ABSTRACT
Groups are sometimes maligned for their incompetence. Most of us have heard the joke about the camel being a horse designed by committee, and at one time or another we’ve all derided a particularly inept group as certain evidence of the core truth in such jokes. But wholesale ineptness is not what most people usually expect from groups. On the contrary, judging by the frequency with which groups are used in the pursuit of important organizational and societal goals, there would seem to be a rather widespread faith in the performance capabilities of groups. Task-performing groups abound in every kind of organization and in all corners of society: architectural firms are rife with design teams, the core work of an airline is done by flight crews, accounting firms field auditing teams, fire departments maintain emergency rescue squads, hospitals play host to surgical teams, television networks depend on film crews, police departments rely on crime investigation details, and atop most organizations are innumerable management committees, taskforces, and policy groups. Indeed, the pervasiveness with which groups are used in every conceivable functional area within modern organizations has prompted one set of critics to declare this the “age of groupism” (Locke, Tirnauer, Roberson, Goldman, Latham, & Weldon, 2001).
