For IWOT 21 we particularly welcome papers on the following themes:

Creating knowledge through team work: The creation of knowledge, fundamental to organizational learning and innovation, is a collective activity. Knowledge creation may happen spontaneously as people from different backgrounds come together, or may be planned for by establishing parallel team structures and providing the necessary infrastructure and support. We welcome papers on both knowledge creation processes and how knowledge creating teams are embedded in the wider organization.

Team working in knowledge-intensive organizations: Knowledge-intensive organizations face an environmental complexity that demands cross-functional teams, multi-teams and/or virtual collaboration across loose organizational boundaries. These organizations should be flexible and find ways to support and regulate teams’ autonomy contingent on environmental demands and limitations. The multi-team context implies that there are dependencies to other teams, while the distributed context incurs that the teams must deal with geographical dispersion of team members, teams or units.

Team working in industry: Ideas about team working have had a major impact on shop-floor work organization through concepts such as socio-technical design, lean production and continuous improvement. In the modern industrial organization, teams are also widely used to perform additional functions such as product design, product development and R&D. Furthermore, project teams are often set up to deal with non-routine tasks and complex problem solving such as implementing new technology or exploring new business opportunities. We welcome theoretical reflections and empirical studies on both classical topics and new developments, for instance on how digitalization creates new possibilities for interaction or how calls for sustainability increase the number of team stakeholders and issues that need to be taken into account.