An established team recognition program at a large multinational food company offered us a unique opportunity to study knowledge-intensive work teams between 2004 and 2008. At any given time, the company had hundreds of project teams engaged in knowledge-intensive work. Many of these project teams submitted their achievements into the companywide recognition program. As a result of the company’s emphasis on using project teams to solve nonroutine problems, to work on complex tasks and to function in ambiguous and uncertain environments, the submissions for the recognition program provided a rich source of information on how project teams involved in knowledge-intensive work accomplish their goals. All six of the matched cases described in the article came from the recognition program.

In addition to the detailed insight gleaned from the matched-pair case studies, the 177 submissions to the team recognition program during the time period of our research provided a rich and unique opportunity to study knowledge-intensive teamwork empirically. More than 60% of the project teams had members from at least two business units, and project teams had an average lifetime of slightly more than one year from beginning to end. Each project team’s submission was classified by the