Group & Organization Management

Group & Organization Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>Team adaptation is particularly impactful within extreme and isolated environments, where sudden and abrupt events drastically challenge effective teamwork. To advance the team adaptation literature, we examined how event characteristics influence the relationship between team adaptation processes and team adaptive performance. To do so, we conducted an on-site, multi-study research using sequential explanatory mixed methods and a retrospective event history approach. The first study (based on a quantitative multilevel methodology) was designed to understand how the characteristics of the events influenced team adaptation processes and team adaptive performance (we collected data of 86 events described by 56 informants nested within 21 teams) during one Antarctic Summer Campaign at the South Shetland Islands Archipelago, Antarctica. The second study, based on qualitative methodology focused on thematic analysis, was designed to obtain a detailed description of the relationship between adaptation triggers and team adaptation (we collected data from 20 semi-structured interviews). Overall, our findings highlight that different team processes are significant in shaping perceptions of team adaptive performance, making the modification of transition and interpersonal processes the most critical. We additionally show how these relationships are moderated by the characteristics of adaptation triggers. We discuss the implications of these findings for teams within extreme environments and beyond.

Group & Organization Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>In a world with high demand for sustainable business practices, this paper investigates how workplace inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities can be accomplished through social partnerships. Drawing on social exchange theory and based on an explorative ethnographic case study of a partnership constellation aiming for workplace inclusion of an intellectually disabled workforce, the study explores how relational practices in social partnerships contribute to workplace inclusion of young people with intellectual disabilities. The study consists of two sub-studies focusing first on identification of the overall goals of the partnership collaboration in regard to workplace inclusion and, second, an investigation of how the goals are accomplished in the here and now of partnership collaboration. The findings are summarized in a conceptual framework that advocates a relational perspective on workplace inclusion and highlights relational practices between partnership participants as important drivers for workplace inclusion. The study advances knowledge on workplace inclusion by offering insights into how relational practices in social partnerships inform workplace inclusion. Furthermore, the findings help the individual social partnership partners effectively manage workplace inclusion by acknowledging relationship processes as fundamental elements of organizing for an inclusive workplace.

Group & Organization Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>Teams operating in isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environments are especially rare and difficult to study. Their inaccessibility limits our understanding of the team processes driving effective functioning in ICE environments and our ability to support them. Contributing to this research space, we present a qualitative study of nine teams each deployed to Antarctica during the summer season for approximately six weeks. By analyzing participants’ daily journal entries reflecting on their teamwork and experiences, we generate an ecological model of extreme team functioning. Our model integrates individual, team, leadership, and contextual characteristics and processes to demonstrate how team functioning is often idiosyncratic and emerges from co-evolving relationships within and across levels. Our dynamic perspective helps move beyond the input-process-output organizing heuristic that has guided teams research for decades, but is limited in its ability to provide insights for specific teams. We take an idiographic approach to focus on understanding the unique processes of specific teams to provide insights into how to support a particular team and better direct interventions. Importantly, we find that the social relationships within the team are especially pertinent for determining team functioning in this ICE environment and identify team structures that supported positive psychosocial functioning and the role of leadership in fostering those structures. We discuss implications for future research and suggest teams in extreme environments can be better supported through special attention to the idiosyncratic processes of a given team and ensuring their social lives are considered alongside their taskwork.

Group & Organization Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>Personal initiative is an influential individual-level construct but less is yet known about team initiative’s functioning and influence on team performance. This work addresses the nature and function of team initiative—a form of proactive behavior that is self-starting, future-focused, and intended to overcome barriers to goal achievement to solve team problems or facilitate team success—and how it relates to team performance. Drawing from the human capital resources perspective, we argue that team initiative only enhances team performance insofar as team members’ personal initiative efforts can be integrated into team processes and transformed into valuable team resources. Based on this perspective, we posit team coordination as the key emergence-enabling mechanism between team initiative and team performance. We also argue that teams can experience “too much of a good thing” with respect to team initiative and theorize that teams have a diminishing capacity to coordinate initiative to resolve team task demands. We test these expectations using satellite-derived player heat map data and team passing network matrices from the 2014 and 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cups. Our findings reveal that team coordination mediates the relationship between team initiative and team performance, but with diminishing marginal benefits of increased team initiative.

Group & Organization Management, Ahead of Print. <br/>In their focused study on the effect of organizational language on workers’ behaviors related to disclosing a disability, Santuzzi and coauthors (2024) explore how employees with disabilities (EWD) weigh the decision to disclose their conditions to employers. We advance this work by offering a relevant theoretical perspective, Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT; Lind & Van den Bos, 2002) for considering EWD’s decisions to disclose. UMT holds that employees strongly look for cues of workplace procedural and interactional justice, in moments of uncertainty. We assert that disclosing one’s disability in moments like those studied by Santuzzi and colleagues (2024) pose high uncertainty for employees who look for signals of just treatment. We explore those processes as they relate to disability disclosure and introduce practical suggestions for organizations to reduce uncertainty surrounding disability disclosure.