The recent debate about scientific knowledge production has been rather intense and diverse especially in terms of changing role of university as a central actor in knowledge generation. Others agree that university's role is fundamentally eroding while others see that university has maintained its centrality in knowledge production although university's role has changed. Nonetheless, knowledge production is facing challenges. The changing nature of scientific knowledge production has its consequences to the organisation of the research practices as well. Current transition has been characterised as a shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2 or as a second academic revolution. As a result of this change collaborative research and collaboration among different scientific communities have increased, multidisciplinary and cross-professional research has became more frequent, and thus knowledge production is to some extent dislocated and detached from its disciplinary foundations. Consequently, the changes have not only meant new research cultures, but also new modes of knowledge production to emerge so that nowadays scientific knowledge is generated more often in a loosely institutionalised research group especially in hard sciences but also in the soft fields of study.The purpose of this presentation is (1) to present a classification of research group members based on how team-oriented and task-interdependent they are, and (2) to make a typification of these different kinds of group members. The different types of research group members were compared to each other in terms of certain process characteristics, like social support and group potency, as well as in terms of trust and conflict. Thereby a picture of each type was formed. The respondents were selected using purposeful sampling from medicine (n = 110) and engineering (n = 121) both of which are hard- applied disciplines. The data was collected through semi-structured questionnaires and it was analysed using descriptive (Fisher's exact test) and explanatory (discriminant analysis) statistical methods.The results suggest four different types of research group members. The respondents who had low team orientation and low task interdependence were labelled independent performers of separate tasks. These members of a group work as individuals and do not have clear task continuity. In the case of this group synergistic dimension of group work is not present. If team orientation was high and task interdependence was low, the group members can be seen as joint constructors of separate tasks. These scholars have their own individual research projects and duties, but they also have something in common, for example a shared supervisor or research object. Respondents who had low team orientation but high task interdependence were classified as independent performers of consistent tasks, which means that the member of the group has task continuity but tasks are performed independently. Respondents reporting both high team orientation and high task interdependence were joint constructors of consistent tasks. More than half of the respondents believed that group tasks were jointly constructed, and therefore these research groups seemed to have a social atmosphere which allowed for the evolution of synergy. The results also indicated that those respondents who had high team orientation, that is, joint constructors of separate/consistent tasks experienced research group work more positively than those who had low team orientation, that is, independent performers of separate/consistent tasks.