Despite the existence of robots that are capable of lifting heavy loads, robotic assistants that can help people move objects as part of a team are not available. This is because of a lack of critical intelligence that results in inefficient and ineffective performance of these robots. This work makes progress towards improved intelligence of robotic lifting assistants by studying human-human teams in order to understand basic principles of co-manipulation teamwork. The effect of modus, or the manner in which a team moves an object together, is the primary study of this work. Data was collected from over 30 human-human trials in which participants in teams of two co-manipulated an object that weighed 60 pounds. These participants maneuvered through a series of five obstacles while carrying the object, exhibiting one of four modi at any given time. The raw data from these experiments was cleaned and distilled into a pose trajectory, velocity trajectory, acceleration trajectory, and interaction wrench trajectory. Classifying on the original base set of four modi with a neural net showed that two of the three modi were very similar, such that classification between three modi was more appropriate. The three modi used in classification were \emph{quickly}, \emph{smoothly} and \emph{avoiding obstacles}. Using a convolutional neural net, three modi were able to be classified from a validation set with up to 85\% accuracy. Detecting modus has the potential to greatly improve human-robot co-manipulation by providing a means to determine an appropriate robot behavior objective function. Survey data showed that participants trust each other more after working together and that they feel that their partners are more qualified after they worked together. A number of modified scales were also shown to be reliable which will allow future researchers in human-robot co-manipulation to properly evaluate how humans feel about working with each other. These same scales will also provide a useful comparison to human-robot teams in order to determine how much humans trust robots as co-manipulation team members.

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The purpose of this paper was two-fold. The first was to investigate the impact of conflict as a mediator in the relationship between distribution and team performance. The second was to examine how that relationship was affected by virtuality. Four-member teams of different distributions (partially distributed, fully distributed, and fully collocated) and different virtuality conditions (videoconferencing, teleconferencing, and chat) played a team-oriented game. Significant results were found only in the videoconferencing condition, in which both distribution and task conflict had a negative impact on team performance, but task conflict did not mediate the relationship between distribution and team performance. Further research investigating how virtuality impacts distributed teams in needed.

This thesis extracts organizational lessons from the U.S. Army's Human Terrain Teams. In the past, the Human Terrain Teams have been the topic of various debates, but none discussed their performance. Studying what influences how Human Terrain Teams perform is important to the National Security System to improve its use of socio-cultural knowledge during conflicts. A contextual narrative of team members formally involved with Human Terrain Teams and information from journalistic articles tells the story of what organizational characteristics affected the performance of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain Teams. / Master of Arts

<p dir="ltr">In this research, I study the role of empathy in first-year engineering design teams. Engineering programs provide students with opportunities to practice and develop teamwork skills to help them become more effective team members. Thus, it is essential to understand factors that contribute to effective teaming experiences for engineering students. One key factor for promoting effective teaming experiences is empathy.</p>

In recent years, remote work has been increasingly adopted globally, with manyorganizations adopting working in remote teams. Remote teams are a new phenomenon thathave unique challenges compared to traditional teams. Distance makes it more difficult tocommunicate and collaborate effectively which can lead to misunderstandings andmisinterpretation causing conflicts. There is existing literature specifically on conflictmanagement in remote teams but is to some extent out-of-date as technology has developed.This study aims to complement existing literature to better understand how conflicts inremote teams are best prevented and managed by answering the research question: “Whatare the unique challenges of conflict management in remote teams, main causes of conflictsin remote teams and how can they be resolved effectively?” This study had an inductive qualitative approach, utilizing interviews to answer our researchquestion. Six participants were interviewed, and the data was analyzed using a thematicanalysis. Our findings present unique challenges, with poor communication standing out asa primary concern causing conflicts. To overcome these challenges the findings concludesfour main strategies for leaders and managers to use in conflict management within remoteteams. These strategies are to enhance communication and provide structure, fosterinterpersonal connections and trust, practicing explicit management, and compromising asa method in conflict resolution

There have been thousands of studies on teams and their performance, but there are still many unanswered questions. An important one is how an organization's reward structure supports the growing trend of using teams. Many organizations implement teams without changing the organizational systems to align with and support the use of teams, i.e., training, feedback, information and reward systems. As predicted by many authorities in the field of team effectiveness research, these teams often fail. One organizational subsystem that has been determined to be important is the reward structure. If the reward structure is not changed to support a team-based structure, the misalignment could negatively impact team effectiveness. This research investigated the relationship between reward structure and team effectiveness using a laboratory experiment. This experiment involved groups of students working as a team on a design problem. The independent variable is the type of reward structure, manipulated over three levels: interdependent (group), independent (individual) and mixed rewards (both group and individual). The experiment used a design task, intended to be more representative of project team work where team members were assigned a functional discipline and worked together to solve a design problem. The primary dependent variable in this study was team effectiveness: team performance as measured by the quality of the team's design, satisfaction of team members, and the ability and desire of team members to work together in the future. Other control variables investigated for their effect on these dependent variables included: cooperative behaviors, reward valence, effort, and autonomy preferences. Few significant effects of reward structure were found. The reward treatment had a significant main effect on both cooperation and effort, but little difference existed between reward treatments. Some unusual results were found in the relationship between effort and cooperation with performance. Both effort and cooperation were negatively related to team performance. Cooperation, satisfaction and ability to exist were all found to be correlated. No one reward structure was found to be significantly better than any of the others in terms of team effectiveness or team process. / Master of Science

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2015. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The research assignment was conducted to evaluate the influential dimensions for building high performing teams in virtual organisations. The new business unit, Middle East and Africa has the challenge of operating globally for the first time. The leadership has the daunting task of getting the virtual team to become a high performance team. An intensive literature review was conducted to draw on the knowledge of previous theory for both high performance teams as well as virtual organisations. A representative sample of the organisation’s leadership was interviewed by means of an online questionnaire, whilst employees were survey by means of both physical and online surveys. The results provided insights into the dimensions that strongly influence high performance teams in virtual global organisations. A deeper understanding of success factors that influence team performance and virtual organisations were learnt and recommendations was made to the company.

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