From improvement teams to innovative ones

The title of this article establishes a relationship of continuity between improvement teams and innovative teams. No opposition exists; though an evolution clearly has taken place. This evolution is characterized by three changes: i) a novel concept of shared leadership is underway, joining the traditional notion of unipersonal leadership; ii) "emergent mediators" of an affective and cognitive nature have aligned themselves with known behavioural processes; iii) a new variable, that of transactive memory (i.e. a collective memory of the areas of specialization of each team member) has been included in the cognitive structuring of the team. The article aims to develop these three points. To this end, I have relied mainly on the final two revisions of research carried out among work teams in an organizational setting. These two revisions are Ilgen, et al. (2005) and Mathieu, et al. (2008).