This study explores the relationships between group-affect tone, teams’ transactive memory systems (TMSs), and teams’ incremental creativity. Data were collected from 334 team members and 70 team leaders across 70 teams. Results indicate that positive group-affect tone enhances TMS, while negative group-affect tone impedes it. TMS positively impacts team incremental creativity. Additionally, both types of group-affect tone influence incremental creativity through TMS mediation. This research advances TMS theory and group-affect tone, substantiating the affect-cognition model and deepening the understanding of TMS’s role in incremental creativity.

In this special issue, we have collected 13 articles that offer new vantage points for research on dynamic capabilities. We offer a selection of thought-provoking papers that advance current thinking on dynamic capabilities and provide directions for new inquiries using the dynamic capability framework. The microfoundations of dynamic capabilities have increasingly received interest. This special issue offers a range of conceptual methodological approaches to deepen our understanding of the issues surrounding the microfoundations of dynamic capabilities.

Participatory work structure is a popular concept but its causal impacts in real-world work groups have heretofore been unquantified and research has been Western-centric. We test the hypothesis that participatory group structure increases productivity for blue-collar workers in a context where participation is not a normative default. We conducted a pre-registered longitudinal field experiment with 65 Chinese factory groups (1752 workers). Half of the groups were randomly assigned to a 20-minute participatory meeting once per week for 6 weeks, in which the group's supervisor stepped aside and workers contributed ideas and personal goals in an open discussion of their work. The other half continued with status-quo meetings in which supervisors spoke and set goals, workers listened, and a researcher observed. We found that a participatory versus a hierarchical structure led to a 10.6% average increase in individual treatment workers’ productivity, an increase that endured for 9 weeks after the experiment ended. The brief participatory meetings also increased treatment workers’ retention rate (an 85% vs. 77% retention rate in treatment vs. control groups) and feelings of empowerment such as job satisfaction and sense of control. We found no evidence of informational gains or new worker goals; instead, evidence suggests that the increase in frequency of workers’ voicing opinions may have driven higher productivity. These findings provide rare causal evidence in a setting where participation is not a normative default, indicating the benefits of direct group participation for changing and sustaining behavior and attitudes.

The compassion of healthcare workers towards patients is widely recognized, but research suggests a dearth of compassion among co-workers. Indeed, workplace bullying and negative employee outcomes are over-represented in the healthcare sector (including burnout and substantial staff turnover). In this paper, we discuss the cultivation of compassion for healthcare workers, using the lens of positive organizational scholarship. Our concern is not only with the individual level compassion (i.e. between employees), we also consider how compassion can be cultivated systemically across healthcare institutions at the organizational level. More specifically, we present a proposed Noticing, Empathising, Assessing and Responding Mechanisms Model of Organizational Compassion as a tool for consciously cultivating workplace compassion in healthcare organizations.

This research focused on the role of group cohesion as moderating the psychological manifestations of attachment and caregiving in performing organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Data were collected from 147 employees, who took part in a 9-week training course. Participants completed questionnaires assessing their attachment and caregiving dimensions as well as group cohesion. Participant OCB levels were assessed by their trainers at the end of the course. Anxious individuals tended to express higher levels of OCB-individual under high levels of group cohesion. However, compulsive caregivers tended to perform OCBI under low levels of group cohesion. The results highlight the contribution of Bowlby's relational perspective in work settings and the importance of contextual factors in predicting OCB.

Previous research demonstrated that different contextual sources can affect voting behavior. Homogeneous familiar networks affect individual behavior of people embedded in these networks toward voting for certain parties. Moreover, being exposed to higher levels of homogeneity in the geographical place where one lives contributes to developing higher propensities to vote for a certain political object. By means of 2006 National Italian Elections data (and by employing new measures of network political homogeneity), this paper tests, with multilevel models, the hypothesis according to which networks and geographical context interact while affecting individuals’ voting behavior. Results confirm such a hypothesis, showing that familiar networks represent a ‘social bubble’, which limits the likelihood of being affected by the broader context.

Group dynamics of humpback dolphins Sousa chinensis inhabiting the Algoa Bay region on the south Eastern Cape coast of South Africa, were investigated by means of boat-based photo-identification surveys undertaken between May 1991 and May 1994. Groups of humpback dolphins varied in size from three to 24 animals (x = seven), with adults representing almost two-thirds of the group members. Births occurred predominantly in summer. Some females, however, may also cycle outside of the apparent summer breeding season, perhaps indicating a secondary winter season. Circumstantial evidence suggests a minimum of a 3-year calving interval. Maternal care lasts at least 3–4 years, but female–calf separation is seemingly not related to the female's next pregnancy. Humpback dolphins displayed varying degrees of residence/fidelity to Algoa Bay. Although a few individuals may possibly be classified as ‘resident’, most dolphins were infrequent visitors in the Bay and seem to be transient. The social system of humpback dolphins appears to be fluid with only casual and short-lasting affiliations. Strong bonds between individuals other than mothers and calves are uncommon. Lack of consistency in the group membership appears to be the general pattern. The weak site fidelity and possibly extensive long-range movement of the majority of dolphins may contribute to the dynamic nature of humpback dolphin groups. There is probably some form of segregation between sex and/or age classes among humpback dolphins in Eastern Cape waters. The nature and extent of this segregation, however, is not yet sufficiently understood. It is likely that the degree of site fidelity displayed by female humpback dolphins is related to their reproductive stage and increases during the nursing period. Mate-searching behaviour of male humpback dolphins is the most likely reproductive strategy of the species.