Today’s fast-paced and global market has added pressure on firm’s to constantly strengthen their competitive advantage. Over the last couple of years, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have become an increasingly used strategy for firms to acquire resources that cannot be developed internally. However, M&As often fail to achieve the initial purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate two research questions; RQ1: What are the effects on employees in a newly created multicultural team that is the outcome of a merger between two firms? and RQ2: How can managers manage these effects, in order to create a successful team integration?To gain understanding of the phenomena, and their respective connections, qualitative research has been conducted. Through a multiple case study design, and data collection in the form of interviews, empirical data was obtained. In total eight interviews were conducted with individuals originating from different roles and acquired firms. Their experiences and emotions were later analysed through thematic analysis and coding.The findings of this study add an additional layer to the conclusions of previous studies within the area of multicultural team integration, post-acquisition. Well-communicated integration strategies have been deemed important; this study confirms that statement. However, the findings of this study provide evidence that transparency should be considered an important dimension of the communication strategy, in order to increase employee satisfaction.

The advancements in technology have enabled contemporary organisations to work remotely, and this work structure is increasingly being adopted by more industries. This forces organisations to implement global virtual teams, that despite differences in geographic locations, time zones and cultures, are obligated to work towards organisational goals. It is possible to identify both opportunities and challenges for leaders within organisations. These can be viewed from various organisational perspectives, although one of the most recurring topics for leaders to consider when managing global virtual teams, is the notion of ​trust. ​Trust is argued to be one of the fundamental constituents for teams to work effectively. Even though the use of global virtual teams is becoming more prevalent, research on trust in regard to virtual teams is limited. Prior research argues that leadership is the key success factor for determining the level of trust in global virtual teams. 

    However, there is a research gap on specifically how leaders work in terms of the specific actions that are taken in order to facilitate for establishing trust. This case study therefore investigates how leaders establish trust in their geographically dispersed virtual teams. 

In order to answer this research question, nine leaders were interviewed through qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews.

As education evolves, leadership processes change. The concept of a single senior leader, with siloed divisions often providing direction, is transforming into a team-based culture. While there is substantive research on school-site leadership, research is limited on how the central organization impacts the system. It identified individual leadership characteristics but had not adequately addressed impact of a senior leadership team. This study addresses the concept of senior leadership teams with divisions and executives working collaboratively. It identifies characteristics of effective leadership teams to explore how they can be successfully created and sustained; and it investigates the senior leader’s role in, and what factors and methods can be replicated to sustain, team effectiveness. Four organizations participated: one school district, one government agency and two for-profit organizations. Twenty-five senior leaders and team members completed a DiSC and Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team assessment; a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis; and a hiring values survey. All were interviewed individually and as a group, and the structured and semi-structured instruments were chosen to explore group characteristics in such a way that the data would point to replicable information. Study elements, coupled with my expertise in team development and leadership, allowed me to critically consider data and identify three emerging themes. While aspects of these themes have been previously identified, they have not been linked as a pathway to creating and sustaining effective teams as a route to organizational excellence leading to student achievement. First, there is a strong relation between the factors of team culture, membership, and expectations and engagement as a foundation of an effective team. Second, crucial team management and engagement methods were identified as key to long-term sustainability. Third, the senior leader’s impact is significant to team success based on team leadership style and methodology. A paradigm emerged changing traditional leadership hierarchy to a new dynamic of leading from the center. The research indicates that deliberately designing teams may have greater potential for success and long-term effectiveness. Further research is encouraged to address issues relating to virtual teams and identify successful strategies in team building and implementation. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Humanities Education / PhD / Unrestricted

No description available.

Social loafing is a growing concern for modern organizations. With advancement in computer technology, virtual tools are used more frequently to communicate, which may allow social loafing to occur in new and unfamiliar forms. The intent of this thesis is to examine social loafing through the use of virtual tools, and to analyze whether collective orientation has a moderating influence on the relationship between social loafing and virtuality. 30 teams, each containing four participants, were randomly assigned to a condition of virtuality (i.e., instant messaging or videoconferencing). Participants then completed a computer simulation task in which social loafing, collective orientation of the team, and team performance were measured.

Trust is gaining attention for its benefits to both teams and organizations as a whole (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012). The difficulty of building it in comparison to the ease of destroying it calls for a deeper understanding of trust, as well as its relationship with critical team outcomes (Colquitt, LePine, Piccolo, Zapata, & Rich, 2012). Unfortunately, current research has progressed in a disjointed manner that requires the integration of findings before a more parsimonious and descriptive understanding of trust at the team-level can be developed. Beyond this basic understanding, research is needed to explore the nature of trust in teams comprised of diverse members, as multi-national, multi-cultural, and interdisciplinary teams are increasingly characterizing the modern landscape. Thus, this article uses meta-analytic techniques to examine the extent to which mutual trust can serve as an underlying mechanism that drives the diversity-team performance relationship. First, surface-level and deep-level diversity characteristics varied in their impact on trust. Value diversity emerged as the most detrimental, along with the moderating effect of time. Second, 95 independent samples comprising 5,721 teams emphasized the importance of trust to team performance with a moderate and positive relationship. Third, mediation analyses answered recent calls (e.g., van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007) to examine underlying mechanisms that can explain the diversity-outcomes relationship. This showed age, gender, value, and function diversity to be related to performance through mutual trust. Furthermore, this study explores whether contextual (e.g., team distribution) as well as measurement (e.g., referent) issues pose systematic differences in the diversity-trust and trust-performance relationships. Surprisingly, the construct of trust at the team-level proved to be generalizable across a number of unique conditions. In addition to this extensive quantitative review, implications and future research are discussed.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Multi-robot systems (MRSs) have gained significant momentum as of late in the robotics community as they find application in tasks such as unknown environment exploration, distributed surveillance, and search and rescue. Operating robot teams in real world environments introduces a notion of uncertainty into the system, especially when it comes to the ability of the MRS to reliably communicate. This poses a significant challenge as a stable communication topology is the backbone of the team's ability to coordinate. Additionally, as these systems continue to evolve and integrate further into our society, a growing threat of adversarial attackers pose the risk of compromising nominal operation. As such, this dissertation aims to model the effects of uncertainty in communication on the topology of the MRS using a probabilistic interaction model. More specifically we are interested in studying a probabilistic perspective to those topologies that pertain to the security and resilience of an MRS against adversarial attacks. Having a model that is capable of capturing how probabilistic topologies may evolve over time is essential for secure and resilient planning under communication uncertainty. As a result, we develop probabilistic models, both exact and approximate, for the topological properties of system left-invertibility and (r, s)-robustness that respectively characterize the security and resilience of an MRS. In our modeling, we use binary decision diagrams, convolutional neural networks, matroid theory and more to tackle the problems related to probabilistic security and resilience where we find exact solutions, calculate bounds, solve optimization problems, and compute informative paths for exploration. / Doctor of Philosophy / When robots coordinate and interact together to achieve a collaborative task as a team, we obtain what is known as a multi-robot system or MRS for short. MRSs have several advantages over single robots. These include reliability through redundancy, where several robots can perform a given task in case one of the robots unexpectedly fails. The ability to work faster and more efficiently by working in parallel and at different locations. And taking on more complex tasks that can be too demanding for a single robot to complete. Unfortunately, the advantages of MRSs come at a cost, they are generally harder to coordinate, the action of one robot often depends on the action of other robots in the system, and they are more vulnerable to being attacked or exploited by malicious attackers who want to disrupt nominal operation. As one would expect, communication plays a very important roles in coordinating a team of robots. Unfortunately, robots operating in real world environments are subject to disturbances such as noise, obstacles, and interference that hinders the team's ability to effectively exchange information. In addition to being crucial in coordination, effective information exchange plays a major role in detecting and avoiding adversarial robots. Whenever misinformation is being spread in the team, the best way to counter such adversarial behavior is to communicate with as much well-behaving robots as possible to identity and isolate inconsistencies. In this dissertation we try to study how uncertainty in communication affects a system's ability to detect adversarial behavior, and how we can model such a phenomenon to help us account for these uncertainties when designing secure and resilient multi-robot systems.