An inter-organizational community of practice (CoP) consisting of employees of multiple organizations plays important roles in individual and organizational learning. However, past studies have mainly focused on CoPs involving organizations in cooperative relationships, without sufficient focus on those involving competitors. To address this problem, we examined a CoP formed by employees of competing Japanese airlines, referencing to the theory of “coopetition,” a situation where organizations simultaneously compete and cooperate. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 22 informants, supplemented by secondary data and observations of the CoP. The modified grounded theory approach was employed to analyze the data. As a result, we found that the airlines established a cooperative relationship that resulted from the common threat they faced, the similarity in tasks they held, and the structure in which one’s cooperative behavior toward the others tended to improve benefits for their own organization. It was also found that the participants’ cooperative behaviors were facilitated further by the rareness and uncertainty of knowledge needed for their tasks. In addition, potential conflicts were mitigated by the separation of competition and cooperation, and by the close business relationship among them.

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A new way of validity test was proposed to test the prescriptions for effective supervision as specified in Situational Leadership Theory (Hersey & Blanchard, 1977). The theory has received little empirical support and has been criticized on theoretical grounds. Moreover, past validity tests of the theory may be biased in terms of methodological processes. To address the issue, an omnibus test by using the cosign curve was proposed. Applying the test to data from 1195 salespeople across 374 stores working for a large Japanese apparel company showed no support for the theory. With the help of the test, the author additionally explored the modified assumptions of the theory that follower maturity moderates the relationship of leader task and relationship behaviors with indicants of follower performance.

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This study looked at how team-level processes (communication) affected team-level outcomes (participation in decision making and team creativity) and individual-level outcomes (stress and satisfaction) for Chinese people who used either their native language or a foreign language, Japanese, in taskrelated team settings. An experimental study was conducted with a sample of 54 teams of Chinese students (N = 222) majoring in the Japanese language. All participants were randomly assigned to either the control group (native language condition) or the experimental group (foreign language condition). The results indicated that the use of a foreign language in team situations tended to lead to lower communication and participation in decision making at the team level, and higher stress and lower satisfaction at the individual level. Moreover, we found that communication mediated the relationships between language and the two team-level outcomes; and member stress mediated the relationship between language and member satisfaction. Cross-level moderating effects of team-level participation in decision making on the individual-level relationship between foreign language and individual outcomes were also found. Specifically, the positive (negative) effect of using a foreign language on stress (satisfaction) became more pronounced as the level of participation in decision making increased.

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