Addressing the paradox of the team innovation process: A review and practical considerations.

Facilitating team innovation is paramount to promoting progress in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, as well as advancing national health, safety, prosperity, and welfare. However, innovation teams face a unique set of challenges due to the novelty and uncertainty that is core to the definition of innovation, as well as the paradoxical nature of idea generation and idea implementation processes. These and other challenges must be overcome for innovation teams to realize their full potential for producing change. The purpose of this review is, thus, to provide insight into the unique context that these teams function within and provide an integrative, evidence-based, and practically useful, organizing heuristic that focuses on the most important considerations for facilitating team innovation. Finally, we provide practical guidance for psychologists, organizations, practitioners, scientists, educators, policymakers, and others who employ teams to produce novel, innovative solutions to today's problems. (PsycINFO Database Record

Team knowledge research: emerging trends and critical needs.

OBJECTIVE: This article provides a systematic review of the team knowledge literature and guidance for further research. BACKGROUND: Recent research has called attention to the need for the improved study and understanding of team knowledge. Team knowledge refers to the higher level knowledge structures that emerge from the interactions of individual team members. METHOD: We conducted a systematic review of the team knowledge literature, focusing on empirical work that involves the measurement of team knowledge constructs. For each study, we extracted author degree area, study design type, study setting, participant type, task type, construct type, elicitation method, aggregation method, measurement timeline, and criterion domain. RESULTS: Our analyses demonstrate that many of the methodological characteristics of team knowledge research can be linked back to the academic training of the primary author and that there are considerable gaps in our knowledge with regard to the relationships between team knowledge constructs, the mediating mechanisms between team knowledge and performance, and relationships with criteria outside of team performance, among others. We also identify categories of team knowledge not yet examined based on an organizing framework derived from a synthesis of the literature. CONCLUSION: There are clear opportunities for expansion in the study of team knowledge; the science of team knowledge would benefit from a more holistic theoretical approach. APPLICATION: Human factors researchers are increasingly involved in the study of teams. This review and the resulting organizing framework provide researchers with a summary of team knowledge research over the past 10 years and directions for improving further research.