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As technology-mediated communication improves, many organizations increasingly use new types of collaborative online tools to promote team-based learning and performance. The purpose of this study is to explore how virtual team leaders cope with process challenges in developing a context for team creativity.

The authors interviewed nine leaders who have worked for more than five years and managed virtual teams in different fields.

This research uncovered distrust, personality differences, generational differences in views, scheduling issues and technology difficulties as the top five inhibitors for virtual team creativity and success. The authors identified seven main strategies for developing virtual team creativity and success. The authors found that building “team norms” and guidelines to encourage positive interactions between team members can facilitate team creativity. In addition, a concept of trust-based open communication was identified as one of the important strategies when teams actively use technology-mediated communication tools.

Organizational practitioners can use the results of this study when developing knowledge to establish assessments regarding which employees possess the appropriate characteristics to lead virtual teams and implement virtual team training.

This study emphasizes the importance of technology in professional lives by showing how technology-mediated work leads to success in learning and producing creative ideas and performance in a virtual team environment.

As a cornerstone of team performance, learning depends on each member’s mindset. Drawing on implicit theories of intelligence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships among individual members’ mindsets and shared leadership (SL) behaviors in design teams and the mediation role of team growth mindset (TGM) on that relationship.

The authors analyzed survey results based on individuals who participated in an international design competition. To test the hypothesized model, the data was analyzed by using SEM using Mplus 7.

The results indicated that an individual growth mindset (IGM; but not an individual-fixed mindset) has significant and positive direct effects on a team growth mindset and SL behaviors. In addition, a TGM mediates the relationship between an IGM and SL.

The research discusses several theoretical and practical implications for human resource development professionals and scholars to improve understanding of a TGM and its influence on individual mindsets and SL behaviors.

Informed by the job characteristics model (JCM) and job crafting theory (JCT), this study aims to investigate the mediating role of meaningfulness at work in the relationship between a growth mindset and in-role performance and moderating role of job crafting in this indirect effect.

To this end, the authors examined the moderated mediation model with 271 corporate trainers enrolled in the largest online community for adult educators in South Korea.

Results showed that the relationship between a growth mindset and in-role performance is positively mediated by meaningfulness at work. Furthermore, job crafting acted as a moderator in this relationship, such that trainers with high levels of job crafting showed a greater in-role performance, while trainers with low levels of job crafting reported a negative indirect effect of a growth mindset.

The current study contributes to the JCM and JCT by suggesting a growth mindset as individual characteristics to promote meaningfulness at work and in-role performance. The study also responds to the calls to expand the mediation mechanisms and boundary conditions of a growth mindset in the workplace. The authors provide important insights into how corporate trainers’ job crafting is crucial in enhancing or impeding their performance and meaningful work.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how multinational corporations’ (MNCs’) women leaders in South Korea (Korea) have overcome career challenges in the process of becoming CEOs. The two guiding questions for this study included: what career challenges have MNCs’ women leaders in Korea faced to become CEOs? How have they overcome their career challenges?

The authors used a basic qualitative research design, the goal of which is to understand how people make sense of their lives and experiences. Qualitative data were collected by semi-structured interviews with 15 women CEOs at MNCs in Korea to capture their lived experiences (challenges and strategies) in their careers. The authors used NVivo 11, a qualitative data analysis software, to analyze the interview data.

From data analysis, the authors identified five themes including: becoming a CEO, key success factors, MNC culture, career challenges and career development strategies. The authors found that in the process of becoming CEOs, 15 women leaders faced career challenges that are largely generated by traditional culture, work stress and work–life balance. The authors also found that the women leaders became CEOs through diverse on-the-job experiences (e.g. marketing and sales) and positions (e.g. managers, senior managers and regional directors) with organizational support (e.g. supervisor support).

Given research on organizational support for leadership, human resource practices and working conditions, this study’s findings have qualitatively confirmed the importance of organizational support for women CEOs’ career success. For theory building in women in leadership, the authors suggest that researchers investigate the complex process of becoming women CEOs, including their early experiences in their career in tandem with family background, organizational climate and national culture.

The study findings on women CEOs’ career strategies can be used as a reference for women in the leadership pipeline who aspire to take leadership positions in organizations. A lack of role models or mentors for women leaders is one of the reasons why women give up on their career. Learning career strategies (e.g. global development programs, mentoring and networks) that women CEOs have employed to overcome their career challenges can help women in the leadership pipeline from their early career on.

The authors found that both internal and external factors combined were instrumental in the women CEOs’ career success. What stood out from this study was that the women’s desirable personality attributes might not have materialized without the MNC culture that has been supportive for these women. The women CEOs shared their company’s values and philosophy that is based on gender equality, received supervisor support that is crucial for their career success, experienced diverse jobs and positions along the way and were recognized for their work ethic. Given research on women leaders conducted largely in western contexts, this qualitative study on the lived experiences of women CEOs in MNCs contributes to emerging non-western research by capturing the importance of culture that is uniquely Korean.

The authors examined team-learning processes in short-term student project teams operating in an intensive design competition at a public university. The purpose of this paper is to explore the critical facilitators, inhibitors and processes for fostering students' creativity within interdisciplinary design teams in higher education.

The authors used a qualitative design to explore facilitators, inhibitors and critical processes in interdisciplinary student project teams. They conducted focus group interviews with three winning interdisciplinary teams that participated in a three-day design competition and used a constant comparison to analyze the data.

The authors identified themes that contributed to creativity at the individual level, the team level and the resource level. The key findings included 12 critical team process phases to achieve one common goal.

The findings of the study yielded to a holistic model of interdisciplinary team development for creativity. Implications for educators and practitioners and suggestions for researchers to expand the interdisciplinary team process model were discussed to facilitate interdisciplinary team creativity in higher education.

As team members temporarily assume the role of leader, a system of shared leadership emerges. This study had three purposes: (a) to test the underlying three dimensions of shared leadership behaviors, (b) to examine the relationship between shared leadership behaviors and team performance, and (c) to examine the mediating effect of trust between team members’ perceptions of shared leadership and performance.

We used the sub-dimensions of shared leadership: relation-oriented shared leadership (ROSL), task-oriented shared leadership (TOSL), and creativity-oriented shared leadership (COSL). We collected survey data from college student teams at two different time points.

This study’s factor analysis results supported a second-order factor model that explains shared leadership with TOSL, ROSL, and a new COSL construct. Additionally, we discovered that shared leadership behaviors predicted team performance both directly and indirectly through team trust.

This study confirms the role of the new sub-dimension of COSL originally discovered by video analysis of project teams (Leight et al., 2018), thereby adding value to shared leadership research. This quantitative study supports the COSL with TOSL and ROSL in a second-order model where each component contributes unique input into the team dynamics. Our findings underscore the significance of shared leadership in elevating team trust, ultimately resulting in improved team performance. This insight holds particular relevance for educational management and leadership, offering a framework for understanding how shared leadership practices can positively influence team dynamics within academic contexts.

This paper aims to examine the effect of shared leadership on student project team processes and outcomes. The authors focused on shared leadership and its association with team processes (coordination, goal commitment and knowledge sharing) and team performance.

To examine the shared leadership, team processes and performance model, the authors conducted two separate surveys of 158 graduate and undergraduate students working in project teams at a large southwestern university.

Results showed that shared leadership positively affected coordination activities, goal commitment and knowledge sharing, which in turn positively affect team performance. Each team process factor had a mediation effect, although shared leadership had no direct effect on team performance.

This research adds to the knowledge of important team process factors through which shared leadership indirectly affects team performance.

Based on the findings, the authors provided implications for students and instructors that shared leadership can facilitate team performance by enabling team members to coordinate activities, commit to goals and share knowledge effectively.

This study presents an initial understanding of the shared leadership-team performance relationship by introducing influential variables, such as coordination activities, goal commitment and knowledge sharing in a team.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the structural relationships among transformational leadership, affective organizational commitment and job performance, as well as the mediating effect of employee engagement on their relationships.

To examine the structural relationships among the research variables, structural equation modeling analysis and bootstrap estimates were performed using the data of 600 full-time employees working in Korean private organizations.

The results of the data analysis suggest that transformational leadership had a significant impact on employee affective organizational commitment and job performance through employee engagement as a mediator. Specifically, employee engagement partially mediated the mechanism in which transformational leadership affects employee affective organizational commitment, whereas there existed a full mediation of the association between transformational leadership and job performance.

The study finding suggested that transformational leadership was the key catalyst in both encouraging affective organizational commitment and task performance of employees throughout the mediator, employee engagement. Thus, organizations need to create a safe and positive environment that promotes employee engagement and should offer interventions for leaders to build skill sets of transformational leadership.

Because previous studies had explored the impacts of transformational leadership on employee positive attitude and job performance separately, there is little known about how these three constructs correlate. By investigating the impacts of transformational leadership on attitude and performance simultaneously in this study, this study expanded to the extant literature by providing better understanding of transformational leadership. Moreover, given that articles on transformational leadership have been limited in the HRD literature, findings of this study can offer trustworthy information for HRD practice and encourage HRD scholars to explore transformational leadership-related research.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between empowering leadership and employee creativity and the mediating roles of work engagement and knowledge sharing in this relationship.

Using the results of a survey of 302 knowledge workers from a leading telecommunications company in South Korea, the relationships among the variables empowering leadership, work engagement and knowledge sharing on employee creativity were analyzed using conducted confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. This study conducted bootstrap analyses to test the mediating effects.

Empowering leadership was positively and significantly associated with work engagement and knowledge sharing. Work engagement was significantly related to knowledge sharing and employee creativity. In turn, knowledge sharing was significantly associated with employee creativity. The direct effect of empowering leadership on employee creativity was nonsignificant, but this study found a significant indirect effect of empowering leadership on employee creativity via the significant mediating roles of work engagement and knowledge sharing.

This study introduced empowering leadership that may work for knowledge workers who create new ideas by analyzing data from the knowledge workers’ perceptions of their leaders in the workplace. The intuitive linkage between work engagement and knowledge sharing was empirically verified in this study. This study’s findings and implications provide direction for knowledge workers and how their managers should support employees’ work environment and activities.

The study attempts to build a creative learning transfer (CLT) theory represented by a nomological network incorporating relevant theories and empirical support for the relationships among the transfer predictors in the learning transfer system (LTS), leaders' CLT and their job performance.

The authors used 76-item survey data from 471 managers who worked for 16 large companies located in South Korea, had completed leadership training at least three months before the data collection and had received a performance review just before the data collection. A series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and reliability tests were conducted, followed by a common method variance test and structural equation modeling.

A nomological network of LTS, CLT and job performance was established. The findings supported the mechanism for motivating managers to transfer acquired leadership skills to challenging organizational situations and eventually, increase their managerial job performance. This study provided a parsimonious CLT scale and verified the influence of CLT on leaders' job performance.

This study is the first attempt to measure the concept of CLT and suggest a parsimonious CLT scale. In addition, this study conceptualized, operationalized and confirmed a nomological network for CLT. Organizations may develop such a system and help managers apply the learned leadership knowledge and skills to novel business situations for creating more competitive work systems, products and services.