This paper examines the effects of management functions on the performance of diverse teams working on projects in the Information Technology (IT) industry, as well as the impact of their performance on organizational sustainable performance. Grounded on organizational management and work team management specific empirical studies and literature, we clarified the content of management functions in the framework of teamwork and acknowledged manners to express the performance of teams distinguished through diversity, as well the most relevant positive effects of team results on organizational performance. On the above basis, we built the online questionnaire. The study involved 189 respondents, who work either in Romania or in the Czech Republic on IT field specific projects. Empirical results show that, individually, some management functions are connected with co-workers’ and teams’ performance, while others are not, but considered together, in interdependence with joint effects, they influence the team’s performance and the organization’s performance from the perspective of its sustainable strategic competencies.

Strategic leadership, environmental uncertainty, and supply chain risk: An empirical investigation of the agribusiness industry | Denisa Bogdana Abrudan, Dana Codruta Daianu, Mădălina Dumitrița Maticiuc, Nosheen Rafi, Masood Nawaz Kalyar | Agricultural Journals

The present paper focuses on the subject of creativity in business starting from a set of interviews with young designers (fashion designers mostly, but not exclusively). In order to provide an updated overview of the “ecosystem” of creativity, we intend to add to the field literature, thus offering a more comprehensive understanding of creativity by focusing on the role of designers in facilitating or inhibiting creativity in business in the fashion industry. The work was limited contextually to the fashion sector in the western region of Romania, with the data being collected through semi-structured interviews with entrepreneur fashion designers (producers of clothing, footwear and accessories). The analysis aims to identify and highlight the attributes of entrepreneur designers in the creative industry, as well as the ways in which they are inclined to develop their creativity in order to combine various materials or textures into something original. The results of our research are in fact empirical evidence regarding the strategic role of entrepreneur designers when it comes to creativity in business, a role that can allow them to achieve durable competitive advantage for their own businesses by developing both the analytical skills necessary for interpreting economic data to validate an idea, and the intuitive skills regarding the economic climate. Although the specific context may be considered a limitation of the study, it may become a real advantage for potential future research that will extend the boundaries of the present one.

This paper pursued to identify whether there are differences between virtual and face-to-face teams concerning their ability to develop a natural and incremental chain of linkages between individual, team and organization level effectiveness, in the context of interactions between their multicultural members and of interdependence that teamwork entails. The novelty and relevance of the research consist in empirically testing the above chain, along with the differences and similarities between virtual and co-located teams, on a sample of 159 respondents working in multicultural IT project teams from Romania and the Czech Republic. Structural equation modelling based empirical findings show statistically insignificant differences regarding the construction of the chain of effectiveness between virtual and co-located multicultural teams. Complementary, in terms of average values for all three levels of results, the face-to-face multicultural teams are superior to virtual multicultural ones, limited by the exclusion of team reaction time and lifespan from the research model.