ABSTRACT
Teams putting on theater productions, launching satellites, or doing open-heart surgery are sights to behold. Yet, our knowledge of how to enhance and measure these efforts borders on the archaic. In the past two decades, reviewers of the group literature have concluded that “although literally thousands of studies of group performance have been conducted, …we still know very little about why some groups are more effective than others. We know even less about what to do to improve the performance of a given group working on a specific task”
(Hackman & Morris, 1975, p. 2). In a subsequent review, Hackman and Morris (1978) bemoaned that “there has hardly been a pouring forth of conceptual and empirical attacks on the group effectiveness problem” (p. 58). Six years later, Dyer (1984) concluded that “despite all of the small-group research that has been conducted, one sometimes feels that, in fact, this is all we know: It’s just teamwork” (p. 294). In 1986, Goodman and his colleagues expressed chagrin about the “dearth of information about permanent groups in organizations,” estimating the number of research studies to be “limited to an average of about 12 studies per year” (p. 22). Bettenhausen (1991) admitted that “managers are often exasperated by what they see as the irrelevant outcomes of scholarly research,” but his prospects are limited to promises of what new scholars may do. In the present volume, the chapters by Brannick and Prince and Salas and Baker reveal similar sentiments.
