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PurposeThis study aims to examine supervisors' temporal reminders and subordinates' pacing style as they relate to employees' absorption in work tasks, and subsequently creativity.Design/methodology/approachThe study involved a weekly diary study among 32 employees of an IT‐development department of a large multinational. An initial questionnaire measured employees' pacing style and their perceptions of supervisors' temporal reminders, after which participants completed a weekly survey for four consecutive weeks to report on their levels of task absorption and creativity.FindingsWhereas supervisors' temporal reminders related positively with task absorption for individuals who scored high rather than low on the deadline action pacing style, they related negatively to task absorption for those high rather than low on the steady action and the U‐shaped action pacing styles. Moreover, task absorption fluctuated consistently with individual creativity.Research limitations/implicationsThe way individuals allocate efforts over time is not only related to the resources they invest in activities but also to their creativity.Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that creativity requires that employees find the time and space to fully immerse in their work. Supervisors can facilitate this process by customizing their leadership practices to individual differences in time use.Social implicationsIn an increasingly time‐pressured corporate society, an effective management of temporal strategies is important to ensure sustained employee well‐being as well as the quality of products in terms of creative solutions.Originality/valueThis study is the first to show that supervisors' temporal reminders relate positively to task absorption, and subsequent creativity levels, but only for specific pacing styles.

In a longitudinal field study of 37 professional project teams over almost 2 years, we investigated the dynamic relationship between perceptual shared cognition and team potency in predicting team performance. Our main results show that initial levels and change in perceptual shared cognition explain team performance outcomes through initial levels and change in team potency, respectively. Thereby, our findings confirmed that initial levels and change in team potency operated as an explanatory mechanism for the relationship between shared cognition and team performance. Interestingly, shared cognition change shows larger benefits on team performance outcomes than initial levels. In addition, we show differential relationships of task‐ and time‐related shared cognition with the quality and timeliness criteria of team performance. Whereas shared task cognition predicts team performance in terms of both output quality and timeliness, shared temporal cognition predicts timeliness only. Altogether, this research suggests the unique theoretical value of change in perceptual shared cognition in explaining team performance and of affective‐motivational team states as an alternative explanatory mechanism for the impact of shared cognition on team effectiveness.Practitioner pointsTeam members' perceptions of being on the same page about their collaborative task and its temporal elements boost their confidence in the team's capabilities, thereby improving team performance.Team members' perceived agreement about the 'what' of their collaborative task is conducive to both project quality and timeliness. Their perceived agreement on the 'when' of task accomplishment further facilitates a timely project completion.Team members' cognitive consensus about the task and its temporal elements are subject to change, so is their confidence in the team's capabilities. Initial disagreements do not necessarily warrant eventual detriments, but performance excellence does require that cognitive consensus is being maintained and improved throughout the project.

This article describes some of the theoretical approaches used by social scientists as well as those used by computer scientists to study the team and group phenomena. The purpose of this article is to identify ways in which these different fields can share and develop theoretical models and theoretical approaches, in an effort to gain a better understanding and further develop team and group research.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate how perceptions of team performance and teamwork processes relate to functional diversity appropriateness perceptions (FDAP), that is, whether one believes that the right functions are represented in a team. Thereby, the authors distinguish between perceptions of team managers and team members.Design/methodology/approach– The study involved a cross-sectional survey study among 48 sourcing teams from 12 multinational companies, all from different industries.Findings– Members' and managers' congruent perceptions of performance showed differential relationships with their perceptions of the team's functional diversity appropriateness. For managers, perceptions of team performance and functional diversity appropriateness were directly and positively related. For team members, this relationship was moderated by teamwork behavior. Moreover, unlike team members, purchasing managers did not consider functionally diverse teams to be more suitable for executing sourcing tasks.Research limitations/implications– This study identified teamwork behavior as a critical element for explaining the differences in FDAP of members and managers of sourcing teams.Practical implications– Rather than homogenizing team structures, managers should stimulate good teamwork behavior that allows for an the integration of interests and insights from different functional areas.Originality/value– This study adds to functional diversity literature as well as perceptual distance literature by revealing how different team effectiveness criteria shape managers' and members' perceptions of functional diversity appropriateness.

Although role stress literature has almost exclusively focused on individual role incumbents, it is conceivable that shared conditions of ambiguity, conflict, and quantitative or qualitative overload may give rise to a collective experience of role stress in teams. Testing a multilevel mediation model among 38 Dutch project teams ( N = 283), we studied the interplay among individual and team role stress, team learning behaviors, and individual and team performance. Team role stress was discerned as a separate construct next to individual role stress. Team quantitative role overload, in particular, impeded team and individual performance by inhibiting team learning behaviors and, indirectly, also hindered individual performance by increasing individual quantitative overload.