Knowledge production - as well as higher education in general - has been facing both external and internal challenges during the last decades in Europe (e.g. Scott 1995). Externally, the changes in the structures of knowledge society and the capitalisation and bureaucratisation of knowledge are reformulating scientific knowledge production. Internally, the democratisation of knowledge, epistemological changes in the structures of disciplines and the changing role of an individual researcher are eroding the traditional views of science. Thereby, the changing nature of scientific knowledge production has its consequences to the organisation of the research communities. Current transition has been characterised as a shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2 (Gibbons et al. 1994) or as a second academic revolution (Etzkowitz, 1998). As a result of this change, collaborative research and collaboration among different scientific communities have increased (e.g. Chompalov & Shrum, 1999), multi- and transdisciplinary research has become more frequent, and thus, knowledge generation is to some extent dislocated and detached from its disciplinary foundations (Jacob 2001). Consequently, the changes have not only meant new research cultures, but also novel modes of knowledge production to emerge. Accordingly, knowledge is produced more often in a loosely institutionalised research group. However, relatively little is known about the dynamics of the research groups given that collaboration is a complicated undertaking. Research groups - like any other groups - have their own dynamics and internal processes which determine the atmosphere and circumstances in which knowledge is produced. Previous studies indicate that group processes are complicated to analyse since many different factors intersect in group work. However, certain factors are seen to be a crucial part of group work. Such factors are among others trust among group members, interdependence, conflicts and group composition. There are different approaches which are applicable in analysing innovative group work: social psychological (e.g. Hackman 1987), constructionist (e.g. Latour 1987; Knorr Cetina 1999), and cultural-historical activity theoretical (e.g. Miettinen 1999) approaches. In this study the elaborated model of work design (Parker et al. 2001), which has its foundations is social psychology, is used in order to analyse group processes. The purpose of this paper is to describe research group's internal dynamics based on the elaborated model of work design and to found out whether there are some features of group work that are typical for research groups. Additionally, attention is paid to the role of research groups as a part of the transformations occurring in higher education and especially in knowledge production. The research groups participated in this study were selected from medicine (n = 20) and engineering (n = 31) and the data was gathered from each group member (n = 231) using semi-structured questionnaire.