Managing a new collaborative entity in business organizations: understanding organizational communities of practice effectiveness.

Companies worldwide are turning to organizational communities of practice (OCoPs) as vehicles to generate learning and enhance organizational performance. OCoPs are defined as groups of employees who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic and who strengthen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on a consistent basis. To date, OCoP research has drawn almost exclusively from the community of practice (CoP) literature, even though the organizational form of CoPs shares attributes of traditional CoPs and of organizational teams.

A multilevel study of leadership, empowerment, and performance in teams.

A multilevel model of leadership, empowerment, and performance was tested using a sample of 62 teams, 445 individual members, 62 team leaders, and 31 external managers from 31 stores of a Fortune 500 company. Leader-member exchange and leadership climate related differently to individual and team empowerment and interacted to influence individual empowerment. Also, several relationships were supported in more but not in less interdependent teams.

Evaluating the impact of the Management Academy for Public Health: developing entrepreneurial managers and organizations.

The Management Academy for Public Health is a management development program with the goals of helping public health managers learn to manage people, data, and finance, to think and plan like entrepreneurs, and to strengthen public health organizations. Managers enroll as teams and develop business plans in the Academy's extensive project-based learning component. Extensive internal and external evaluation shows that the program improves managers' knowledge, skills, and confidence in key curriculum areas; that participants apply many of the skills in their jobs; that many of the business plans receive funding, resulting in new public health programs; that the training experience helped agencies respond and plan after September 11, 2001; and that many participants report beginning to think more like entrepreneurs through activities like teaming, partnering, innovating, negotiating, finding funds, and generating revenue.

The Management Academy for Public Health: program design and critical success factors.

The Management Academy for Public Health is a team-based training program jointly offered by the School of Public Health and the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This 9-month program teaches public health managers how to better manage people, information, and finances. Participants learn how to work in teams with community partners, and how to think and behave as social entrepreneurs.

Enhancing the transfer of computer-assisted training proficiency in geographically distributed teams.

The authors examined factors that determine whether knowledge gained from computer-assisted (i.e., technology-based) team training in a geographically distributed team (GDT) context transfers to organizational results.