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We explored in this article the process of entrepreneurial team formation. As theory specific to this topic is scant, we drew first on disparate views of team formation and its correlates; we then called upon in-depth interviews to provide deeper, nuanced insights into this dynamic process of creation. Our focus is team member addition. We identified resourceseeking and interpersonal attraction as primary alternative motivators for new teammate addition; however, we also illustrated how these motivations may be complementary in practice. Finally, we considered in some depth how new member identification and selection processes may unfold as new ventures are formed.

Integrating and extending literature on international management and team effectiveness, we examined how macro context in multinational organizations (MNCs) influences work team learning and how team learning influences task performance and interpersonal relations. We examined these influences in a multimethod study of 115 teams in 20 subsidiaries of five MNCs. Controlling for micro contextual features, including team type, training, feedback, and autonomy, we found that organizational contexts emphasizing global integration reduced team learning, but those emphasizing responsiveness and knowledge management increased team learning. Team learning in turn positively influenced both task performance and the quality of interpersonal relations.

Interruptions have commonly been viewed as negative and as something for managers to control or limit. In this paper, I explore the relationship between interruptions and acquisition of routines-a form of knowledge-by teams. Recent research suggests that interruptions may play an important role in changing organizational routines, and as such may influence knowledge transfer activities. Results suggest that interruptions influence knowledge transfer effort, and both knowledge transfer effort and interruptions are positively related to the acquisition of new work routines. I conclude with implications for research and practice.

Metaphors allow us to understand abstract subject matter in terms of more concrete, familiar terms. In a technical sense, metaphors are "mappings across conceptual domains" (Lakoff, 1993: 245), and metaphor is evoked whenever a pattern of inferences from one conceptual domain is used in another domain. In this way, metaphors are a key mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning. Our behavior reflects our metaphorical understanding of experience. The importance of metaphor for understanding experience is evident in the metaphors embedded in the following comments we heard in studying U.S. teams: "Among the sales people on our team, Jack is the star quarterback"; and "Our team leader acts more like a coach than a referee." One can understand these statements to the extent that one identifies with the metaphor "Workteam-as-sports-team," which involves understanding one (target) domain of experience (work teams) in terms of a very different (source) domain of experience (sports teams). There are ontological correspondences between entities in the domain of a sports team (the coach, the players, the players' positions, the team's field position, the score, etc.) and entities in the domain of work teams (e.g., the leader, the team members, their roles, their progress, their objectives). It is via such mappings that an individual in the U.S. is likely to project sports-domain inferences (e.g., expectations about sports teams) onto the work-team domain (Lakoff, 1993: 245). Furthermore, the metaphor is a source of cognitive priming in that it brings forth semantic, behavioral, and affective responses (Blair and Banaji, 1996) that are characteristic of the source domain. Examples of this phenomenon are evident in stories in the U.S. popular press. At Eastman Chemical, leaders are called "coaches," and their main role is to help teams set performance goals, assist teams in resolving personnel problems, and manage upsets and emergencies. At Wilson Corporation, during the annual rewards and recognition dinner, gold, silver, and bronze achievement medals are awarded to winning teams based on process improvements. At Sabre, Inc. North America, team training is administered through the "Tour de Teams" program, in which teams progress along a route of programs, pass various milestones, and receive a "yellow jersey" if they are ahead of other teams. These practices are consistent with the work-teamas-sports-team metaphor. Team members are likely to respond to such a metaphor to the extent that they make sense of their work team in terms of a sports team.

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This paper reports on a study of structural antecedents to team learning. In a study of self-managed pharmaceutical research and development teams, we first find that more team-level structure is associated with more internal learning as well as more external learning. We then establish that more organizational-level structure is negatively associated with both internal and external learning. We find that psychological safety mediates the positive relationship between team structure and team learning, and that task autonomy constraints mediate the negative relationship between organizational structure and team learning. Investigating the interaction effect between team and organizational structure, we find, unexpectedly, that organizational structure supports external team learning under conditions of less team structure. Specifically, when teams have less team structure, the relationship between organizational structure and external team learning is positive. This structure substitutability finding suggests that although more organizational structure, on average, hurts external team learning, there are situations in which it helps. An important implication of the study is that multiple levels of structure, and their interactions, should be taken into consideration when assessing structural effects on team learning.

The point of departure for the special issue is that current theory and research in international business (IB) may have overly emphasized a negative view on foreignness, distance, and differences of all kinds (national, cultural, organizational, and institutional), with an emphasis on liabilities and adverse outcomes associated with such differences. While existing research is certainly valuable, we argue that focusing on mostly negative processes and outcomes has hindered our understanding of the dynamics, processes, and conditions that enable organizations to benefit from diversity in a wide range of IB contexts. The goal of this special issue is to promote research that is in line with a Positive Organizational Scholarship perspective, which encourages scholars to look at commonly considered phenomena in new ways, as well as to explicitly consider positive phenomena in IB research. We then introduce the three articles included in the special issue and highlight how they help IB scholars better understand when and how foreignness, distance, and diversity can enhance organizational effectiveness and performance at multiple levels.