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The increasing importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday work also means that new insights into team collaboration must be gained. It is important to research how changes in team composition affect joint work, as previous theories and insights on teams are based on the knowledge of pure human teams. Especially, when AI-based systems act as coequal partners in collaboration scenarios, their role within the team needs to be defined. With a multi-method approach including a quantitative and a qualitative study, we constructed four team roles for AI-based teammates. In our quantitative survey based on existing team role concepts (n = 1.358), we used exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to construct possible roles that AI-based teammates can fulfill in teams. With nine expert interviews, we discussed and further extended our initially identified team roles, to construct consistent team roles for AI-based teammates. The results show four consistent team roles: the coordinator, creator, perfectionist and doer. The new team roles including their skills and behaviors can help to better design hybrid human-AI teams and to better understand team dynamics and processes.

Background The British Columbia (BC) government has made significant investments towards the implementation of team-based care (TBC) in its provincial comprehensive cancer control program. TBC implementation involves purposeful efforts towards: (a) establishing/expanding multidisciplinary care teams, (b) optimizing scope of practice, and (c) increasing care team consistency. Study objectives include an early-phase evaluation of (i) the association between TBC elements and team effectiveness and (ii) staff perceptions of barrier and facilitators of team effectiveness. Methods A series of five surveys over a 2-year period will be administered to prospectively evaluate the ongoing implementation of TBC. This study draws on data from the first of the five planned surveys, administered in May 2023. Eligible respondents included 299 program employees—spanning various roles such as physicians, nurses, and unit clerks—working within TBC at the time of survey deployment. The survey included both validated and researcher-developed questions that were either closed or open-ended, including measures of team composition, team consistency, team effectiveness, scope of practice, and demographics. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive and regression analysis; qualitative data were analyzed guided by interpretive description methodology. Results Collected responses totaled 121, with the majority of respondents being women (76%), full-time employees (90%), and working in direct patient care (77%). Regression analyses indicated that (i) higher frequency of consistently working with the same team members and (ii) lower proportion of shifts practicing below scope are both significant predictors of higher team effectiveness ratings. Qualitative data highlighted staffing levels as a driver of under- and over-utilized scopes of practice. Furthermore, effective communication, enhanced knowledge of each team member’s scope of practice, and strong interpersonal relationships were highlighted as contributing factors to effectiveness among multidisciplinary care teams. Conclusions Preliminary findings from the first of five prospective surveys highlight team consistency and role optimization as drivers of effective teamwork in the early implementation of a team-based model of cancer care. Future research should explore contextual factors that influence cancer care staff and clinicians’ perceptions of effectiveness.

Interest in team diversity initiatives has grown significantly over the past decade. Some initiatives focus on creating “highly variable” teams where members bring a wide range of attributes. Others prioritize “highly atypical” teams, where members contribute attributes underrepresented within the broader organization or field, regardless of variety. These two approaches entail markedly different assumptions about maximizing team diversity’s benefits. Comparing short- and long-term outcomes provides important insights into cultivating and leveraging diverse teams. To do so, we examined the proposal submissions of all variable and atypical teams within a competitive seed grant program over six years. We assessed short-term performance based on funding outcomes following a three-stage review process and long-term viability based on team members’ tendency to collaborate more in the future. Our findings demonstrate that diversity operates differently when conceptualized as variability versus atypicality. Specifically, while team variability often resulted in neutral or even negative short-term performance, it had a mixed effect on long-term viability. Conversely, while team atypicality had a mixed impact on short-term performance, it consistently enhanced long-term viability. These results underscore the distinctive value of nurturing highly atypical teams to promote lasting collaboration success and highlight the importance of aligning diversity cultivation strategies with organizations’ short- and long-term goals.

Despite the upsurge in cross-border R&D collaboration within multinational corporations (MNCs), firms often fail to realize the full potential of cross-border R&D teams. We examine under what conditions geographic diversity might lead to higher or lower innovation performance by focusing on the moderating roles of team composition. We first demonstrate that the geographic diversity of an MNC’s research team has a curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship with the team’s innovation performance. Building upon group learning theory, we further claim that this non-linear relationship is strengthened by the technical experience heterogeneity of researchers but weakened by repeated collaboration among researchers. Our analyses on the top 25 multinational pharmaceutical companies and their 59,998 patents registered from 1981 to 2012 provide strong support for our hypotheses. When geographic diversity is relatively low, teams with different levels of technical experience and more fresh collaborators improve performance by amplifying the benefits of sourcing diverse knowledge. With high geographic dispersion, on the other hand, minimal experience heterogeneity and more instances of past collaboration lead to better performance by facilitating the integration of diverse knowledge. The results shed light on the importance of technical and social relationships among researchers in sourcing and integrating location-specific knowledge and ultimately enhancing team performance.

PurposeThis article summarizes practitioner observations on three research questions. First, the factors that lead to the emergence and persistence of such teams. Second, the repercussions of siloed teams. And third, practical suggestions and recommendations that practitioners can employ to prevent silo formation or address existing silos. This article thus complements recent academic work that has previously explored the formation of silos.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used the input of current team leads from a focus group along with their consulting experience to explore these three research questions. The team lead input and consulting expertise are integrated with academic research on silos.FindingsThe emergence and persistence of silos was mostly attributed to company characteristics (size, growth and stakeholder management) as well as communication inefficiencies (lack of role clarity and ownership within teams), which in turn were impacted by situational variables (pandemic and turnover). The authors noted the effect of team composition effects, team competition and organizational changes (rapid growth and restructuring) as potential contributors to the formation and persistence of silos. The team lead experts and our consulting experiences were congruent with the literature focused on repercussions of silos, from poor information exchanges to inefficiencies, divisions and perceived isolation of teams from the organization. Solutions focused on project organization and documentation as well as the adoption of new decision-making tools and practices, and the creation of more exchange and learning opportunities. The authors added additional options to promote more visibility, appreciation, proactive monitoring within teams and organizational identification initiatives.Originality/valueThe current article adds a pragmatic perspective to silos and how organizations can address these when they become problematic and hinder performance and collaboration.

On the basis of the literature of open systems and team diversity, we present a new dynamic team diversity theory that explains the effect of change in team diversity on team functioning and performance in the context of dynamic team composition. Building upon the conceptualization of teams as open systems, we describe the enlargement and decline of team variety, separation, and disparity through member addition, subtraction, and substitution. Then, focusing on diversity enlargement, we theorize the contemporaneous and lasting effects of team diversity change on team performance change and on team processes and states leading to them. Dynamic team diversity theory expands the focus of team diversity research from teams' being more diverse than others to teams' becoming more diverse than before. It aims to advance team diversity research to be better aligned with the organizational reality of dynamic team composition. We also discuss methodological considerations in subsequent empirical testing of the theory and highlight how the theory and future research may help to guide organizational practice in recomposing work teams.

What determines the success of open source projects? In this study, we investigate the impact of network social capital on open source project success. We define network social capital as the benefits open source developers secure from their membership in developer collaboration networks. We focus on one specific type of success as measured by the rate of knowledge creation in an open source project. Specific hypotheses are developed and tested using a longitudinal panel of2,3 78 projects hosted at SourceForge. We find that network social capital is not equally accessible to or appropriated by all projects. Our main results are as follows.First, projects with greater internal cohesion (that is, cohesion among the project members) are more successful. Second, external cohesion (that is, cohesion among the external contacts of a project) has an inverse U-shaped relationship with the project's success; moderate levels of external cohesion are best for a project's success rather than very low or very high levels. Third, the technological diversity of the external network of a project also has the greatest benefit when it is neither too low nor too high. Fourth, the number of direct and indirect external contacts positively affects a project's success such that the effect of the number of direct contacts is moderated by the number of indirect contacts. These results are robust to several control variables and alternate model specifications. Several theoretical and managerial implications are provided.

The process of team composition in multiplayer sports such as football has been a main area of interest within the field of the science of teamwork, which is important for improving competition results and game experience. Recent algorithms for the football team composition problem take into account the skill proficiency of players but not the interactions between players that contribute to winning the championship. To automate the composition of a cohesive team, we consider the internal collaborations among football players. Specifically, we propose a Team Composition based on the Football Players’ Attributed Collaboration Network (TC-FPACN) model, aiming to identify a cohesive football team by maximizing football players’ capabilities and their collaborations via three network metrics, namely, network ability, network density and network heterogeneity&homogeneity. Solving the optimization problem is NP-hard; we develop an approximation method based on greedy algorithms and then improve the method through pruning strategies given a budget limit. We conduct experiments on two popular football simulation platforms. The experimental results show that our proposed approach can form effective teams that dominate others in the majority of simulated competitions.

University spin-offs (USOs) are an important driver for innovation, along with economic and social development. Hence, understanding which factors help them perform successfully is crucial, especially regarding their peculiarities in a scientific environment. This study focuses on essential factors such as team composition and diversity in USOs in the biotech sector in 64 founding teams in Switzerland and Germany. By identifying the team composition, and going beyond the usual team characteristics, along with checking in parallel for network and financing effects, the paper adds empirical evidence to the ongoing debate if and how team diversity in USOs affects the performance of this special group of newly founded firms. We test our hypotheses with the partial least squares method (PLS). Our results from the mediation model show how the diversity of teams is related to networks and financial resources and affects the performance. In addition, our study reveals the direct and indirect effects of team diversity on success in USOs. This way we contribute to the ongoing discussion on performance investigating the sources of team effects more in detail.

Team cohesion is a critical factor for team effectiveness. Cohesion is a dynamic emergent state, demonstrating important changes as a function of the interactions among team members. Given the important role of individual differences for impacting the quality of social interactions as well as the resulting appraisals of individuals, it is not surprising that a plethora of studies find significant relationships between team composition and team cohesion. Unfortunately, knowledge of how individual difference composition influences changes in cohesion over time is still lacking. Therefore, drawing on theories on the development of interpersonal relationships, we tested predictions regarding the role of team personality and goal orientation for shaping the longitudinal trajectories of social and task cohesion. More specifically, we used a highly interdependent laboratory simulation to assess the differential impact that individual differences have on the initial status (i.e., intercept) and change (i.e., slope) in cohesion over time. Growth curve modeling results suggest support for our predictions that different individual differences uniquely predict the intercepts and slopes of task and social cohesion. Implications for the composition and intervention of teams are discussed.