Cognitive versatility and adaptation to fluid participation in hospital emergency department teams

Role-based frameworks have long been the cornerstone of organizational coordination, providing clarity in role expectations among team members. However, the rise of "fluid participation"-a constant shift in team composition and skill sets-poses new challenges to traditional coordination mechanisms. In particular, with fluid participation, a team's roles can oscillate between disconnected and intersecting, or between lacking and having overlap in the capabilities and expectations of different roles. This study investigates the possibility that a disconnected set of roles creates a structural constraint on the flexible coordination needed to perform in volatile contexts, as well as the mitigating role of cognitive versatility in a team's strategically-central member. Utilizing a sample of 342 teams from a hospital Emergency Department, we find that teams with a disconnected role set are less effective than teams with an intersecting role set as demonstrated by longer patient stays and increased handoffs during shift changes. Importantly, the presence of a cognitively versatile attending physician mitigates these negative outcomes, enhancing overall team effectiveness. Our findings remain robust even after accounting for other variables like team expertise and familiarity. This research extends the Carnegie School's seminal work on fluid participation by integrating insights from psychology and organizational behavior, thereby identifying key individual attributes that can bolster team coordination in dynamic settings.

Relationships Between Temporal Leadership, Transactive Memory Systems and Team Innovation Performance

Background

In recent years, temporal leadership has gradually attracted academic attention.

Purpose

This paper discussed the impact of temporal leadership on team innovation performance.

Methodology

Through the sample analysis of 385 team members in 98 teams. The measurements of temporal leadership, team innovation performance, transactive memory system, and team reflection were used to measure the relationships between temporal leadership, transactive memory systems and team innovation performance.

Findings/Results

It is found that temporal leadership has a positive impact on team innovation performance, which is transmitted through the credibility dimension and coordination dimension of transactive memory systems. Positive team reflection regulates the relationship between temporal leadership and transactive memory systems.

Value

This paper reveals the specific impact mechanism of temporal leadership on team innovation performance and provides a new perspective on how to improve team innovation performance in limited time resources.

The Mechanisms and Components of Knowledge Transfer: The Virtual Special Issue on Knowledge Transfer Within Organizations

Knowledge transfer within organizations has important implications for organizational performance and competitive advantage. In this virtual special issue, we review articles on this topic published in Organization Science between 2014 and 2020 and identify 53 articles for their theoretical and empirical contributions. These articles examine knowledge transfer through five transfer mechanisms: social networks, routines, personnel mobility, organizational design, and search. We consider the intersection of each transfer mechanism with important components of knowledge transfer (characteristics of sources/recipients, characteristics of knowledge, and characteristics of contexts). We present 15 exemplar articles, each of which reflects the intersection of a mechanism and a component of knowledge transfer. We also present an overview of the methodological approaches and empirical contexts that are utilized. We conclude our article with a discussion of future research opportunities. The articles published in Organization Science have advanced understanding of both the mechanisms through which knowledge transfer occurs and the conditions under which it is most likely.

Detrimental Collaborations in Creative Work: Evidence from Economics

Prior research on collaboration and creativity often assumes that individuals choose to collaborate to improve the quality of their output. Given the growing role of collaboration and autonomous teams in creative work, the validity of this assumption has important implications for organizations. We argue that in the presence of a collaboration credit premium—when the sum of fractional credit allocated to each collaborator exceeds 100%—individuals may choose to work together even when the project output is of low quality or when its prospects are diminished by collaborating. We test our argument on a sample of economists in academia using the norm of alphabetical ordering of authors’ surnames on academic articles as an instrument for selection into collaboration. This norm means that economists whose family name begins with a letter from the beginning of the alphabet receive systematically more credit for collaborative work than economists whose family name begins with a letter from the end of the alphabet. We show that, in the presence of a credit premium, individuals may choose to collaborate, even if this choice decreases output quality. Thus, collaboration can create a misalignment between the incentives of creative workers and the prospects of the project.