The purpose of this study, a quasi experimental design, was to investigate the relationship between team leader behavior and team performance and satisfaction. This field research tested leader behavior dimensions from two theoretical models of team effectiveness: Hackman's (1992) "expert available coaching," and Cohen's (1994) "encouraging supervisory behaviors." The relationship between coaching behaviors and team performance, employee, and customer satisfaction was assessed. Manager behavior was assessed with the SMT Leader Survey (Burress, 1994), an instrument determined appropriate for team environments, that measures Communication, Administration, Leadership, Interpersonal Skills, Thinking, and Flexibility. Employee satisfaction and performance information was archival data provided by the organization. The results demonstrated that leader behavior is a less important component of team effectiveness than initially expected. Even though direct customer interaction was 25% of these manager jobs and considered the organization's most important predictor of corporate profitability, no relationship between leader behavior and customer satisfaction was found. Among the key findings was, that while flexibility differentiated leader behavior more than any other scale, its relationship with both team performance and team satisfaction was negative. Interpersonal skills were positively associated with team performance, while leadership was positively associated with team performance and satisfaction. The SMT data were factor analyzed and formed into three factors. Two were historical leadership constructs: consideration (which correlated positively with employee satisfaction) and structure. A third factor, decisiveness, was negatively related to team performance. This research determined some essential skills for managing high performance teams and improving employee satisfaction. The results indicate that managers in a team environment may need to alter their roles if high performance and employee satisfaction are organizational objectives. Possibilities include building and developing the corporation's business, creating in depth relationships with customers, and establishing alliances and partnerships with other organizations. These roles will require new manager skills which have the potential to increase manager job satisfaction and augment manager value to the corporation.

There is a lack of academic research on sales teams, despite team selling becoming more prominent in recent years. Particularly in Inside Sales, there is a lack of clarity as to what are the drivers of optimum team-based selling and their degree of effect on sales performance. We utilize a team-based approach that aims to study the characteristics of Inside Sales teams and their interactions with business leads, using data from a well-reputed leads management software vendor. Based on prior team-based constructs in the literature, we built a framework that posits Quality of Team Composition, Task Utility and Intra-team Coordination leading to different categories of sales performance at various stages of the sales pipeline via their reflective variables. We tested our conceptual model in the following fashion: first, we used text mining on sales results to classify the different stages of the sales pipeline. Following that, we measured the conversion ratio at each stage as appropriate. Next, we discretized each conversion ratio into three levels of performance groups. The outcome variables in the model are different categories of team performance at each stage of the sales pipeline. Subsequently, we used multinomial logistic regression to regress our outcome variables on our team-based predictor variables in the hopes of establishing and validating important drivers for nuanced Inside Sales success. We uncovered new insight regarding team-selling best practices, using pre-identified constructs from the literature which are uniquely suited to teams and also constructs which are aggregated at a team level from an individual level. Our study is especially relevant to the Inside Sales process, as the outcome measures relate to the sales pipeline. Our main finding was that in there is a difference in skills required at different stages of the sales pipeline, in that more customization and experience is needed at the more advanced stages, whereas more repetition of activity is needed at the beginner stages. We also found that smaller team sizes tend to do better in Inside Sales, which was an unsettled research question in team research with plenty of evidence in favor of both smaller and bigger teams. Additionally, even if it was not a primary goal of our study, by virtue of classifying the leads by their final outcomes, we stumbled across an interesting finding, which is that an overwhelming majority of the sales leads tend to stay at one stage in their entire lifecycle. The implications of all our findings are very relevant to both practitioners and researchers of Inside Sales who are interested in team-based sales optimization. More research should be done in the field of Industrial Marketing, building upon what we found to be true for the B2B sector.

Background: Internet of Things is one of the most important areas of future technology and countless of industries are directing attention towards it. IoT has now started to appear in the sport industry. One sport that has not been investigated to the same extent within the terms of IoT is ice hockey. Problem Statement: Numerous teams in ice hockey have not yet realized the impact IoT may have on their team performance. With an absence in research on the use of IoT in the Swedish ice hockey industry, there is a knowledge gap on how Swedish ice hockey teams can grasp this opportunity and the main factors that affect their adoption. Research Purpose: IoT creates an opportunity for Swedish ice hockey teams to achieve a competitive advantage and thus a chance to gain new grounds in managing their teams. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate to what extent teams in the Swedish Hockey League are using IoT devices and explore the factors affecting the adoption process. Research Questions: To what extent are IoT devices used by teams in the Swedish Hockey League to increase teams’ performance? What main factors affect the adoption of IoT devices into teams in the Swedish Hockey League? Method: With an inductive approach, this qualitative research explores the IoT phenomenon in the context of ice hockey in SHL. With semi-structured interviews, this research gather data from the perspectives of seven SHL teams on IoT. By using a conventional content analysis, the data collected is categorized and divided into themes. Results: The use of IoT devices in SHL is low. The interest to adopt IoT devices is shared amongst many interview participants. When conducting the conventional content analysis on the data gathered from the interviews, certain themes became evident. The findings could be traced down to either their attitude, their competence within the field or their resources. Conclusion: The Internet of Things is changing the way professional sport teams are managed, coached, and led. The benefits that could be harvested from adopting IoT devices are undeniable, but there are several factors that facilitate a successful adoption. The culture and atmosphere in the organization, the skills and know-how, and the financial situation are all important parts of a successful adoption.

Due to globalization and increasing complexity within the business environment, teams have become a way of life for many organizations in order to generate higher performance and sustain competitive advantage. Organizations, however, may fail to fully benefit from teams despite all the investment and efforts that they make. Herein, we believe that a possible way to cope with these failures might be establishing an understanding that individuals’, particularly team members’ need for autonomy within teams through accomplishing self-discipline and managing their emotions and behaviors. Therefore, our purpose in this study is to investigate the relationship between individuals’ emotional intelligence and their self-leadership ability in the context of team performance. In line with this purpose, we find plausible to employ conceptual research approach in order to build an integrated and logical model, with proposed hypotheses, which could be used as a departure point for the researchers and their empirical studies in the future. Through this model, we argue that individuals’ emotional intelligence has a positive impact on the self-leadership ability and its three strategies, which are behavior focus strategy, natural reward strategy, and constructive thought patterns strategy, by managing and regulating one’s own and other’s emotions. Hence, as suggested, the association of emotional intelligence and self-leadership can influence team communication, team trust, team learning and team creativity positively thus it may enhance the overall team performance.

In this study, I investigated the precursors and the outcomes of team resilience. In contrast to many resilience studies, which focus on low-probability, high-impact challenges, I investigated resilience in the face of high-frequency, low-impact challenges that teams can face in their operational environments. I conducted an extensive literature analysis of the field of resilience and on the basis of this constructed a model of team resilience by integrating insights from high reliability organizing, positive organizational scholarship, sensemaking and disaster resilience studies. I then tested and improved this model through an exploratory study of team behaviour in two 'Escape Game' settings in which teams of 5 people worked through a series of puzzles under time-constrained and somewhat stressful conditions. Following the exploratory study, I developed the resilience model into an operationalizable format and tested it using seven runs of a simulation study involving 547 individuals in 68 teams. In the simulation, teams had to work both quickly and accurately whilst adapting to the changing conditions of a turbulent, competitive environment. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected on various team attributes, team resilience and team performance. I have used quantitative data as the main source of analysis and qualitative data as a supporting tool. Self-completion questionnaires, objective performance indicators, direct observation and post-simulation team and individual reflections were among the data collection tools that were used to obtain data. Team resilience shows highly significant associations with a range of objective measures of team performance. In turn, resilience is supported by several team attributes, including collective mental models, effective channels of communication and systems of information gathering and team cohesion. When teams faced challenges outside of their existing action repertoires their ability to improvise also contributed to resilience. Finally, when teams overcame (novel) challenges, this fed back into their accumulated knowledge through collective learning, enriching action repertoires. Together, these features bestow teams with resilience, which, in turn, enables them to overcome disturbances that might otherwise impede operational performance. In its final form, my resilience model serves as an explanation of the mechanisms of resilience and identifies its antecedents and outcomes. It can inform teams operating in uncertain, ambiguous and volatile work conditions about the capacities and capabilities they need in order to create and sustain resilience in daily operations.

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. These competitive demands have forced many organizations to increase levels of flexibility and adaptability through the use of virtual environments, and global teams are prevalent in business organizations. Although significant research has been conducted on virtual teams, the development of shared understanding among the members of these teams has not been studied adequately. Time/space barriers, communication complexities, and team diversity hinder the development of shared understanding in these teams. Based on the Media Synchronicity Theory (MST), a new theoretical model was created that used the constructs use of communication media, mode of interaction and team diversity to ascertain the influence shared understanding in global virtual teams. Additionally, the research model examined the relationship between shared understanding and team performance. The developed, web-based survey measured the participants’ use of communication media, mode of interaction, diversity, shared understanding, and team performance in virtual environments. The survey was administered through SurveyMonkey and distributed to a pool of opt-in respondents from firms with virtual teams. A total of 118 respondents participated in the study. The findings of this study indicate that use of communication and familiarity with systems are strong determinants of shared understanding, and subsequently shared understanding is a strong predictor of team performance. The study also indicates that mode of interaction is less of a predictor of shared understanding, and that cultural diversity, modified diversity construct, did not influence shared understanding. As virtual teams continue to proliferate, executive leaders and managers must ensure that teams and environments are designed for collaboration through use of communication technologies that promote synchronicity, and that its members are familiar with systems which subsequently promotes shared understanding.

Virtual teams improve organizational performance and competitiveness because they reduce business travel and allow team members to work from anywhere, anytime, using the Internet to complete projects. Although researchers have identified benefits of using virtual teams, knowledge about how cultural backgrounds influence virtual team performance is limited. Illuminating this relationship may help leadership improve team performance. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of team members with different cultural backgrounds to understand their effect on team performance. The research questions were based on the conceptual framework of organizational cultural theories developed by Schein and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner. Interview questions were electronically distributed to a purposeful sample of 20 participants who worked on virtual teams and could describe their lived experiences. Data were collected, coded using open and axial techniques, and analyzed for themes and patterns. Key themes emerged such as cultural backgrounds, language barriers, communication, conflict, and use of information technology. Findings included techniques for improving communications, understanding different cultural backgrounds, and the satisfaction of team members. Implications for positive social change include an improved understanding among virtual team leaders regarding how different cultural backgrounds influence team performance. Results of this study may benefit organizations by helping them better manage the performance of multicultural virtual teams, thereby leading to improved product development and reduced costs associated with activities such as business travel and remote work.

The Department of Defense's (DoD's) budgetary and personnel challenges are affecting readiness, thus encouraging the use of effective teams to improve efficiency. This qualitative, descriptive case study examined how public sector DoD members experienced characteristics of high-performing teams (HPTs), defined by their members' shared sense of purpose, interdependent commitment, and exceptional team effectiveness. The documentation of these experiences may aid other DoD teams seeking to improve performance. Lewin and Sherif's theories on group dynamics, Johnson and Johnson's theory on groups, Katzenbach and Smith's theory of HPTs, and Edmondson's work on teams comprised the theoretical framework. Thirty-nine public sector DoD members provided responses to semistructured questions that were developed to seek insights into DoD members' team experiences and practices. Data were analyzed and categorized based on codes derived from the literature. Emergent themes from participant responses confirmed that public sector DoD team members experienced some characteristics of HPTs. Study participants perceived that these teams made positive organizational impacts, but transferring knowledge about these teams' best practices was inconsistent. These findings may contribute to positive social change by improving awareness among DoD practitioners about related HPT benefits and practices; informing public policy makers and practitioners about the value of HPTs in increasing financial and operational efficiencies; improving managerial quality and team experiences; encouraging innovation, openness, and action; and fostering an high-quality DoD workforce exemplifying long-term commitment to excellence and continuous improvement.

The overarching goal of the proposed study is to develop and test a mediated multi-level model of leadership emergence in virtual teams, which aims to better understand not only the processes that result in leadership emergence in self-managed virtual teams, but also how patterns of emergent leadership and team member dispersion can impact team performance in collaborative activities. Virtual teams, which can be defined as "a collection of individuals who are geographically and/or organizationally or otherwise dispersed and who collaborate via communication and information technologies in order to accomplish a specific goal" (Zigurs, 2003), continue to grow in importance as to how organizations function in the 21st century (Hertel, Konradt, & Orlikowski, 2004; Lipnack & Stamps, 2000), and the benefits to companies and individuals are numerous. For employees, virtual teamwork offers flexibility in work-life balance, a decrease in time spent in travel and commuting, and a greater range of work-related opportunities and experiences, particularly for individuals with physical disabilities. For organizations, virtual teams offer cost savings on office space and travel, an increased knowledge base and accelerated organizational learning, access to a wider range of expertise and qualified labor, and increased productivity (Jude-York, Davis, & Wise, 2000; Gillam & Oppenheim, 2006). The model to be tested in the proposed study is predicated on the input--mediator--output--input (IMOI) model proposed by Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt (2005). Also, heeding the recent call for researchers to better incorporate the potential of attribution theory (see Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1973; Weiner, 1986) in explaining organizational behavior (Martinko, Harvey, & Dasborough, 2010), the interpersonal attribution model proposed by Gilbert & Malone (1995) is applied within the IMOI framework for the purposes of this study. At the individual level, the model provides a theoretical linkage between communication behaviors and several outcomes, including team member perceptions/attributions and, ultimately, emergent leadership. At the team level, the model also incorporates the effect of leadership pattern differences across teams, as well as differences in level of virtuality, on overall team performance. Based on the results of an experiment involving 86 four-person teams, it was found that configuration and collocation have significant effects on team performance and peer perceptions of individual team members. A curvilinear relationship was found between the level of dispersion among team members and team performance, such that performance generally decreased as team dispersion increased, yet performance improved at the high end of the dispersion continuum. Collocation also had strong positive effects on perceptions of trust, ability, and leadership emergence. In terms of the relationships between communication-related behaviors and emergent leadership, task-based communications proved to be the strongest predictor of emergent leadership. The use of texting language was positively associated with perceptions of leadership emergence as well. These results have significant practical implications for the design of virtual teams from both a team configuration and a team member skills/individual differences perspective. Several avenues of future research are also discussed.

Teams are pervasive in organizations and provide an important contribution to organizational productivity. Since Hackman's (1987) seminal work, the team research focus has shifted from describing teams to outlining how researchers might use points of leverage, such as team design, to increase team effectiveness. There has been a wealth of research on team design variables that relate to team effectiveness. However, more than 15 years later, the team design literature remains fragmented and is inconsistent, and conclusions regarding optimal team design are difficult to make. The present study sought to unify the team design research by proposing a conceptual model and testing hypothesized relationships between specified design variables and team effectiveness using meta-analytic techniques. Specifically, the objectives of this study were to: (a) identify team design variables over which researchers and practitioners have some degree of control, (b) summarize the literature related to each of these variables, (c) hypothesize how each of the design variables are related to team effectiveness, (d) assess the relationship between these variables and team effectiveness using meta-analysis, (e) assess the influence of specified moderator variables (e.g., study setting, team tenure) on the team design variable/team effectiveness relationships, (f) make theoretically- and empirically-based recommendations for the design of effective teams, and (g) highlight areas in need of additional research. Results indicated that several team design variables show promise as a means of increasing team effectiveness. The strength of the team composition variable/team performance relationships was dependent on the study setting (lab or field); however, the study setting had considerable overlap with the type of team assessed (intellectual or physical). For lab studies (intellectual teams), team general mental ability (GMA) and task-relevant expertise were strong predictors of team performance, while team personality variables were unrelated to team performance. In field studies (physical teams), team agreeableness and conscientiousness had stronger relationships with team performance than team GMA and team task-relevant expertise. Team task design variables (e.g., task significance) had consistent, positive relationships with team performance, and several team structure variables (e.g., degree of self- management) were also related to team performance.