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The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the link between diversity in project teams and team performance by examining the effects of players’ international career diversity on the performance of national football teams.

The paper draws upon the literature on project organizations and experiential diversity in teams. Using data on players’ international career backgrounds and team performance from the FIFA World Cup 2006, the authors test two hypotheses linking experiential diversity in teams and a measure of relative team performance. The dataset includes detailed individual background profiles of the 736 participating players and performance data from the 64 games played at the tournament.

The findings suggest that different types of experiential diversity have contrasting effects on team performance in a time‐limited project team setting.

These findings encourage team diversity researchers to further examine the impact of experiential diversity in teams on team process and performance outcomes in future research.

The findings particularly highlight the need to carefully manage experiential diversity in project team settings in order to benefit from access to diverse tacit resources, while at the same time avoiding that the integrative capacities of teams becoming overstretched.

The paper is a step towards a better understanding of how diversity of individual career backgrounds affects team performance outcomes in project teams.

This chapter focuses on design capability. The authors draw from the work of design models to define design for intelligence work. Design is presented as both a way of thinking and a way of working. This chapter breaks the design capability down to several critical activities, including environmental scanning, problem detection, discovery, problem decomposition and recomposition, brainstorming, critical thinking, problem definition, factor identification, hypothesis development, model building, and source identification blueprinting.

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed profitability with labor's interests, and ended class conflict. They thought that Keynesian policies insured a near full-employment, low-inflation, continuous growth economy. They viewed the United States as the “new lead society,” eliminating industrial capitalism's backward features and progressing toward modernity's penultimate “postindustrial” stage.⁷ Many Americans believed that the ideal of “consumer freedom,” forged early in the century, had been widely realized and epitomized American democracy's superiority to communism.⁸ However, critics held that the new capitalism did not solve all of classical capitalism's problems (e.g., poverty) and that much increased consumption generated new types of cultural and political problems. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that mainstream economists assumed that human nature dictates an unlimited “urgency of wants,” naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites. In his view, mainstream economists’ individualistic, acquisitive presuppositions crown consumers sovereign and obscure cultural forces, especially advertising, that generate and channel desire and elevate possessions and consumption into the prime measures of self-worth. Galbraith held that production's “paramount position” and related “imperatives of consumer demand” create dependence on economic growth and generate new imbalances and insecurities.⁹ Harsher critics held that the consumer culture blinded middle-class Americans to injustice, despotic bureaucracy, and drudge work (e.g., Mills, 1961; Marcuse, 1964). But even these radical critics implied that postwar capitalism unlocked the secret of sustained economic growth.

Recent evidence indicates an improving effect of the co-occurrence of autistic traits and psychotic symptoms on social cognition, but there is no agreement on the effect of the interaction between autistic traits and psychotic proneness on empathy. The aim of this study is to examine the effect of the interaction between autistic traits and positive psychotic experiences on cognitive and affective empathy.

The sample consisted of 420 adults aged between 18 and 60. Assessments were administered anonymously online. Empathic abilities were evaluated by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). While Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) was applied to measure autistic traits, The Community Assessment of Psychic Experience (CAPE) was used as a measurement of positive psychotic experiences.

A series of regression analyses showed that although AQ and CAPE scores were not correlated with cognitive-IRI, the interaction between these scores predicted cognitive-IRI scores. It was found that the personal distress subscale of IRI was significantly associated with AQ, but this relationship was moderated by CAPE scores.

These findings provide a different perspective on understanding social cognitive impairments in autism, which may have potential clinical implications. Findings also contribute to explaining the individual differences in empathic abilities.

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of team diversity on team performance in the Tour de France.

Longitudinal data on teams participating in the Tour de France between 2004 and 2013 are used for the empirical analysis (n = 208). Team performance is captured with a standardized measure controlling for the number of riders arriving in Paris. Diversity is measured with the variation coefficient (continuous variables) and the Blau index (categorical variables). Regression analysis is used to analyze diversity effects on team performance.

The results show that diversity in terms of tenure significantly adds to team performance, while diversity in terms of skills (proxied by body mass index) decreases performance. Diversity in terms of age, nationality, language, previous Tour participations and stage wins has no significant effect on team performance. The more teammates arrive in Paris, the better the team’s performance.

The findings have implications for team managers and the composition of teams. Managers should employ riders who are heterogeneous regarding tenure and homogeneous regarding skills. While investing in the integration of riders of different nationalities or languages does not pay off, it can be recommended to select riders who are likely to arrive in Paris.

The present study adds to the literature by examining diversity in a variety of attributes including human capital, experience and success that are observable in sport.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze circular business models of Brazilian companies.

The authors analyzed 105 business models of adopting companies from the perspective of the circularity of resources. These were classified as analytical sector category, business model design aligned with sustainability, sustainable practices adopted, level of maturity of business models and determinants of the circularity of resources.

The results show that companies belonging to the service sector predominate, which, above all, offer the virtualization of processes, sharing, ecological products, socially responsible and emphasis on recycling. Of these, 92.38 percent were already aligned with the sustainability assumptions, which contribute decisively to the operationalization in a circular perspective. Therefore, the materialization of the circular economy (CE) in Brazil is occurring, although there is potential for a stronger engagement with the determinants of the CE, especially in the perspective of the biological cycle and in the short cycles of technical levels.

In addition, the authors promote advances in the maturity levels of business models to optimize the optimal level, where processes are predictable, critically analyzed and continuously improved.