ABSTRACT
Moving toward the 21st century, teams continue to be a dominant presence in industry (Guzzo & Salas, 1995). Created for tasks as varied as designing a product to selecting a new CEO, they have a life expectancy that can range from the length of a given meeting to the duration of a corporation (e.g., Cannon-Bowers, Tannenbaum, Salas, & Volpe, 1995). Clearly, the last decades have seen a tremendous increase in the use of teams. As such, the implementation, use, or both, of teams as a definable organizational unit has substantially increased-beginning with the periodic use of quality circles and project teams and ending with the current popularity of self-managed teams. Surveys of medium to large corporations reveal that the “team presence” in industry has risen from 5% in the early 1980s to over 50% in the mid-1990s (Savoie, 1998). Similar results were found by an American Society for Quality Control (ASQC) Survey (1993) that polled over 1,200 employees, revealing that 80% were involved in one or more teams in their company.
