Maritza R. Salazar

Facilitating Innovation in Diverse Science Teams Through Integrative Capacity

Knowledge integration in diverse teams depends on their integrative capacity—the social and cognitive processes, along with emergent states, that shape a team’s ability to combine diverse knowledge. We argue that integrative capacity represents the potential that a team has to overcome various compositional, team, and contextual barriers to generating integrated and novel knowledge. This article focuses specifically on the unique challenges facing diverse science teams that have the goal of generating novel knowledge at the intersection of disciplinary, practice, and organizational boundaries. The integrative capacity of a science team is argued to help facilitate the social and cognitive integration processes necessary for effective team processes that enhance the likelihood of innovative team outcomes. Implications of our theoretical framework for practice and research on fostering innovation in diverse science teams are discussed.

To join or not to join: an investigation of individual facilitators and inhibitors of medical faculty participation in interdisciplinary research teams.

Interdisciplinary research (IDR) teams are an important mechanism for facilitating medical breakthroughs. This study investigates the role of individual-level predictors of the choice to join a new IDR team at a major medical institution. We collected survey data from a sample of 233 faculty members who were given the opportunity to participate in IDR teams that had recently formed around a wide range of medical topic areas. Our results suggest that even under supportive organizational conditions, some medical experts were more likely to participate than others. Specifically, basic and translational researchers, associate professors, and faculty with distinctive topic area expertise and with more experience collaborating across departmental boundaries participated at a greater rate than their peers. Our findings have implications for research, practice, and policy focused on overcoming the challenges of drawing together diverse medical experts into IDR teams with the potential to advance knowledge to prevent, cure, and treat complex medical conditions.

Debunking key assumptions about teams: The role of culture.

Scholars have argued that if psychologists are to gain a true understanding of human behavior, culture should be central to research and theory. The research on teams is an area where better integration between the mainstream and cross-cultural literatures is critically needed, given the increasing prevalence of multicultural teams. The purpose of this article is therefore to demonstrate how research focused on culture’s influence on teams advances current mainstream theoretical understanding of team effectiveness. Guided by widely accepted frameworks of team effectiveness (Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005) and culture (Giorgi, Lockwood, & Glynn, 2015), we extract several key assumptions from the mainstream literature that have also been examined within the cross-cultural literature. Through a process of comparing and contrasting, we determined which components of current models are upheld and debunked when seeking to generalize these models to other cultural contexts outside of North America. Although we found some consistent results across the two literatures, most of our analyses reveal there are important boundary conditions surrounding common team effectiveness assumptions when culture is considered. By anchoring our analyses around fundamental aspects of teams, including how they form, function, and finish, we then revised these assumptions according to the integration of the teams and cross-cultural literatures. Taken together, we provide a rich foundation for future research, and facilitate a more nuanced understanding of human behavior within the team context.

Diversity and team creativity: Exploring underlying mechanisms.

Past research demonstrates that the relationship between distinct subgroups within teams can be improved using interventions that emphasize commonalities, such as a superordinate team identity. By comparing the creative outcomes of 51 racio-ethnically diverse teams, comprised of both majority and minority racio-ethnic subgroups, this study shows when a common ingroup identity will lead to higher creativity. We hypothesize that there is a combined effect of racio-ethnic identity and superordinate team identity salience on the usefulness as well as the novelty of team’s ideas. Accordingly, we found that superordinate team identity salience had a positive effect on novelty, but only when differences between subgroups were also made salient. There was no joint influence on the usefulness of ideas. Furthermore, our results showed that the relationship between the simultaneous salience of the superordinate team and racio-ethnic identities on the novelty of ideas generated was mediated by team member’s perception of the team as unified and inclusive. Collectively, racio-ethnic subgroup and superordinate identity salience foster a feeling of a common “we,” which in turn support the generation of novel ideas. Limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Educational Approaches Across Cultures: Consequences for International I/O Programs

Approaches to education and training differ across cultures and regions. Education systems vary widely in terms of the philosophies for teaching and training, the formal organization and regulation regarding certification and degree conferral, and the informal expectations for faculty and students. These cultural differences in norms, values, and practices have the potential to create challenges for schools hoping to develop a truly international industrial/organizational (I/O) curriculum that includes international exchanges and experiences. In an effort to inform and improve the development of international I/O programs, this chapter aims to critically analyze the dominant approaches to graduate training across a few exemplar cultures and to distill suggestions regarding the internationalization of I/O education. Toward this aim, the chapter is divided into three primary sections. We begin with a brief summary of the education systems and philosophies prominent in the USA, Europe, the UAE, Brazil, and China. These regions were selected to represent a wide range of influential areas where I/O psychology either currently exists or may eventually expand. These education models are then critically integrated with a focus on how various aspects of the education systems from around the world can be combined to provide the best of all worlds for international I/O curricula. For example, we suggest the use of a variety of educational techniques including didactic learning, experiential learning, critical thinking, personal reflection, and group work. We conclude the chapter with a summary of the suggestions that can be gleaned from this analysis, with a focus on how the elements of the education models can be combined to influence curriculum content, training of students, and educational and research-oriented collaboration between programs. We hope this chapter will serve as a starting point for programs simply looking to add a little more international perspective to their existing program or looking to develop into a truly global international I/O program.