Journal of Management

Team reflexivity, the extent to which teams collectively reflect upon and adapt their working methods and functioning, has been shown to be an important predictor of team outcomes, notably innovation. As described in the current article, the authors developed and tested a team-level contingency model of team reflexivity, work demands, and innovation. They argue that highly reflexive teams will be more innovative than teams low in reflexivity when facing a demanding work environment. A field study of 98 primary health care teams in the United Kingdom corroborated their predictions: Team reflexivity was positively related to team innovation, and team reflexivity and work demands interacted such that high levels of both predicted higher levels of team innovation. Furthermore, an interaction between team reflexivity, quality of physical work environment (PWE), and team innovation showed that poor PWE coupled with high team reflexivity was associated with higher levels of team innovation. These results are discussed in the context of the need for team reflexivity and team innovation among teams at work facing high levels of work demands.

This study investigates the effects of group member nonresponse in research that examines relationships between group-level constructs aggregated from the responses of individual group members. Simulation data show that the effects of nonresponse vary greatly depending on levels of between-group variability and within-group variability expressed jointly as intraclass correlation, or ICC(1), values. Even high response rates, for example, can produce significantly attenuated correlations between group-level variables with ICC(1) levels commonly reported in group studies. Conversely, even low response rates can yield accurate group-level correlations when ICC(1) levels are high. These effects of nonresponse are equivalent whether nonresponse derives from a random or biased process. Group size appears to play no important role in moderating the effects of response rate. Suggestions for research design and post hoc diagnosis of findings are discussed.

With emphasis on a venture’s institutional environment and its stage of development, the authors develop theory to explain how the quality of a nation’s legal system and the level of political hazards affect venture capital (VC) investment strategies in developing countries. The data set consists of 433 VC investment transaction rounds occurring in 13 Latin American countries over the period 1995 to 2003. Different from previous research on the likelihood of investment occurrence, the authors consider the size of an investment transaction as a dependent variable. The authors find a negative relationship between investment size and the political hazards risk and that larger investments are associated with ventures operating in lower quality legal systems. The authors also propose the moderating role of these institutional dimensions in the relationship between a venture’s stage of development and investment size. Findings indicate that in lower quality legal systems, conventional VC-staging strategies are not apparent, where middle and later stage ventures receive the largest investments, but with improvements to the legal system, increasingly larger investments go to early stage ventures. Regarding the stage interaction with political hazards, the authors find that the positive relationship between the venture’s stage of development and investment size weakens as the level of political hazards increases, and when political hazards are high, conventional VC-staging similarly does not occur. In uncovering the unique impact of these institutional dimensions with respect to developing country entrepreneurship, these findings shed light on the acute challenges faced by developing country ventures seeking VC funding at varying stages of development.

This study draws from social information processing theory and the climate literature to examine an antecedent to and the consequences of voice climate, defined as shared group member perceptions of the extent to which they are encouraged to engage in voice behaviors. The authors test their hypotheses using data collected from a sample of 374 full-time employees nested in 54 work groups. Their results indicate that group perceptions of supervisor undermining have a negative effect on group perceptions of voice climate. In addition, voice climate predicts group voice behavior and also has a significant influence on group performance beyond the influence through group voice behavior. These findings provide additional evidence for the predictive validity of the voice climate construct and provide future research opportunities for researchers.

This article extends previous research on network industries by analyzing the role that firm strategy plays in markets where network effects are important. The authors postulate that firms can benefit from the existence of network effects through their strategic choices. The main premise of this article is that companies, by influencing expectations, coordination, and compatibility, can leverage network effects and network value. The authors empirically test their hypotheses in the mobile telecommunications industry, a paradigmatic example of a network industry. This study not only seeks to understand the impact of firm strategy on network value but also analyzes the impact of the latter on firm performance.

Informed by social exchange theory, this study examines whether and how employees reciprocate to their organizations for the idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) they receive. Specifically, the authors examined whether i-deals (in scheduling flexibility and professional development) are related to employees’ flexible work role orientation, social networking behavior, and organizational trust over time. In turn, they hypothesized that these mediating variables would be positively related to employees’ use of constructive voice. Data were collected from 466 managers and professionals in the United States and China at three points in time over a 10-month period. The data analyses revealed that flexible work role orientation, social networking behavior, and organizational trust all mediated the relationship between i-deals and voice behavior. Furthermore, the mediating effects were generally stronger for professional development i-deals than for scheduling flexibility i-deals and were generally stronger in the China sample than in the U.S. sample. The article concludes with a discussion of the utility of social exchange theory as a framework for future research on i-deals and for guiding the implementation of i-deals in organizational settings.

This research examines a condition under which supervisor undermining is related to perceptions of leader hypocrisy that then lead to employee turnover intentions. Drawing on behavioral integrity theory and arguments from the social cognition literature, the authors argue that subordinates compare supervisor undermining to an interpersonal justice expectation, as a salient social cue, to draw conclusions regarding leader hypocrisy. In turn, the cognitive conclusion that the leader is indeed a hypocrite generates uncertainty that subordinates are motivated to manage by increasing turnover intentions. The authors examine perceptions of leader hypocrisy as the mediator of their proposed theoretical model while controlling for psychological contract breach and trust in supervisor. Results from a scenario-based experiment ( N = 202) and a survey-based study ( N = 312) provide general support for the authors’ hypotheses.

Organizations must learn and adapt to succeed in today’s ever-changing business environment, so it is essential for scholars to better understand the antecedents to learning processes among individuals, teams, and organizations as a whole. In this article, the authors offer a multilevel theory that illustrates how individuals’ motivation for different achievement goals, that is, goal orientations, shape the way they individually and collectively participate in organizational learning processes. This framework is grounded in a theoretical synthesis of organizational learning and achievement goal theories, which highlights the value of using an emergent motivational theory to better understand how predominantly cognitive learning processes may emerge across levels in organizations. In particular, the authors illustrate how mastery- and performance-oriented norms emerge in work groups and influence information interpretation and integration. The authors further describe how groups’ goal orientation norms can become embedded in the organizational culture, which impacts the ways in which learning processes are institutionalized throughout the organization. This theoretical framework provides a fuller depiction of why and how learning unfolds in organizations, which may facilitate future research on the microfoundations of organizational learning and how these can enable organizations to enhance their capabilities.

Team effectiveness can be gauged not only by team-level outcomes but also in terms of influences on individual members. The authors present a two-sample cross-level model of individual informal learning and team commitment, as influenced by team-level processes and empowerment. In the first sample, they examine the impact of team-level constructs on individual outcomes, using 575 individuals from 80 teams in an international Fortune 500 manufacturing firm. Using a sample of 67 teams and 271 individual service engineers from a separate Fortune 500 business solutions organization, the authors further advance their model using a pre–post intervention design. Informal learning and commitment are shown to be positively impacted by team-level empowerment and processes, over and above individual predispositions and perceptions in both samples. In addition, changes in team empowerment and processes attributable to the intervention account for additional criterion variance. Implications are discussed in terms of both research and practice.