This study investigates the role of teams in venture growth by focusing on how patterns of team roles and actions explain venture growth. The role of venture teams (relative to individuals) in managing new venture growth is receiving increasing recognition in studies of entrepreneurship and economic development. Generally, many studies tend to focus on why new ventures fail to grow. And where studies of venture teams do exist, they tend to show that teams achieve higher growth rates, on average, than individual entrepreneurs. But, there are still rather few studies that examine in depth the processes through which teams work together. The analysis presented here is based on five growing firms in Zimbabwe. The findings that emerged from this qualitative study highlighted five key issues that growing firms in many different socio-economic contexts face. These growth issues are: start-up and growth capital, opportunities, human capital and delegation, internal controls and external risks/threats. From the cross case analysis of team roles, it is found that these issues are resolved in particular ways which can be categorised in seven ways. Firstly, it is claimed that team ventures are more able to transcend or minimise growth stage crises because of their capacity to formalise structure/systems early in the emergence process. Secondly, venture teams engaged professional management practices and organisational features at early stages of venture founding using them to facilitate growth. In so doing, teams compress the growth cycle because of the opportunity for team members to perform tasks concurrently. Thirdly, teams endow new ventures with institutional credibility to attract resources and customers. And, fourth, teams exhibit high levels of innovation using multiple team roles to realise business ideas and opportunities. Fifth, working in teams enhances the creativity of individuals through social facilitation because this regulates behaviour and stretches their various efforts. Sixth, it is shown that teams can use network nodes that are more than the sum of the individual network nodes of the team members because they add team level networks. Finally, it is claimed that teams act as self-governance systems. In summary, it was because the ventures contradicted, rather than conformed, to the conventional models of new firm growth that team venture growth was achieved with relative ease in all the five cases.

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As the existing team literature mostly excludes context and culture, little is known about how these elements affect real-life team working (Engestrom, 2008; Salas & Wildman, 2009), and how teams work in non-Western settings, such as in Chinese firms (Phan, Zhou, & Abrahamson, 2010).This research addresses this issue by investigating how new product design (NPD) teams use team working to carry out product innovation in the context of Chinese family businesses (CFBs) via an indigenous psychology perspective. Unlike mainstream teamwork literature which mostly employs an etic design, an indigenous psychology perspective adopts an emic approach which places emphasis on understanding real-life phenomena in context through a cultural-insider perspective (Kim, 2000). Compatible with this theoretical position, a multiple qualitative case study approach was used as the research methodology. Three qualitative case studies were carried out in three longstanding family-run manufacturing firms in Taiwan, where family firms have been the pillars of high economic growth in the past five decades (W.-w. Chu, 2009). Two salient findings were established across the three case studies. First, the team processes identified across the three family firms are very similar with the exception of owners’ involvement and on-the-job training. All three family firms’ NPD teams are managed in a highly hierarchical manner, with considerable emphasis placed on hierarchical ranking, cost-effectiveness, efficiency, practicability, and interpersonal harmony. Second, new products developed by CFBNPD teams are mostly incremental innovation or copycat innovation, while radical or original products are rare. In many ways, CFBNPD teams may not be the ideal incubators for innovation. This is because several aspects of their unique context can cast constraints on how they work and innovate, and thus limit the ratio of radical innovation. A multi-level review into the facilitators and inhibitors of creativity or innovation in CFBNPD teams is provided. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings and the limitations of the study are also addressed.

Team structures and technology-mediated communications have experienced a welldocumented growth in popularity because of their perceived value in delivering productivity. The nexus of these trends, the concept of the "virtual team", might therefore be expected to have clear benefits in comparison to "traditional" teams. However, research has been equivocal in its findings, and in practice "pure" virtual teams, in which members never meet face-to-face, have been rare. Equally, teams that only work face-to-face have become rare, so some researchers have begun to adopt a perspective in which "virtuality" is seen as a characteristic of all teams. Adopting this perspective here, the research reported in this thesis addresses the question of how virtuality in teams contributes to organisational value. Considering teamwork as an intangible asset understood as a form of intellectual capital the research question is posed as: how does virtuality in teams affect the development of intellectual capital? Reviewing the virtual team literature highlights the direction of its development and the gap in understanding that led to the research question. It also provided the roots for the further development of the concept of virtuality in teams. Here it is defined as "virtual continuities" that mediate the effects of discontinuities, such as those created by geography, time, culture, organisations, technology and working practices. Reviewing the literature on intellectual capital, a multi-level model was alsodeveloped in which teamwork was defined as intellectual capital at the team level and comprised of human capital, social capital and structural capital dimensions. Drawing on these two concepts, a team process model and conceptual framework of virtuality were created to provide a focus for the collection and analysis of qualitative data using a case study methodology. The setting for this was an inter-organisational entity, spanning the government, commercial and academic sectors, consisting of teams researching technology and the systems engineering of intelligent systems. The analysis of data from the case study supported the conceptual developments but also pointed to the need to enhance them to capture the importance of discontinuities created by a team's task, membership and temporal boundaries; their effects on the development of intellectual capital; and the role of virtuality in mediating these effects. Returning to the literature, an explanation of the nature of the mediating effect of virtuality on discontinuities was developed using the concept of contextual ambidexterity as the basis for answering the research question.

The current trend in industry to move towards team-based organisational structures has resulted in an increased interest to seek innovative ways for managing team performance. In that sense, team performance measurement has been recognised as an effective management practice. This research departs from an industrial problem identified while working on a number of projects with industry - i. e. lack of understanding of how to design effective team-based performance measurement systems. The overall goal is to create a better understanding of the design of effective team-based performance measurement systems (TPMS). In particular, its aim is to gain new insights into (1) the process for designing effective TPMS and (2) the factors that enable and/or constrain the design of effective TPMS. An effective TPMS is defined here as a performance measurement system that enables the team to increase its contribution to the business and at the same time motivates and develops the team and its individuals. This study falls into the empirical and applied research category because it focuses on an industrial problem and provides a solution through continuous collaboration with industry. The following is the most significant contribution of this research: (1) A typology for TPMS design that describes the characteristics of a comprehensive process for designing TPMS. (2) The identification and description of ten factors that enable and/or constrain the development of effective TPMS. (3) A practical construct to enable industrial organisations to design effective TPMS. The quality of the research was ensured by defining the evaluation criteria and the specific research tactics early in the process. These criteria and tactics guided all the activities carried out during this study. This thesis will be of interest to managers, team leaders and indeed anyone who works in a team. Researchers working in the fields of performance measurement and team management will also benefit from this research.

Following the opening chapter, which surveys existing literature on the issue of the interaction between individual and group reputation, the remaining chapters each address a simple question to better understand how reputation affects outcomes and incentives. Specifically: Even though good and bad luck might affect short term reputations, do agents end up with the reputations that they deserve, that is one that reflects their genuine underlying ability. The central result of Chapter 2 is that, if the agent knows her own ability (though customers can only make inferences by observing history) then eventually the truth will out. How can an agent, who has proven her ability, commit to working hard. Once an agent has established a reputation then it is a tautology to say that she has no reputational concern. However, if effort is efficient she may want to commit to exerting effort and get adequately rewarded. Chapter 3 shows that one way that she may be able to do this is by hiring and working with a junior agent of uncertain ability. Do teams care any more or less about their reputations than individuals. Joint work with Juanjo Ganuza and introduced in Chapter 4 suggests that an important aspect in answering this question would be to determine whether an agent or team's reputational concerns are primarily about a concern to show itself to be excellent and capable in every task, or about a concern to avoid customers thinking that it is inept. How does industry structure affect a firm's ability to commit to producing high quality. The final chapter discusses this question and suggests that a number of different effects are in play so that there is no simple answer.

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