation data analysis did not support the hypothesized direct relationship between team cognitive diversity and personal initiative-taking or the indirect path through perceived subgroup split. This study’s analysis supported only the indirect path through work meaningfulness. Implications of the findings as well as avenues for further research and theory expansion are discussed.

Supervisors may experience time differently from their subordinates, and little is known about the interplay between the time pressures experienced by supervisors and their teams. Focusing on team creativity as the outcome of interest, we explore how teams with varying time pressures function alongside the distinct time pressures experienced by their supervisors. In a polynomial regression and response surface analytical framework, team creativity was enhanced when there was a greater divergence between the time pressures of supervisors and team members. Conversely, creativity suffered when the time pressures of both parties were more aligned, whether at low or high levels.