ABSTRACT
Group climate Organizations increasingly employ teams to achieve organizational goals (Ilgen, 1999) and recognize the benets of teamworking, where teams are capable of producing higher levels of performance than are individuals (Hackman, 1998). Guzzo (1996) dened teams as social entities embedded in organizations. Teams may come together to undertake a specic range of tasks or a single task that contributes to achieving the organization’s goals. There is evidence to suggest that the introduction of teamworking into an organization results in improved organizational performance in terms of nancial (Macy & Izumi, 1993), efciency, and quality measures (Applebaum & Batt, 1994). A review of survey-based research using quantitative measures demonstrated that teamworking is associated with improved organizational performance, across behavioral, operational, and nancial measures (Delarue, Van Hootegem, Procter, & Burridge, 2008). A study conducted by Birdi et al. (2008) tracked human resources management (HRM) practices and nancial performance for more than 22 years, and found evidence of productivity gains, although these tended to appear 6 to 9 years after implementing teamworking. However, teams do not always make optimum decisions (or even the same quality of decisions made by the most capable team members) because of psychological issues (e.g., Allen & Hecht, 2004), including process loss (Steiner, 1972). Process loss can arise due to a number of intra-group problems, such as introversion, social conforming, diffusion of responsibility, and groupthink, among others.
