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Full-Text Articles in Business

Remote Work: Examining Current Trends And Organizational Practices, Bradford Bell Mar 2015

Remote Work: Examining Current Trends And Organizational Practices, Bradford Bell

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] Although remote work offers a number of potential benefits, it is not without risks and challenges. Companies can find it difficult to build a culture that is accepting and supportive of remote work. It can also be difficult to track exactly who is working remotely, particularly when remote work is adopted more informally, and to measure the business impact of these initiatives. Remote workers can face a number of personal and professional challenges. For instance, they may struggle for exposure and access to professional opportunities and there is the risk that those working outside the office can become socially …


Collective Failure: The Emergence, Consequences, And Management Of Errors In Teams, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski Mar 2015

Collective Failure: The Emergence, Consequences, And Management Of Errors In Teams, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

The goal of the current chapter is to examine the emergence, consequences, and management of errors in teams. We begin by discussing the origin and emergence of errors in teams. We argue that errors in teams can originate at both the individual and collective level and suggest this distinction is important because it has implications for how errors propagate within a team. We then consider the paradoxical effects of errors on team performance and team learning. This discussion highlights the importance of error management in teams so that errors can prompt learning while at the same time mitigating their negative …


Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration And Review, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski, Sabrina Blawath Mar 2015

Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration And Review, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski, Sabrina Blawath

Bradford S Bell

With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel …


Slippage In The System: The Effects Of Errors In Transactive Memory Behavior On Team Performance, Matthew Pearsall, Aleksander Ellis, Bradford Bell Jul 2011

Slippage In The System: The Effects Of Errors In Transactive Memory Behavior On Team Performance, Matthew Pearsall, Aleksander Ellis, Bradford Bell

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] Although researchers have consistently shown that the implicit coordination provided by transactive memory positively affects team performance, the benefits of transactive memory systems depend heavily on team members’ ability to accurately identify the expertise of their teammates and communicate expertise-specific information with one another. This introduces the opportunity for errors to enter the system, as the expertise of individual team members may be misunderstood or misrepresented, leading to the reliance on information from the wrong source or the loss of information through incorrect assignment. As Hollingshead notes, “information may be transferred or explicitly delegated to the ‘wrong’ individual in …


Work Teams, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski Jul 2011

Work Teams, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] Teams serve as the basic building blocks of modern organizations and represent a critical means by which work is accomplished in today's world. Therefore, significant research during the past few decades has been focused on understanding work team effectiveness. This entry looks at the history of this research and what it says about team types, team composition, team development, team processes, and team effectiveness.


Advances In Technology-Based Training, Bradford Bell, Steve Kozlowski May 2011

Advances In Technology-Based Training, Bradford Bell, Steve Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] There is a growing utilization of technology-based training in the workplace. The 2005 State of the Industry Report published by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) revealed that in the average organization, technology-based training accounted for 28.1 percent of all training hours in 2004 (Sugrue and Rivera, 2005). The report also revealed that the utilization of technology-based training has almost doubled since 2002 and is projected to further increase to 32.5 percent in 2005. In this chapter, we examine this trend and explore recent advances in technology-based training. We begin by discussing the environmental factors pushing companies …


Active Learning: Effects Of Core Training Design Elements On Self-Regulatory Processes, Learning, And Adaptability, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski May 2011

Active Learning: Effects Of Core Training Design Elements On Self-Regulatory Processes, Learning, And Adaptability, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

This research describes a comprehensive examination of the cognitive, motivational, and emotional processes underlying active learning approaches, their effects on learning and transfer, and the core training design elements (exploration, training frame, emotion-control) and individual differences (cognitive ability, trait goal orientation, trait anxiety) that shape these processes. Participants (N = 350) were trained to operate a complex computer-based simulation. Exploratory learning and error-encouragement framing had a positive effect on adaptive transfer performance and interacted with cognitive ability and dispositional goal orientation to influence trainees’ metacognition and state goal orientation. Trainees who received the emotion-control strategy had lower levels of state …


Adaptive Guidance: Enhancing Self-Regulation, Knowledge, And Performance In Technology-Based Training, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski Apr 2011

Adaptive Guidance: Enhancing Self-Regulation, Knowledge, And Performance In Technology-Based Training, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

Considerable research has examined the effects of giving trainees control over their learning (Steinberg, 1977, 1989; Williams, 1993). The most consistent finding of this research has been that trainees do not make good instructional use of the control they are given. Yet, today’s technologically based training systems often provide individuals with significant control over their learning (Brown, 2001). This creates a dilemma that must be addressed if technology is going to be used to create more effective training systems. The current study extended past research that has examined the effects of providing trainees with some form of advisement or guidance …


Goal Orientation And Ability: Interactive Effects On Self-Efficacy, Performance, And Knowledge, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W.J. Kozlowski Apr 2011

Goal Orientation And Ability: Interactive Effects On Self-Efficacy, Performance, And Knowledge, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W.J. Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

This study examined the direct relationship of goal orientation – and the interaction of goal orientation and cognitive ability -- with self-efficacy, performance, and knowledge in a learning context. The current paper argues that whether a particular type of goal orientation is adaptive or not adaptive depends on individuals' cognitive ability. Results indicated that the direct associations of learning and performance orientations were consistent with previous research. Learning orientation was positively related to self-efficacy, performance, and knowledge, while performance orientation was negatively related to only one outcome, performance. The interactions between goal orientation and ability also supported several hypotheses. As …


Work Groups And Teams In Organizations, Steve Kozlowski, Bradford Bell Apr 2011

Work Groups And Teams In Organizations, Steve Kozlowski, Bradford Bell

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] Our objective in this chapter is to provide an integrative perspective on work groups and teams in organizations, one that addresses primary foci of theory and research, highlights applied implications, and identifies key issues in need of research attention and resolution. Given the volume of existing reviews, our review is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, it uses representative work to characterize key topics, and focuses on recent work that breaks new ground to help move theory and research forward. Although our approach risks trading breadth for depth, we believe that there is much value in taking a more …


A Typology Of Virtual Teams: Implications For Effective Leadership, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski Apr 2011

A Typology Of Virtual Teams: Implications For Effective Leadership, Bradford S. Bell, Steve W. J. Kozlowski

Bradford S Bell

As the nature of work in today's organizations becomes more complex, dynamic, and global, there has been an increasing emphasis on far-flung, distributed, virtual teams as organizing units of work. Despite their growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of work unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to focus research toward understanding virtual teams and, in particular, to identify implications for effective leadership. Specifically, we focus on delineating the dimensions of a typology to characterize different types of virtual teams. First, we distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams to identify where …


[Review Of The Book The Mismanagement Of Talent: Employability And Jobs In The Knowledge Economy], Bradford S. Bell Apr 2011

[Review Of The Book The Mismanagement Of Talent: Employability And Jobs In The Knowledge Economy], Bradford S. Bell

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] In The Mismanagement of Talent, Brown and Hesketh argue that rooted within the dominant discourse of the "war for talent" are several core assumptions that have shaped our perspective on employability in the KBE. The most central of these is that there is a limited pool of talent capable of rising to senior managerial positions, which creates fierce competition to recruit the best and brightest. The perception of talent as a limited commodity is seen as driving organizations to diversify their talent pools and adopt more rigorous recruitment and selection tools in an effort to get the right people, …


The Language Of Bias: A Linguistic Approach To Understanding Intergroup Relations, Quinetta M. Roberson, Bradford S. Bell, Shanette C. Porter Apr 2011

The Language Of Bias: A Linguistic Approach To Understanding Intergroup Relations, Quinetta M. Roberson, Bradford S. Bell, Shanette C. Porter

Bradford S Bell

[Excerpt] This chapter explores the role of language in the relationship between diversity and team performance. Specifically, we consider how a linguistic approach to social categorization may be used to study the social psychological mechanisms that underlie diversity effects. Using the results of a study examining the effects of gender, ethnicity and tenure on language abstraction, we consider the potential implications for team processes and effectiveness. In addition, we propose a revised team input-process-output model that highlights the potential effects of language on team processes. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research linking diversity, linguistic categorization and team effectiveness.