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This paper presents a longitudinal experimental study on teams with the purpose of investigating the impact of communication media on decision‐making teams. The authors aims to achieve that by comparing face‐to‐face (FTF) and computer‐supported (CS) teams over a series of three sessions on three response variables: performance, cohesiveness, and synergy.

A total of 24 teams, each of five students, participated in three separate decision‐making sessions in which they solved a survival simulation scenario. Each team was randomly assigned to either face‐to‐face (FTF) or computer‐supported (CS) communication condition. The analysis compared overall means and mean patterns over time on the three response variables across the two communication media.

Results suggest that there were no differences in overall performance between CS and FTF teams and no differences in performance changes over time between the two media; there were no overall differences in overall synergy or synergy changes over time; and FTF teams reported higher average cohesiveness than CS teams, but cohesiveness improved at a faster rate in CS teams than in FTF teams. Overall these results suggest that the CS communication did not reduce the group's ability to work together. Moreover, the higher increase in cohesiveness reported by CS teams suggests that the ability to build relationships can increase over time.

Given the prominence of information technologies as a communication mechanism, the question of how team members in remote locations perform over time is of great theoretical and practical importance.

This study provides some preliminary evidence that computer communication does not significantly reduce the group's ability to perform over time for decision‐making tasks. CS teams report lower overall levels of cohesiveness which could indicate that some communication barriers might still limit the group's ability to build relationships.

Many of the benefits of Six Sigma (SS) programs stem from the proper use of tools within team‐based improvement projects. However, teams often struggle with selecting and integrating the best tools to use in their projects, compromising not only the project completion but also the solution implementation and sustainability over time. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic approach to articulate SS tools based on team learning, in order to facilitate tool selection and alignment, team collaboration, solution ownership, and overall solution quality and sustainability.

The action research approach was adopted to explore the link between team learning practices and tool application that combined participation in and reflection upon a successful SS project from the electronic manufacturing industry.

SS tools can be more effectively aligned and integrated with team learning practices. Team discussions and dialogues on SS tool outcomes are pivotal to the development of practical interpretations, allowing the team to create new knowledge, change mental models regarding pre‐conceived solutions, and enable team members to collectively select and interpret tools in a coherent way, leading to the buy‐in of the final solution and the SS program as a whole.

The paper yields value to practitioners and researchers interested in successful SS project execution and program sustainability, by providing a team‐learning approach for effective tool integration. In addition, this paper highlights the need for additional research on team learning within SS programs.

Prodigious teamwork is the basis for augmenting the level of productivity on construction projects. Globalisation of the construction market has meant that many practitioners work outside of their geographical spectrum; however, the multicultural dissimilarities of construction workforces within the project management team (and how these may impact upon project productivity performance) have been given scant academic attention. To bridge this knowledge gap, this paper aims to analyse the effects of a multicultural workforce on construction productivity.

The epistemological positioning of the research adopted mixed philosophies (consisting of both interpretivism and postpositivism) to undertake a deductive and cross-sectional survey to collate primary quantitative data collected via a closed-ended structured questionnaire. Census sampling and convenience sampling techniques were adopted to target Ghana’s construction workforce and their opinions of the phenomenon under investigation. Out of 96 questionnaires administered, 61 were retrieved. The data obtained were analysed by using mean score ranking, relative important index, one sample t-test and multiple regression. The reliability of the scale was checked by using Cronbach’s alpha coefficient.

From the t-test analysis, 11 variables sourced from extant literature, and the null hypothesis for the study was not rejected and all factors (except high cost of training and improper gender diversity management) were affirmed as negative effects of the multicultural workforce on construction productivity. Using multiple regression analysis, six of the independent variables were shown to impact upon productivity. The goodness of fit was verified by collinearity and residual analysis. The model’s validation revealed a relatively high predictive accuracy (R² = 0. 589), implying that the results could be generalized. In culmination, these findings suggest that the predictors can be used to accurately predict the effects of multicultural workforce on construction productivity performance.

The findings indicate that multicultural workforce/teams have a substantial effect on overall construction productivity in the construction sector; consequently, stakeholders must address this issue to enhance productivity across the sector.

The current study significantly contributes to our understanding of how multicultural workers/teams affect construction productivity in the construction business perspective and how to respond to the negative menace.