Exploring the socialisation experiences of female board members

Orientation: The processes that newly appointed female board members undergo to gain the social knowledge and skills to migrate from outsiders to insiders are not well understood.Research purpose: This study aimed to explore the socialisation experiences of female board members in South Africa to determine whether the process is conducive to ensuring these individuals, as newcomers, are better equipped to navigate the challenges and nuances of the board in a short amount of time.Motivation for the study: A paucity of research exists concerning organisational socialisation processes (onboarding) that new female board members undergo to acquire the skills and social knowledge required to migrate from outsiders to insiders. This study intended to fill the gap.Research approach/design and method: A qualitative exploratory research method was followed. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted from semi-structured interviews consisting of 15 female board members from various industries.Main findings: The board organisational socialisation process needs to be strategic, deliberate, collaborative and iterative. A conceptual framework was developed from the summary of findings.Practical/managerial implications: There is a need for organisations to reassess how they perform board organisational socialisation to achieve its intended outcome and maximise the board’s performance and newcomer’s performance predisposed to challenges upon entry.Contribution/value-add: Using the proposed conceptual framework developed in this study, this research can lend itself useful to organisations, leaders and consultants involved in the socialisation of newcomers within non-traditional organisational structures.

Modeling the Feedback Process in Teams: A Field Study of Teamwork

Research on teamwork has considered the effects of different types of feedback and information exchanged as teams coordinate their actions and has described team processes in terms of phases of task performance. Interpersonal communication processes represent the behavioral mechanism by which teams create shared mental models, but it is not clear how teams use and exchange feedback as part of these processes as they perform together. Using a 5-year-period, grounded theory methodology, we investigated how action teams exchange feedback to achieve teamwork. We examined the feedback process of three different elite French military teams. Our findings offer new evidence that action teams working in extreme/high stakes contexts use different types of feedback from multiple sources and that certain feedback sources are more relevant and certain feedback practices are more prevalent at certain stages. Specifically, throughout briefing, team task performance, formal debriefing, and informal debriefing stages, the teams we studied used information from multiple sources as they engaged in technique, reflexive, and socialization feedback practices. Teamwork was evident as the teams coordinated their action during recurring performance cycles. We use our findings to model the feedback process for teamwork and discuss implications for research and practice.

Teams in Small Organizations: Conceptual, Methodological, and Practical Considerations

Research on teams and teamwork has flourished in the last few decades. Much of what we know about teams and teamwork comes from research using short-term student teams in the lab, teams in larger organizations, and, more recently, teams in rather unique and extreme environments. The context in which teams operate influences team composition, processes, and effectiveness. Small organizations are an understudied and often overlooked context that presents a rich opportunity to augment our understanding of teams and team dynamics. In this paper, we discuss how teams and multi-team systems in small organizations may differ from those found in larger organizations. Many of these differences present both methodological and practical challenges to studying team composition and processes in small complex organizational settings. We advocate for applying and accepting new and less widely used methodological approaches to advance our understanding of the science of teams and teamwork in such contexts.