Autonomy and teamwork in innovative projects
研究了团队自主性的两个维度（外部影响和内部平等）与团队合作质量的关系，发现外部干预会降低合作质量，而内部决策权共享则提升合作质量，对创新项目管理有指导意义。
The use of teams that incorporate autonomy in their designs continues to be an important element of many organizations. However, prior research has emphasized projects with mostly routine tasks and has assumed that autonomy resides primarily with a team leader. We investigate how two aspects of team autonomy are related to teamwork quality, a multifaceted indicator of team collaboration (Hoegl & Gemuenden, 2001). Specifically, we hypothesize that team-external influence over operational project decisions is negatively related to teamwork quality, while team-internal equality of influence over project decisions is positively related to teamwork quality. Testing our hypotheses on responses from 430 team members and team leaders pertaining to 145 software development teams, results support both predictions. Acknowledging the possible benefits of certain types of external influence (e.g., constructive feedback), the findings demonstrate that team-external managers of innovative projects should generally refrain from interfering in team-internal operational decisions. Likewise, the study shows that all team members should share decision authority, recognizing that their contributions to team discussion and decision making may well differ given differences in experience and expertise. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.