The extant literature on groupware, mainly found in Computer Science and Management Information Systems journals, has been almost completely ignored by Industrial-Organizational Psychology. The lack of integration of this information into research on "traditional" organizational team performance is surprising. This paper brings the groupware literature to the attention of researchers and practitioners. Additionally, the theoretical frameworks used in the groupware research do not reflect recent developments in Industrial-Organizational Psychology (e.g., groupware research does not generally include critical contextual variables). Based on this review, we propose a comprehensive and integrated research agenda for future work in this area.While there is ample recognition in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behaviour disciplines of the importance of groups and teams in the workplace (e.g.

This study asked members of teams to identify the factors that most contributed and most hindered the effectiveness of their team. Seventy-five team members from 13 different work teams in different organizations participated in the study. The results showed that the factors that most hinder a team's performance are external to the team and those that most contribute to its effectiveness are internal to the team. Thus, support via organizational contextual variables are necessary but not sufficient conditions to promote team effectiveness. The factors that put teams into the ‘effective’ category are those variables that are specific to the team members themselves.