ABSTRACT
Sixty years ago, Kurt Lewin (1947), who is generally regarded as the father of group dynamics research, published an article in the first issue of the journal, Human Relations, entitled ‘Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science.’ In this article, Lewin was particularly concerned with engaging in social change and emphasized that ‘in social research the experimenter has to take into consideration such factors as the personality of individual members’ (p. 9). Leaders and sports coaches are often heard commenting that group functioning is facilitated or debilitated by the presence or absence of certain personnel and so it would seem entirely logical to understand how group composition and members’ personality characteristics are related to conjoint functioning. Just over three decades after Lewin’s seminal paper another prominent group dynamics theorist, Marvin Shaw (1981) similarly asserted that ‘personality characteristics of group members play an important role in determining their behavior in groups. The magnitude of the effect of any given characteristic is small but taken together the consequences for group processes are of major significance’ (p. 208).
