ABSTRACT

In recent years there has been an increasing appreciation of interpersonal skills as a key determinate of job performance. Strikingly, over half of the approximately 60 billion dollars spent per year on organizational development is devoted to training in interpersonal skills (“Industry Report,” 1997). Simultaneously, professionals within organizations as well as management and organizational consultants and researchers have been striving to refine services for preventing and intervening in problems of interpersonal difficulties, including those aimed toward optimizing interpersonal skills (e.g., Gist & Stevens, 1998; Hollenbeck & McCall, 1999).