Diversity in Design Teams: A Grounded Theory Approach

Recent workforce trends have virtually guaranteed that employees need to be able to work effectively with a diverse group of colleagues. First, US workforce demographics have changed dramatically; the population is now 16.4% Hispanic or Latino, 11.7% Black or African American, and 5.5% Asian. Women now make up 46.8% of the labor pool (BLS, 2015). A second trend is the widespread use of interdisciplinary teams to tackle cognitively demanding tasks, as well as to spur creativity and innovation (Cooke, Salas, Cannon-Bowers, & Stout, 2000; Fay, Borril, Amir, Haward, & West, 2006; Salas, Cooke, & Rosen, 2008). Taken together, it is clear that understanding diversity in teams is an issue that needs to be at the forefront of research and practice. In the science of teams, diversity has been labeled a double-edge sword (Chi, Huang, & Lin, 2009). Diverse members offer a wider range of expertise and ideas from which the team can draw (e.g., Watson, Kumar, & Michaelsen, 1993). According to information processing theories (e.g., van Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004), this leads to team behaviors (e.g., constructive debate) that result in higher quality team processes (e.g., decision making; Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007) and performance (e.g., creativity; McLeod, Lobel, & Cox, 1996). Alternatively, similarity-attraction (Byrne, 1971) and social categorization (Hogg & Turner, 1985) theories posit that diversity leads to subgrouping based on perceived similarity, and ultimately to bias, reduced social integration, and increased conflict that can act as barriers to realizing the team-level benefits of diversity (Stahl, et al., 2010). Indeed, the influence of diversity on team process and outcomes is anything but straightforward. In fact, empirical evidence has failed to find consistent relationships (e.g., Webber & Donahue, 2001), highlighting the importance of potential moderators (see Table 1 for a sample of these factors). Towards this end, a series of meta-analytic investigations have been conducted that emphasize the importance of team type, task difficulty, task type and inter-industry factors such as competition (Bell et al., 2011; Bowers, Pharmer, & Salas, 2000; Joshi & Roh, 2009). Clearly, context matters, and understanding the diversity-performance relationship requires a deeper dive into a specific context of interest. Qualitative inquiry is one tool through which this can be achieved. Toward this end, qualitative research allows for an inductive approach to the relationship between diversity and team performance under specific contexts, and recent efforts (e.g., Shachaf, 2008) have shown that while diversity affects similar team processes (e.g., communication), the way this effect unfolds uniquely differs by context. Therefore, in line with these efforts, the current investigation takes a structured and systematic grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to look closely at a context where creativity and innovation are demanded from today’s workforce, namely, design teams. In an attempt to shed light on persistent equivocal findings in both the team diversity and team conflict literatures, I put forth: (1) a temporally-based framework of diverse design team performance using the Input Mediator Output Input model (IMOI; Ilgen, et al., 2005), (2) an integrative theory, and a (3) set of testable findings. I argue that in engineering design teams, diversity on assertiveness, previous experience, and demographics (and the underlying cultural dimension of collectivism/individualism) can either positively or negatively influence communication behaviors (i.e., information exchange and elaboration; Van Knippenberg et al., 2004) through the avenues of frequency, timelines, equality, and comprehension of exchange. Furthermore, and in line with meta-analytic findings (Stahl et al., 2010), it is proposed that the nature of diverse teams and the engineering design process itself suggest the diversity-task conflict relationship will be strong. While previous research has largely looked at task and relationship conflict in silo (Behfar, et al., 2008), I suggest that these strongly correlated states (de Wit, Greer, & Jehn, 2012) are inextricable linked and often develop together. Furthermore, the underlying mechanism that is responsible for task conflict spiraling into relationship conflict is diversity in the directness of conflict expression (Weingart et. al, 2015), a variable associated with both assertiveness and collectivism (Oyserman & Kemmelmeier, 2002). Indeed, members varied greatly in their preference for straightforward, goal-directed expression versus ambiguous, relationship-centered expression. It is argued that heterogeneity in this construct among team members has the potential for expressions to be seen as rude, insincere, or argumentative by those less direct, or as avoidant and passive aggressive by those more direct (Taras et al., 2007), thus triggering the onset of relationship conflict. In a unique contribution to the literature, the theory then develops further to address many of the limitations cited in the conflict literature related to measurement, failure to consider reciprocal effects between conflict state, and temporal issues (Loughry & Amason, 2014). What follows is a unique look at how conflict-communication cycles unfold across a team’s lifecycle, and the team level states (e.g., social integration; O’Reilly, Caldwell and Barnett, 1989) that can act as a buffer against potentially negative effects on team performance

High antigen levels induce an exhausted phenotype in a chronic infection without impairing T cell expansion and survival.

Chronic infections induce T cells showing impaired cytokine secretion and up-regulated expression of inhibitory receptors such as PD-1. What determines the acquisition of this chronic phenotype and how it impacts T cell function remain vaguely understood. Using newly generated recombinant antigen variant-expressing chronic lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) strains, we uncovered that T cell differentiation and acquisition of a chronic or exhausted phenotype depend critically on the frequency of T cell receptor (TCR) engagement and less significantly on the strength of TCR stimulation. In fact, we noted that low-level antigen exposure promotes the formation of T cells with an acute phenotype in chronic infections. Unexpectedly, we found that T cell populations with an acute or chronic phenotype are maintained equally well in chronic infections and undergo comparable primary and secondary expansion. Thus, our observations contrast with the view that T cells with a typical chronic infection phenotype are severely functionally impaired and rapidly transition into a terminal stage of differentiation. Instead, our data unravel that T cells primarily undergo a form of phenotypic and functional differentiation in the early phase of a chronic LCMV infection without inheriting a net survival or expansion deficit, and we demonstrate that the acquired chronic phenotype transitions into the memory T cell compartment

Geographical and temporal distribution of SARS-CoV-2 clades in the WHO European Region, January to June 2020

We show the distribution of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) genetic clades over time and between countries and outline potential genomic surveillance objectives. We applied three genomic nomenclature systems to all sequence data from the World Health Organization European Region available until 10 July 2020. We highlight the importance of real-time sequencing and data dissemination in a pandemic situation, compare the nomenclatures and lay a foundation for future European genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2

Impact of clinical phenotypes on management and outcomes in European atrial fibrillation patients: a report from the ESC-EHRA EURObservational Research Programme in AF (EORP-AF) General Long-Term Registry

Background: Epidemiological studies in atrial fibrillation (AF) illustrate that clinical complexity increase the risk of major adverse outcomes. We aimed to describe European AF patients\u2019 clinical phenotypes and analyse the differential clinical course. Methods: We performed a hierarchical cluster analysis based on Ward\u2019s Method and Squared Euclidean Distance using 22 clinical binary variables, identifying the optimal number of clusters. We investigated differences in clinical management, use of healthcare resources and outcomes in a cohort of European AF patients from a Europe-wide observational registry. Results: A total of 9363 were available for this analysis. We identified three clusters: Cluster 1 (n = 3634; 38.8%) characterized by older patients and prevalent non-cardiac comorbidities; Cluster 2 (n = 2774; 29.6%) characterized by younger patients with low prevalence of comorbidities; Cluster 3 (n = 2955;31.6%) characterized by patients\u2019 prevalent cardiovascular risk factors/comorbidities. Over a mean follow-up of 22.5 months, Cluster 3 had the highest rate of cardiovascular events, all-cause death, and the composite outcome (combining the previous two) compared to Cluster 1 and Cluster 2 (all P <.001). An adjusted Cox regression showed that compared to Cluster 2, Cluster 3 (hazard ratio (HR) 2.87, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.27\u20133.62; HR 3.42, 95%CI 2.72\u20134.31; HR 2.79, 95%CI 2.32\u20133.35), and Cluster 1 (HR 1.88, 95%CI 1.48\u20132.38; HR 2.50, 95%CI 1.98\u20133.15; HR 2.09, 95%CI 1.74\u20132.51) reported a higher risk for the three outcomes respectively. Conclusions: In European AF patients, three main clusters were identified, differentiated by differential presence of comorbidities. Both non-cardiac and cardiac comorbidities clusters were found to be associated with an increased risk of major adverse outcomes

Exploring new boundaries in team cognition: Integrating knowledge in distributed teams

Distributed teams continue to emerge in response to the complex organizational environments brought about by globalization, technological advancements, and the shift toward a knowledge-based economy. These teams are comprised of members who hold the disparate knowledge necessary to take on cognitively demanding tasks. However, knowledge coordination between team members who are not co-located is a significant challenge, often resulting in process loss and decrements to the effectiveness of team level knowledge structures. The current effort explores the configuration dimension of distributed teams, and specifically how subgroup formation based on geographic location, may impact the effectiveness of a team\u27s transactive memory system and subsequent team process. In addition, the role of task cohesion as a buffer to negative intergroup interaction is explored

Dyad Leadership in Healthcare: A training needs analysis to inform dyad leadership development

Leadership Institutehttps://openworks.mdanderson.org/edwk21/1017/thumbnail.jp

Leveraging Hfacs To Understand Medication Error In Emergency Medical Services (Ems): A Systemtic Review

Medication errors are prevalent in EMS settings, and can occur in as frequently as 21% of patient calls (Vilke et al.., 2006), significantly impacting patient care. However, even with the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS), a widely accepted human factors error taxonomy, there is currently no widely accepted systematic method for organizing and understanding medication errors and its antecedents. The current effort seeks to synthesize the EMS medication error literature with the goal of extracting current themes and gaps to offer recommendations for which use of HFACS could to improve EMS medication error research. By leveraging HFACs and incorporating the emerging knowledge of EMS medication error, medication error can be better understood by practitioners and inform interventions aimed to target specific underlying issues. Copyright 2013 by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Inc

Nine Empirical Guidelines For Top Leadership Teams In Nonprofit Organizations

Organizations, nonprofit and for-profit alike, are increasingly relying on teams to achieve their various goals (Salas, Stagl and Burke, 2004). An increasing reliance on leadership teams is similarly evident in research and practice (Hambrick, 2007; Morgeson, DeRue and Karam, 2010). And while team and top management team (TMT) research has blossomed in the past 30 years (Carpenter, Geletkanycz and Sanders, 2004; Hambrick, 2007), research on leadership teams in nonprofit organizations (NPOs) is sorely needed (Courtney, Marnoch and Williamson, 2006). It has been argued that the complexity of NPOs in comparison to for-profits (a function of the existence of multiple stakeholders, missions, donors, classes of workers and the saliency of the dual governance system) necessitates even more effective approaches to leadership (Anheier, 2005; Finkelstein, 1992; Jager and Beyes, 2010), and by extension, a more nuanced understanding of the construction and functioning of top leadership teams. NPOs are an increasingly important part of modern society (Anheier, 2005; Ferris, 1998), yet the majority of research focus is placed on for-profit organizations. Concepts and theories from the for-profit world are applicable to NPOs to a certain extent, though research tends to overlook the complexities of the nonprofit world when applying these constructs (Jager and Beyes, 2010). TMTs and corporate boards represent the core leadership teams in NPOs; to understand and facilitate effective leadership in NPOs, it is imperative that we understand the conditions, characteristics and processes that contribute to leadership effectiveness in these teams. Process-based models of teams have guided research and practice in other settings (e.g., Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson and Jundt, 2005; Rosen et al., 2008; Salas, Bowers and Cannon- Bowers, 1995). To this end, we review relevant literature on top leadership teams (i.e., corporate boards and TMTs) in not-for-profit and for-profit organizations, in order to address qualitatively two key questions

The Role of Work Environment in Training Sustainment: A Meta-Analysis

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to examine the role of three work environment support variables (i.e., peer, supervisor, and organizational support) in training transfer and sustainment or long-term use of learned knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs). BACKGROUND: Estimates demonstrate that little training is transferred to the job, wasting billions in organizational spending each year and resulting in significant loss to safety and individual and team performance. Prior research shows the importance of a supportive work environment to facilitating transfer; however, we know little of the relative importance of specific support variables. This study seeks to examine the unique roles of distinct support variables in training transfer. METHOD: A meta-analysis was conducted with multiple regressions to answer three primary research questions. RESULTS: All work environment support variables demonstrate moderate and positive correlations with transfer of training. Furthermore, multiple regressions demonstrate that each factor of the work environment explains unique variance as a predictor, with the model accounting for 32% of transfer and peer support accounting for most of R2. Motivation to transfer mediates the relationship between all three work environment support variables and transfer. Furthermore, three support variables are positively related to sustainment, with peer and supervisor support showing the strongest relationships. CONCLUSION: Findings illuminate the relative contribution of peer, supervisor, and organizational support to transfer and sustainment of training. As transfer continues to be an important yet understudied measure of the effectiveness of workplace training, these findings hold implications for both research and practice