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Group leadership from a bona fide group theory perspective was examined. Twenty-three effective group leaders were interviewed in depth about what they believe is important in leading groups. Five themes emerged: (a) establishing the intention for the overall project; (b) building the team and developing a positive group culture; (c) monitoring and managing the team's interaction; (d) managing the group's task and keeping the group focused; and (e) communication behaviors and personal characteristics of the leader. Effective group leaders take group leadership seriously and work at improving their performance and exhibit selfmonitoring and adaptive behaviors. Future research should examine how leaders learn to become effective, how they assess and balance competing goals of building relationships and completing tasks, and what experiences have been most influential.Findings verify the utility of the bona fide group perspective and also suggest dialectical and turning point theories as potentially useful perspectives for revealing further insights into effective group leadership.

This study focuses on the relationship among amount of conflict experienced, the style of its management, individual satisfaction, and decision quality of small, task-oriented groups. In all, 129 subjects took part in a task requiring a group product. Data suggested that a curvilinear relationship exists between the number of conflict episodes experienced by group members and the subsequent quality of their decisions. The study also found that integrative conflict-management strategies were associated with higher quality solutions than were distributive strategies. Satisfaction was found to be negatively related to conflict. Interaction between number of conflict episodes and management style was discussed in terms of its implications for increasing decision quality and future research. Downloaded from 32 oriented groups. The focal variable was the group's quality of solution, or outcome. Our goal was to assess the contribution that each of the other variables may make in increasing the quality. A brief review of each of the variables will follow prior to reporting methodology, results, and discussion. CONFLICT DEFINITIONA cursory review of the conflict literature reveals that one of the problems facing the comparability of research results is the definition and conceptualization of conflict (Deutsch