ABSTRACT
Much of the world’s work is accomplished in groups, and many groups perform collective tasks that require the pooling of individual members’ inputs. At a societal level, sports teams, juries, rock groups, quality circles, policy committees, symphony orchestras, construction crews, government assemblies, and research teams provide but a few examples of groups that combine the efforts of individual members into a single group product or outcome. In organizational settings, the issue of group effectiveness has acquired special relevance in recent years with a dramatic increase in the use of work team, participative management, self-management, continuous quality improvement (CQI), and total quality management (TQM) approaches (e.g., Guzzo & Salas, 1995; Hackman & Wageman, 1995; Sundstrom, De Meuse, & Futrell, 1990).
