When confronted with permeable boundaries, knowledge-based teams have dynamic membership resulting in short-term teams. Higher education has long experience with managing short term knowledge-generating teams. This paper examines the impact of the interaction of personality profiles and gender on short-term team deliverables.
We also examine personality profiles to determine if any one profile drives either the overall significance or the interaction results. Quality of final written and oral artifacts are decomposed and examined for these conditions and to determine if any of the attributes are dependent upon the type of knowledge deliverable rendered.
Short-Term Work Teams
By definition short-term work teams are embedded in an organizational context (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003) and have a finite time period for team members to accomplish the team’s objective. Trust in each team member’s technical competence (Madhavan & Grover, 1998) is an important aspect. When team membership is expected to be dynamic, team members can expect to take on a variety of roles (Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas, & Cohen, 2012). This is important to realize since having clear goals and aligning individual competencies with those goals is crucial for high performance (Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas, & Cohen, 2012). Still, leadership remains essential since mediocre leaders can actually decrease the ability of a top team to be effective (Black, Oliver, Howell, & King, 2006; Mankins, Bird, & Root, 2013). Better leaders often possess strong abilities in two or more disciplines including management and a specialized knowledge content area (Madhavan & Grover, 1998).
Embedded versus Embodied Knowledge Artifacts
Madhavan and Grover (1998) distinguish between the collaborative creation of knowledge within a team (embedded knowledge) and the creation of the knowledge artifact which is embodied knowledge. Our goal is to examine the processes that work towards a high quality embodied knowledge and to tease out the embedding processes which are in part linked to active interaction between team members.
In work contexts, knowledge generation and efficient use of knowledge resources create a tension requiring controls. Controls range from clan control orientations (Kirsch, Ko, & Haney, 2010) which often use team composition (Jeong, Bozkurt, & Sunkara, 2012; Stapleton, 2008) to an emphasis on team process development (Kuipers, Higgs, Tolkacheva, & de Witte, 2009). Included here are expectations on role behaviors and personality profiles (Suman, 2009).
Hypotheses and Results
Strategic management resource in the resource-based view of the firm argues that not only the specific resources but also the relationships between the resources matter (Black & Boal, 1994). Thus, we will examine hypotheses that look at both the composition of the short term teams and their relationships with each other. After presenting the resources/capabilities and their relationships, we examine the interaction effects and the implications from these results.
THE_INTERACTION_OF_GENDER_AND_PERSONALITY_Abstract.pdf 