Industrial Team Research Articles

Developing team performance: the double-edged nature of justice

This study bridges social cognitive theory and Turner’s theory of social interaction to develop a model that explains how work teams in technology industry can be motivated to enhance team performance. The prevalence of the use of work teams in technology industry environments has enhanced the importance of studying the processes involved in their performance development. For that reason, this study uses data from team workers in high-tech firms in Taiwan, and shows that collective efficacy positively relates to team performance via the mediation of social interaction. Furthermore, justice positively moderates the relationship between collective humility and social interaction but negatively moderates the relationship between collective efficacy and social interaction. Lastly, managerial implications and research limitations based on the empirical results are provided.

The Cross-Level Effect of Shared Leadership on Tourism Employee Proactive Behavior and Adaptive Performance

Shared leadership has emerged as a new style that has been proven to contribute to employee performance. However, the underlying mechanism of shared leadership on employee performance and its possible correlates have not received sufficient academic attention in the literature. To narrow the related research gaps, the current study aims to establish a multi-level framework incorporating shared leadership, team reflexivity and employee performance, and examined the cross-level mediation mechanism between shared leadership and adaptive performance. A questionnaire survey consisting of 301 valid employees’ samples from 31 work teams in the hotel industry in China validated the proposed model. Multilevel analysis with Mplus was applied. The current study found that shared leadership positively influences team reflexivity, and share leadership influences employee’s adaptive performance through proactive behavior. The current study sheds light on the role of shared leadership in tourism organizations. The practical implications regarding how to improve the organizational environment to enhance productivity are further discussed.

Finding Common Ground: HR Manager and Line Manager Alignment on Climate and Innovation Performance

Both HR managers and line managers play a significant role in implementing espoused organizational HR practices, yet these two entities often hold different views of both the intended and implemented practices within the organization. To date, the research literature is not clear about how either alignment or misalignment of the perceptions of these important groups affects HR practice implementation or downstream performance outcomes. Using HR system strength theory as a theoretical guide, this study leverages the concept of consensus amongst HR managers and line managers to determine if alignment affects the innovation performance of new product development (NPD) teams in the Chinese automotive industry. Specifically, the paper examines the effects of alignment on innovation performance through important mediating variables: climate for cooperation and climate for innovation. Drawing upon a sample of NPD units in 73 firms, we find that both innovative climate and cooperative climate are significantly higher when HR managers’ and NPD managers’ perceptions of HR practices are aligned rather than when they are misaligned. Under the condition of perceptual misalignment, higher levels of innovative and cooperative climates are observed when NPD managers report higher implementation of HR practices than when HR managers report higher levels. Moreover, we find that innovative climate significantly mediates the relationship between HR practice perception alignment and NPD performance. A similar result was not found for cooperative climate. The findings further advance HR system strength theory and demonstrate the importance of managerial alignment in practice implementation.

Adaptation and Transformation: Transition in a Self-organizing Team

This study looks into a less explored question - how does a self-organizing team initiate and implement changes – when the capacity of spontaneously generating transition and transformation is usually assumed in the literature of self-organization. I examine this inquiry through an inductive theory-building approach. On basis of single-case longitudinal design, I conducted an in-depth, ethnography oriented study with a product development team in the software industry. The study showed that, the nuanced dynamic consisting of contingency enactment, dialectical processes of tensions, and linkage between design conception and synchronized practices constitutes the mechanism of transition in a self-organizing team.

Pozytywne relacje interpersonalne a dzielenie się wiedzą w zespołach menedżerów najwyższego szczebla

The aim of the article is to determine the relatedness between the quality of interpersonal relationships, measured by the level of their positivity, with knowledge sharing among members of the top management teams (TMT). The analyses primarily concerned the relatedness between interpersonal relationships and a) the declared individual tendency to share knowledge, b) the motives of knowledge sharing among members of the surveyed teams, c) the forms of knowledge sharing. The empirical basis of the article is a CATI research on a sample of 123 managers who are members of decision-making teams in the furniture industry in Poland. The results obtained suggest that knowledge sharing within management teams is related to the level of positive interpersonal relationships of their members. These relationships strengthen the intrinsic motivation to share knowledge, reducing the importance of extrinsic motivators, as well as foster informal and direct forms of knowledge sharing, reducing the importance of institutionalized forms.

The Moderating Effects of Dynamic Capability on Radical Innovation and Incremental Innovation Teams in the Global Pharmaceutical Biotechnology Industry

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a quantitative, integrative and systematic literature review of the moderating effects of dynamic capability associated with radical innovation and incremental innovation teams in the global pharmaceutical biotechnology industry. This paper utilizes a conceptual framework of dynamic capability and socio-technical theory to underpin the study. The study includes 250 articles which were originally surveyed, and then a final selection of 66 articles was based on a structured coding system. The study outcome reveals that knowledge sharing strengthens existing professional knowledge and enhances internal work coordination and consistency in employees’ behavior, and effectively integrates diverse team knowledge and experience. Open innovation has a positive effect on radical innovation and enables knowledge acquisition to form a symbiotic relationship with knowledge sharing. Learning orientation has a stronger effect on incremental innovation than on radical innovation. The limitations of the study are related to a systematic literature review for this research does not establish causality. The mediating effects of dynamic capability on teams are not explored for this research. The implications for management are as follows, teams must be given the autonomy to make decisions from a technical perspective. Tacit knowledge, open innovation, knowledge acquisition and learning orientation are areas in which priority must be given during and after acquisitions in the pharmaceutical biotechnology industry.

No-Blame Culture and the Effectiveness of Project-Based Design Teams in the Construction Industry: The Mediating Role of Teamwork

AbstractThis study investigates how a no-blame culture affects the effectiveness of project-based design teams across different project delivery methods in the construction industry. Ninety-two tea...

Unremarkable but Crucial: Motivating Employees in Business as Usual Work

‘Business as usual’ (BAU) tasks refers to the daily, mundane but necessary operational tasks performed by companies both large and small. While technology and automation have gone a large way towards reducing its necessity, some tasks still need to be performed by a human. Employees have typically shunned such roles as uninteresting, unrewarding, and unlikely to lead to career growth or recognition within the company. This in turn leads to low levels of motivation when performing such tasks, giving rise to a greater risk of mistakes being made, poor performance, or turnover as employees shun such work. This paper examines one typical team in the Singapore finance industry, highlighting the difficulties of motivating employees in performing such unremarkable but crucial tasks, and proposing some possible solutions that may be adopted. It is hoped that this article will give some insight to line managers in how to motivate employees to perform unremarkable but crucial BAU tasks.

Data driven update to industry Life-Saving Rules

The International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) is a global forum in which member companies identify and share best practices to achieve improvements in many areas including upstream safety. The IOGP first published Life-Saving Rules in 2010, having based the choice of topics covered and actions recommended on an analysis of 1484 fatal incident reports and 1173 high potential event reports collected through IOGP’s annual Safety Performance Indicators. In 2017, IOGP launched an initiative called Project Safira with the aim of eliminating fatalities; one of the work streams within this project was to refresh, simplify and reduce the number of industry Life-Saving Rules to encourage industry standardisation. An industry team of subject matter experts, health, safety and environment (HSE) and operations professionals conducted a comprehensive analysis of the latest 10 years of fatality data and streamlined the original 18 rules down to nine, while retaining the level of applicability in fatality prevention and incorporating the latest thinking on human performance and lessons learned from member companies’ experiences in implementation of similar programs. The Life-Saving Rules are not intended to replace company HSE management systems but rather to complement existing organisational processes and procedures. The rules provide simple actions, in the form of ‘I statements’ which can provide a final barrier that individuals have control over, using their own actions to prevent fatalities. From 2008 to 2017, 376 workers lost their lives in incidents that may have been prevented by following one of the new nine IOGP Life-Saving Rules.

Managing tolerance stack-up through process integration team in steel industry

Managing tolerance stack-up through process integration team in steel industry

Fan Identification, Brand Community Identification, and Oppositional Brand Loyalty towards Sponsors of a Rival Sports Team: The Mediating Role of Schadenfreude

Empirical evidence confirms that brand loyalty is broadly understood in the context of positive side i.e. supportive loyalty compared to negative side i.e. oppositional loyalty. However, theoretically positive (supportive) loyalty cannot be explained exclusively without considering negative (oppositional) loyalty. This study, therefore, examines brand loyalty using a triadic approach combining both negative and positive loyalty in the cycle of love and hate relationship. Specifically, the study examined the influence of fan and brand community identification on oppositional brand loyalty towards sponsors of a rival team in sports industry. A survey cross-sectional research design was adopted, through collecting data using semi-structured questionnaire from 228 highly identified fans of two giant sports teams in Tanzania namely Simba Sports Club and Young Africans Sports Club. The collected data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), and findings revealed that fan and brand community identification have a strong positive significant influence on oppositional brand loyalty towards sponsors of a rival team when mediated with schadenfreude. Therefore, business firms should take precautions when embarking on sponsorship of highly competing sports teams. Finally, this study adopted a quantitative approach, hence further studies that adopt a qualitative approach is recommended to get a naturalistic picture of subject under the study. Additionally, a comparative study is recommended to compare level of resistance loyalty exhibited by fans of each team.

Filtered prioritized and cluster-based optimization towards correction of antipatterns

When systems evolve, the maintainability and the complexity of the system increase, resulting in the poor antidesign patterns or antipatterns in software maintenance. Refactoring is an operation used to improve the structure of an existing system by changing its internal structure without affecting its external behavior. Many studies revealed that refactoring is underused by software development team in industry due to its increased effort and lack of knowledge about existing approaches. Thus, a prioritized correction of antipatterns based on relevance of classes, analyzed development history, risk to refactor, minimized code changes, and maintainers context and preferences is needed for good refactoring recommendations. We propose an approach based on filtered relevant classes with generic linkage-based clustering and adapted nondominated sorting genetic algorithm III to find good refactoring recommendations, which maximize the software quality and reduce the refactoring effort. Our approach uses our own node centrality-based sub-graph isomorphism algorithm to dynamically understand the system with good accuracy prior to optimization. Our approach is evaluated on six open-source systems and the results have shown the effectiveness of our approach compared to the other existing ones.

Celebrating industry’s impact

Four industrial teams whose work has improved the lives of people around the world through advancements in printing, pharmaceuticals, and automotive paint were honored with the 2019 Heroes of Chemistry Award during the American Chemical Society national meeting in San Diego in August. The winning teams are from DuPont; Paratek Pharmaceuticals; Pharmacyclics, an AbbVie company; and PPG Industries. Started in 1996, the Heroes of Chemistry Award is ACS’s most prestigious honor for industrial chemists, who make up approximately half of ACS’s membership. Here’s a look at the teams being honored this year: DuPont: Cyrel Easy The DuPont team’s development of the Cyrel Easy flexographic printing plate technology has led to higher ink densities and color saturation, as well as improved print quality and consistency. Applications include more vibrant and eye-catching consumer product packaging, such as wine bottle labels, potato chip bags, and juice boxes. Like the modern-day version of a

Leadership Capability Framework for the Construction Industry Leaders in Malaysia

This study aims to identify the leadership capabilities for Malaysia construction industry team leaders. This research apllied exploratory sequential mix-method research design where is qualitative followed by quantitative method. In the first phase, semi-structured interview was used and purposive sampling was employed in selecting 15 research participants. Team leaders and Human Resource Managers were selectetd to be reseach participants of this study. Qualitative data was analysed using content and thematic analyses. Quantitative data was collected using survey questionnaire involving 171 randomly selected team leaders as respondents. The data was examined using descriptive and inferential statistics consisting of t-test, One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson Correlation, Multiple Regression and Structured Equation Modeling (SEM). This research found that personal integrity, working within industry, customer focus and quality, communication and interpersonal skill, developing and empowering people and working as a team were required leadership capabilities among construction industry team leaders. Findings also indicated that leadership skills was the important element to develop leadership capability. A framework developed can be used as a guide by employers in improving leadership capability of Malaysia construction industry team leader.

How to develop therapeutic and translational research collaborations with industry.

Discovery and development of new medicines requires the talent and passion of both academic and industrial scientists. Identifying the optimal set of circumstances for direct collaboration between academic and industry teams requires a mutual understanding of what each partner brings to the relationship, and an appreciation of the specialized capabilities and scope of work to be undertaken by each group. We provide our perspective on the who, what, where, why, and how for establishing therapeutic and translational research collaborations between academic and industry scientists.

A Balanced Perspective on Prediction and Inference for Data Science in Industry

The strategic role of data science teams in industry is fundamentally to help businesses to make smarter decisions. This includes decisions on minuscule scales, such as what fraction of a cent to bid on an ad placement displayed in a web browser, whose importance is only manifest when scaled by orders of magnitude through machine automation. But it also extends to singular, monumental decisions made by businesses, such as how to position a new entrant within a competitive market. In both regimes, the potential impact of data science is only realized when both humans and machine actors are learning from data and when data scientists communicate effectively to decision makers throughout the business. I examine this dynamic through the instructive lens of the duality between inference and prediction. I define these concepts, which have varied use across many fields, in practical terms for the industrial data scientist. Through a series of descriptions, illustrations, contrasting concepts, and examples from the entertainment industry (box office prediction and advertising attribution), I offer perspectives on how the concepts of inference and prediction manifest in the business setting. From a balanced perspective, prediction and inference are integral components of the process by which models are compared to data. However, through a textual analysis of research abstracts from the literature, I demonstrate that an imbalanced, prediction-oriented perspective prevails in industry and has likewise become increasingly dominant among quantitative academic disciplines. I argue that, despite these trends, data scientists in industry must not overlook the valuable, generalizable insights that can be extracted through statistical inference. I conclude by exploring the implications of this strategic choice for how data science teams are integrated in businesses.

Agile risk management for multi‐cloud software development

Industry in all sectors is experiencing a profound digital transformation that puts software at the core of their businesses. In order to react to continuously changing user requirements and dynamic markets, companies need to build robust workflows that allow them to increase their agility in order to remain competitive. This increasingly rapid transformation, especially in domains like IoT or Cloud computing, poses significant challenges to guarantee high quality software, since dynamism and agile short-term planning reduce the ability to detect and manage risks. In this paper, we describe the main challenges related to managing risk in agile software development, building on the experience of more than 20 agile coaches operating continuously for 15 years with hundreds of teams in industries in all sectors. We also propose a framework to manage risks that considers those challenges and supports collaboration, agility, and continuous development. An implementation of that framework is then described in a tool that handles risks and mitigation actions associated with the development of multi-cloud applications. The methodology and the tool have been validated by a team of evaluators that were asked to consider its use in developing an urban smart mobility service and an airline flight scheduling system.

Do Student Trials Predict What Professionals Value in Sustainable Design Practices?

When teaching sustainable design in industry or academia, we should teach design methods, activities, and mindsets that are most effective at driving real change in a industry. However, most studies of design practices are performed on students, not on professionals. How strongly do student perceptions of value predict those of industry teams designing real products? This study provided workshops on three sustainable design methods (The Natural Step, Whole System Mapping, and Biomimicry) for 172 professionals and 204 students, applying the methods to their actual products being developed. It surveyed both populations about which activities or mindsets within each design method provided sustainability value, innovation value, and overall value. Quantitatively, student results did not strongly predict professional opinions; professionals chose clearer favorites and valued more things. However, qualitatively, student results did predict the reasons why professionals would value the design activities and mindsets. Therefore, care should be taken to choose appropriate participants for the questions being asked in sustainable design research.

ACS honors industrial teams with 2019 Heroes of Chemistry Award

Four teams of industrial chemical scientists from Paratek Pharmaceuticals, DuPont, Pharmacyclics, and PPG Industries have won the 2019 Heroes of Chemistry Award, the American Chemical Society’s highest honor for industrial chemical scientists. The teams will be honored during the fall ACS national meeting in San Diego. Started in 1996, the Heroes program recognizes industrial chemical scientists whose innovative work has led to the development of commercially successful products involving chemistry for the benefit of humankind. “The 2019 ACS Heroes of Chemistry have demonstrated an exceptional degree of creativity and technical achievement in developing successful commercial products that improve the lives of people worldwide,” says ACS president Bonnie A. Charpentier, adding that the advancements in pharmacology, automotive coating, and printing will “benefit both patients and consumers and once again shine a spotlight on the chemical sciences as a driving force of innovation.” The team from Paratek Phar...

Effectiveness of knowledge transfer between project team members in digitally disrupted organizations

Research question: The study aims to extend and deepen the understanding of maturity level of knowledge transfer effectiveness between project team members in an organization in which disruptive innovations and external forces foster acceleration of various types of changes within organization. Motivation / Idea: Banks in Serbia are characterized by dominant functional organizational structure in which knowledge is acquired and stored in well-established departments and branches. On the other hand, the banking sector in Serbia is going through transformation mainly due to external forces that accelerate significant changes, at the same time implying meaningful increase in number and types of projects which are becoming increasingly demanding and complex. These factors further imply a shift from functionally-based operations to project-based operations. A radical shift of temporary organization from functionally-oriented to project-oriented foster new challenges when knowledge transformation is in question. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to research predictors for knowledge transfer success between project teams and to reveal major barriers to knowledge transfer effectiveness in the banking sector. Data / Tools: This paper opted for a survey research method and the sampling frame includes 13 banks that operate in Serbia. Findings: Research results show that knowledge transformation between project team members is low. Moreover, very dynamic circumstances, projects complexity and tight deadlines create new challenges when knowledge transfer effectiveness is in question. Accordingly, research results show that organizational understanding, valuing and adequate support for knowledge acquisition and transfer represent significant indicators for knowledge transfer success within project teams in the banking industry of Serbia. Besides, individual readiness, efforts, capabilities and history of successful knowledge transfer play an important role in knowledge transformation success. Finally, regression analysis output disclosed that all observed aspects, i.e., characteristics of knowledge transfer, individual and organizational aspects represent significant simultaneous predictors for knowledge transfer success between project teams in the banking sector of Serbia. Contribution: The paper contributes to enriching the literature on knowledge transfer between project teams in an industry’s, country’s and regional contexts that have been poorly addressed so far. By focusing on this phenomenon, the paper contributes to project managers, strategic managers and policy makers by addressing the gap between importance of knowledge transfer in one hand, and poor project outcomes on the other.