Recent research suggests that shared behavioral dynamics during interpersonal interaction are indicative of subjective and objective outcomes of the interaction, such as feelings of rapport and success of performance. The role of shared physiological dynamics to quantify interpersonal interaction, however, has received comparativley little attention. In the present study, we investigate the coordination dynamics of multiple psychophysiological measures and their utility in capturing emotional dynamics in teams. We use data from an experiment where teams of three people built origami boats together in an assembly-line manner while their heart rate, skin conductance, and facial muscle activity were recorded. Our results show that physiological synchrony of skin conductance measures and eletromyographic measures of the corrugator supercilii develops spontaneously among team members during this cooperative production task. Moreover, high team synchrony is found indicative of team cohesion, while low team synchrony is found indicative of a teams' decision to adopt a new behavior across multiple production sessions. We conclude that team-level measures of synchrony offer new and complementary information compared to measures of individual levels of physiological activity.

Initiatives to redesign cities so that they are smarter and more sustainable are increasing worldwide. A smart city can be understood as a community in which citizens, business firms, knowledge institutions, and municipal agencies collaborate with one another to achieve systems integration and efficiency, citizen engagement, and a continually improving quality of life. This article presents an organizational framework for such collaboration and employs it to analyze Smart Aarhus, the smartcity initiative of Aarhus, Denmark. Based on the experiences of Smart Aarhus to date, it offers a set of lessons that can benefit the designers, leaders, and policymakers of other smart-city initiatives.

We analyze performance and emotions as antecedents and consequences of team strategic decisions to explore a new routine versus exploiting an existing one. In a laboratory study, we examine team decision making over time and draw causal inferences about the relationships among team emotions, team performance, and explore–exploit decisions. We use self‐report data to measure team emotions, and validate results with psychophysiological data. We find that declines in performance increase the likelihood that teams decide to explore new routines rather than exploit existing ones. We also find a marginal positive effect of positive emotions, as measured by both self‐report and psychophysiological data, on team decisions to explore a new routine. Further, teams successful at implementing new routines report increased positive emotions, as measured by the self‐report data. This relationship is fully mediated by performance change. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

What can we learn from outliers? While statisticians rightly warn us against their non-representativeness, we believe it is also true that thinking carefully about what makes them atypical may improve our understanding of the typical case. This is the premise behind the Organization Zoo series. Valve Corporation (Valve) is an unusual firm. It is a rare example of a firm that appears to operate without any formal hierarchy in its organization. What can we learn about the viability of authority hierarchies from Valve's way of organizing? We wrote a brief account of Valve based on public information sources and asked several renowned organizational experts to comment on this unusual firm. We asked them to write a short commentary on what the Valve example means for organizational theorists and practitioners. Thankfully, they all accepted, and we are excited to present the results of their thinking in this first "exhibit" in the Organization Zoo.

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