About

Alina Ionica Lungeanu is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the College of Arts, Media and Design, with a joint appointment in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business in the Management and Organizational Development Group. She also holds a position as a Core Member of the Network Science Institute (NetSI). Her research combines insights from social science and network science to examine how team networks configure to advance the frontier of science.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Data Mining
• Machine Learning
• Information Retrieval
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data science
• Knowledge management
• Telecommunications
• Mathematics
• Art
• Geography
• World Wide Web
• Statistics
• Psychology
• Econometrics

Selected publications

• Collective Attention in Virtual Teams: A Pathway for Mitigating Communication Delays

  Personnel Psychology · 2026-03-02

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Virtual work has become a defining feature of modern organizations, intensifying the need for strategies that support virtual team performance. Communication delays—prolonged intervals between sending and receiving messages—are one of the most persistent and consequential barriers to virtual team performance. However, effective mitigation strategies remain scarce, likely due to an incomplete understanding of the explanatory mechanisms linking delays to team performance. Adopting a dynamic view of teamwork, we propose that delays impair team performance by disrupting collective attention —the synchronous focus of team members on a shared target. Building on the collective attention literature, we identify three factors that help teams sustain collective attention during communication delays: task experience , which strengthens members’ capacity to coordinate attention; message simplicity , which increases the clarity of attentional cues; and shared leadership , which enhances social connectivity and mutual engagement. We test our framework in two studies. Study 1, a longitudinal spaceflight simulation, demonstrates that collective attention mediates the negative relationship between communication delay and team performance, and task experience buffers this effect. Study 2 uses a calibrated agent‐based model (ABM) to simulate how collective attention networks evolve under varying levels of communication delay, task experience, message simplicity, and shared leadership. Results show that collective attention is best sustained when teams combine high task experience with clear communication and distributed influence. Together, these studies position collective attention as a central mechanism explaining how communication delays degrade team functioning and offer a multi‐pronged intervention framework for sustaining it amid the challenges of virtual teamwork.

  PublisherDOI

• The differential impacts of team diversity as variability versus atypicality on team effectiveness

  Scientific Reports · 2025-02-06 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Interest in team diversity initiatives has grown significantly over the past decade. Some initiatives focus on creating "highly variable" teams where members bring a wide range of attributes. Others prioritize "highly atypical" teams, where members contribute attributes underrepresented within the broader organization or field, regardless of variety. These two approaches entail markedly different assumptions about maximizing team diversity's benefits. Comparing short- and long-term outcomes provides important insights into cultivating and leveraging diverse teams. To do so, we examined the proposal submissions of all variable and atypical teams within a competitive seed grant program over six years. We assessed short-term performance based on funding outcomes following a three-stage review process and long-term viability based on team members' tendency to collaborate more in the future. Our findings demonstrate that diversity operates differently when conceptualized as variability versus atypicality. Specifically, while team variability often resulted in neutral or even negative short-term performance, it had a mixed effect on long-term viability. Conversely, while team atypicality had a mixed impact on short-term performance, it consistently enhanced long-term viability. These results underscore the distinctive value of nurturing highly atypical teams to promote lasting collaboration success and highlight the importance of aligning diversity cultivation strategies with organizations' short- and long-term goals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Corrigendum to “Leading the crew to Mars: Evidence from NASA HERA analog crews” [Acta Astronaut. 237 (2025) 141-150]

  Acta Astronautica · 2025-10-29

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Two is Too Many and Not Enough: Shared Leadership in Ancient Rome (32 to 491 CE)

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  The complexity of modern organizations has spurred interest in shared forms of leadership wherein multiple individuals collectively contribute to the leadership of a group. These efforts are supported by research documenting the benefits of shared leadership to teamwork process and performance. At the same time, research supports a strong tendency for people to self-organize into hierarchies. While shared leadership may be advantageous, it may also be unlikely. Examining shared leadership in the context of Ancient Rome the Imperial Period (32 CE to 491 CE; N = 87 emperors), we find that while groups show a natural tendency to shift from hierarchical to shared leadership, dyadic leadership (co-leaders) is unstable and unlikely to persist. This finding suggests there may be an inherent instability of two leader arrangements. This study opens new directions in leadership research, providing an empirical foundation to distinguish leadership dyads from larger shared leadership configurations. Future research directions are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• When Two is Too Many and Not Enough: Discoveries on the Stability of Shared Leadership from Rome to Mars

  Academy of Management Discoveries · 2025-12-05

  article

  Leadership research has established the benefits of shared leadership, but much less is known about its stability. Drawing on data from NASA space analog teams and Ancient Rome (32 BCE–491 CE), we discover that the number of leaders critically shapes whether shared leadership persists or changes form. Using observational data from 13 NASA crews and historiometric data from the Roman Empire, we find that shared leadership often arises in both contexts, but its stability varies markedly. Specifically, while both hierarchical leadership (single leader) and group shared leadership (three or more leaders) tend to persist, dyadic shared leadership (two leaders) is uniquely unstable. This

  PublisherDOI

• Leading the crew to Mars: Evidence from NASA HERA analog crews

  Acta Astronautica · 2025-08-18

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Leading the Crew to Mars: Evidence from NASA HERA Analog Crews

  2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Teams that SIRIUSly Go the Distance: Effect of Isolation and Confinement on Team Performance

  2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Success in First-Time Partnerships: Optimal Expertise Diversity

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Collaboration is of fundamental importance to modern scientific and technological development, and expertise diversity has emerged as an important factor in predicting the success of collaboration. While expertise diversity has typically been seen as the knowledge attribute of a group (i.e., between collaborators), we provide an additional theoretical and empirical conceptualization that considers whether collaborators’ knowledge itself is similar (versus being dissimilar) to the knowledge domain of their research output. We define the degree of (dis)similarity between collaborators’ knowledge and project output as divergent ideation. We examine the effect of expertise diversity and divergent ideation (and their interaction) on the success of first-time collaborations using data from 158,012 first-time partnerships recorded in the US Patent Office between the years of 1976 and 2012. We use natural language processing to estimate areas of expertise of each inventor and develop measures of expertise diversity and divergent ideation. Results show that collaborations exhibiting a high degree of expertise diversity produce more impactful products, while collaborations exhibiting a low degree of expertise diversity are more likely to collaborate again. Further, collaborations exhibiting a high degree of expertise diversity and a low-to-moderate degree of divergent ideation are most likely to create highest impact inventions, but they are less likely to sustain their collaboration. We conclude our study by outlining the implications of our findings to the literatures on diversity and technological innovation.

  PublisherDOI

• Diversity, Networks, and Innovation: A Text Analytic Approach to Measuring Expertise Diversity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Noshir Contractor

  31 shared

• Leslie A. DeChurch

  17 shared

• Ryan Whalen

  10 shared

• Sophia Sullivan

  3 shared

• Wolfgang Munar

  Milken Institute

  3 shared

• Mark McKnight

  Yale University

  2 shared

• Nicholas A. Christakis

  Yale University

  2 shared

• Neelam Modi

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Technology and Social Behavior

  Northwestern University

  2015

Awards & honors

• NASA. “Composing Teams with TEAMSTaR: Tool for Evaluating an…
• National Science Foundation (NSF) & National Institutes of H…
• National Science Foundation (NSF). “Safe Bets and Risky Prop…