Freelancers, entrepreneurs, new ventures, but also incumbent firms increasingly use coworking spaces (CWS). The alignment of work-space and social space can facilitate organizational empowerment supporting individual work satisfaction. Our mixed-methods study of 363 respondents from CWS in 26 cities in the USA, Germany, and China identifies configurations of institutional patterns on work satisfaction associated with a sense of community, autonomy, participation, linkage multiplicity and mutual knowledge creation. High work satisfaction can occur in three different configurations related to a) agility housing, b) knowledge housing, and c) social housing. Our findings contribute to how incumbent firms and CWS can influence work satisfaction and empower towards innovation and entrepreneurial performance.

For family firms, alliances represent a form of heightened entrepreneurial risk-taking. However, a dearth of research exists on the implications of forms of alliance governance for family firms. In a study of 939 non-equity alliances of family and non-family firms, we analyse how contracts and trust influence mutual knowledge creation. Both contract completeness and trust assist non-family firms in knowledge creation. However, family firms rely on high levels of trust for the creation of knowledge. Knowledge creation suffers when family firms encounter very complete contracts tied to attempts at high levels of trust. The negative interaction effect is especially strong for non-owner-run family firms.

Despite interest in innovation teams, we have only limited insights into how team members make sense of innovation teams' inherent ambiguity. By referring to the sensemaking literature and to the research on task discourse, this study introduces task discourse as a valuable sensemaking mechanism in innovation teams. We argue that team creativity and feasibility testing increase the need for task discourse, which, in turn, improves team performance. We further consider ambivalent effects of team spirit. On one hand, through team spirit synergies emerge, but on the other, high team spirit can limit team members' willingness to challenge each other's different perspectives and opinions. Data from 250 innovation teams at German manufacturing firms support the assumed beneficial effects of task discourse and the ambivalent effect of team spirit. Our results indicate that teams need sensemaking through task discourse when they want to achieve benefits from team creativity. Our study enriches current research on ambiguity and sensemaking in innovation teams, answers the call to elaborate advantages and disadvantages team spirit might bring to teams, and provides valuable managerial implications.

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