Effects of group size.

Thomas, Edwin J.; Fink, Clinton F.

doi:10.1037/h0047169

Cited by 272 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…The findings suggested that the larger stations were more compatible and effective than smaller stations. Such results do not conform to those reported in other studies where small group size has consistently correlated with member perceptions of g-eater cchesiveness or compatibility (Viteles, 1953;Seashore, 1954;Thomas and Fink, 1963), and to a lesser degree small size has been seen as positively related to group achievement (McGrath and Altman, 1966).…”

contrasting

confidence: 54%

Group Size and Leisure Activity Behavior Among Antarctic Volunteers

Doll¹,

Gunderson²

1970

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contrasting

confidence: 54%

Group Size and Leisure Activity Behavior Among Antarctic Volunteers

Doll¹,

Gunderson²

1970

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“…For example, ample research has documented the effect of size and resources on group process and outcomes (Gladstein, 1984;Hackman, 1982;Thomas & Fink, 1963). In addition, studies of research and development teams have documented the impact of task and product characteristics on performance (c.f.…”

Section: Complex Relationshipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance

Ancona

Caldwell

1992

Organization Science

1,456

1,078

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The increasing reliance on teams in organizations raises the question of how these teams should be formed. Should they be formed completely of engineers or should they include a range of specialists? Should they be made up to people who have long tenure in the organization, or those with a wide range of experience? As teams increasingly get called upon to do more complex tasks and to cross functional boundaries within the organization, conventional wisdom has suggested that teams be composed of more diverse members. This study suggests that the answer may not be so simple. Using 409 individuals from 45 new product teams in five high-technology companies, this study investigates the impact of diversity on team performance. We found that functional and tenure diversity each has its own distinct effects. The greater the functional diversity, the more team members communicated outside the team's boundaries. This communication was with a variety of groups such as marketing, manufacturing, and top management. The more the external communication, the higher the managerial ratings of innovation. Tenure diversity had its impact on internal group dynamics rather than external communications. Tenure diversity is associated with improved task work such as clarifying group goals and setting priorities. In turn, this clarity is associated with high team ratings of overall performance. Yet diversity is not solely positive. While it does produce internal processes and external communications that facilitate performance, it also directly impedes performance. That is, overall the effect of diversity on performance is negative, even though some aspects of group work are enhanced. It may be that for these teams diversity brings more creativity to problem solving and product development, but it impedes implementation because there is less capability for teamwork than there is for homogeneous teams. These research findings suggest that simply changing the structure of teams (i.e. combining representatives of diverse function and tenure) will not improve performance. The team must find a way to garner the positive process effects of diversity and to reduce the negative direct effects. At the team level, greater negotiation and conflict resolution skills may be necessary. At the organization level, the team may need to be protected from external political pressures and rewarded for team, rather than functional, outcomes.

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“…Whatever the underlying processes may be, it is clear that close attention must be given to the effect of group size in learning experiments, especially when the study time is self-paced. Unexpected effects of group size were warned against 20 years ago by Thomas and Fink (1963), but researchers do not seem to have paid much attention to them.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Group size: A possible distorting factor in learning experiments

Swerts

Peeters

d’Ydewalle

1983

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

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Group size may have confounding effects on some dependent variables in experiments conducted in a collective setting. Three experiments revealed unexpected effects of group size on self-paced study and test time, although this was not the main purpose of the studies. Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that the study time of female subjects increases with the group size up to five subjects and then decreases as the group size increases to nine subjects (as used in Experiment 2). When we considered the first subject to finish studying within the group, we noted the same relationship. The phenomena were not found with the male subjects. The withingroups variability of the study time was much larger for the female than for the male subjects. Some of the findings from Experiments 1 and 2 were confirmed in Experiment 8, notwithstanding the much smaller number of subjects and a very different experimental setting. The test times were examined and, again, effects of group size were often obtained. We report these findings in order to make experimenters sensitive to possibly confounding effects from group size when carrying out experiments in a collective setting.Running experiments with a number of subjects together in the same room saves considerable time for the researcher. In contemporary research on learning and memory, it is implicitly accepted that the data are not affected by the collective setting. Because of the convenience of computers, it has become common practice to run several subjects together, the actual number depending on how many show up for the session. However, a survey of recent literature revealed a virtual absence of publications in which the effect of group size as a potentially noisy variable on the dependent measures is taken into account. In view of the older studies on audience effects in social learning (for review, see Geen & Gange, 1977), this lack of methodological care and completeness in reporting is rather surprising.The present paper describes three experiments that were not designed for investigating the effect of group size, but in which group size did emerge as a significant factor. In each experiment, it was expected that the main variable (either test expectancy in Experiments 1 and 2 or the experimenter's characteristics in Experiment 3) was not powerful enough to reveal major effects with a small number of observations. In addition, it was not possible to have many observations with the same subjects. Therefore, we decided to collect data from a fairly large number of subjects. To save time, a number of subjects (always from the same sex) were invited at the same time. In all the experiments, the study time was self-paced_ Since there were several groups of subjects in each condition, we had to decide to Requests for reprints should be sent to Gery d'Ydewalle,

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Effects of group size.

Cited by 272 publications

References 33 publications

Group Size and Leisure Activity Behavior Among Antarctic Volunteers

Group Size and Leisure Activity Behavior Among Antarctic Volunteers

Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance

Group size: A possible distorting factor in learning experiments

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