Claudia Buengeler

National diversity and team performance: the moderating role of interactional justice climate

In this team-level study, we present and test a model in which two aspects of interactional justice climate, its level and its strength, interact to moderate the effects of national diversity on team performance. Connecting the literatures on team diversity and (interactional) justice climate, we hypothesize that a high level of interactional justice exhibited by the line manager promotes the performance of nationally diverse teams, but only when team members share this perception (i.e. when the climate is strong). Using time-lagged performance measurement, we conducted a multisource field study using data from 272 employees clustered in 45 teams who worked for a local subsidiary of a multinational enterprise. The findings confirm our hypothesis and have implications for the diversity and justice literatures, while advancing knowledge that promotes the effective management of increasingly diverse workforces in this era of globalization.

Killer Apps: Developing Novel Applications That Enhance Team Coordination, Communication, and Effectiveness:

As part of the Lorentz workshop, “Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics,” held in Leiden, Netherlands, this article describes how Geeks and Groupies (computer and social scientists) may benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration toward the development of killer apps in team contexts that are meaningful and challenging for both. First, we discuss interaction processes during team meetings as a research topic for both Groupies and Geeks. Second, we highlight teamwork in health care settings as an interdisciplinary research challenge. Third, we discuss how an automated solution for optimal team design could benefit team effectiveness and feed into team-based interventions. Fourth, we discuss team collaboration in massive open online courses as a challenge for both Geeks and Groupies. We argue for the necessary integration of social and computational research insights and approaches. In the hope of inspiring future interdisciplinary collaborations, we develop criteria for evaluating killer apps—including the four proposed here—and discuss future research challenges and opportunities that potentially derive from these developments.

Meetings all over the world: structural and psychological characteristics of meetings in different countries

Previous research on work meetings has mainly been conducted in the Anglo-Saxon context. In this chapter, we add an international perspective that addresses this question: Does the national context of the meeting influence how it is structured and perceived? We provide a descriptive-comparative empirical analysis of differences and commonalities in both structural (i.e., size, lfreth, frequency, lateness, the use of an agenda, and action points) and psychological (i.e., participation, satisfaction, and mood) meeting characteristics. Our analysis is based on a survey study with 710 participants from 45 countries. We first provide a comparison using a framework that classifies cultures according to the dimensions of space, time, and context using seven country clusters identified in the GLOBE study: Anglo (n = 91), Confucian Asia (n = 94), Eastern Europe (n = 242), Germanic Europe (n = 136), Latin Europe (n = 37), Middle East (n = 33), and Northern Europe (n = 70). We found important similarities, but also noteworthy differences in work meetings between locations. We discuss the emerging profile of cross-cultural meeting similarities and differences in light of their theoretical and managerial implications and provide ideas for future research on meetings across cultures.

Diversity in Teams: Was macht diverse Teams erfolgreich?

Teams in Organisationen sind zunehmend divers zusammengesetzt. Mit Diversity sind neben Unterschieden bezuglich demografischer Merkmale beispielsweise auch Differenzen in unmittelbar aufgabenbezogenen Merkmalen sowie in Werten, Einstellungen und Eigenschaften gemeint, welche oftmals nicht sofort ersichtlich sind. Die weiterhin zu erwartende Zunahme von Diversity in Organisationen, die Moglichkeit positiver sowie negativer Effekte von Diversity auf den Teamerfolg und die damit verbundene Notwendigkeit eines aktiven Diversity Managements erklaren das sowohl auf Praktiker- als auch auf Forschungsseite grose Interesse an Diversity. In diesem Kapitel zeigen wir mittels der Literatur im Bereich der organisationspsychologischen und Managementforschung auf, welche Konsequenzen Diversity in Teams haben kann. Als Strategien zum effektiven Management von Diversity heben wir die Bedeutung von drei Arten von Einflussfaktoren fur den Erfolg diverser Teams hervor, namlich Einstellungen, Denkweisen und Wahrnehmungen in Bezug auf Diversity, Diversity Training sowie Fuhrung, indem wir diese mittels empirischer Befunde beleuchten. Da diese Erfolgsfaktoren grundsatzlich beeinflussbar sind, konnen sie einen wichtigen Beitrag zum effektiven Diversity Management in Organisationen leisten.

Why and When Followers Sacrifice: A New Look at Charismatic-Transformational Leadership

According to Bass (1985), charismatic-transformational leadership fosters followers’ willingness to sacrifice (i.e., the readiness to go beyond expectations and transcend self-interests for the good of the organization and the whole). Drawing on an identity perspective, this paper aims to refine the theoretical link between charismatic- transformational leadership and followers’ sacrificing. In our theoretical framework, we consider processes at the societal level (rate of complex change; Beck, 2009; value erosion; Sennett, 2005) as moderators of the above mentioned relation. Although these societal- level processes increase followers’ demand for meaning and orientation, they seem to prevent (rather than foster) charismatic- transformational leadership’s capacity to provide meaning and orientation to followers. As a result, observed sacrificing may also be explained as coping behavior (Lazarus, 1991) against as harmful experienced feelings of existential uncertainty (Heidegger, 1929). Such coping occurs m...