Small Group Research

This article attempts to answer three questions. First, why has it been so difficult to achieve true interdisciplinary collaboration in the study of small groups? Second, what has been accomplished (and, in some cases, lost) in past attempts? And finally, what has been accomplished recently?

This pilot study investigates the contribution of supportive psychodynamically oriented group psychotherapy to the clinical characteristics and functioning of psychotic patients. After a year of group psychotherapy using an intermediary object, the drawings of a number of psychotic patients were inspected separately so as to ascertain the improvement of psychopathological elements depicted. Two groups of 38 patients each, with similar psychopathology, clinical and demographic data were assessed before and after 1 year. One group participated in group psychotherapy, with or without an intermediary object; the other group received standard care. The study demonstrated improvement in functioning, quality of life, positive/negative symptoms, and relapses of hospitalizations for patients participating in group psychotherapy. Moreover, elements that indicate psychopathology declined in the drawings of the group in therapy with an intermediary object. Psychodynamically oriented group psychotherapy, with or without an intermediary object, could be an additional treatment option for psychotic patients.

Teams with strong faultlines often do not achieve their full potential because their functioning is impaired. We argue that strong diversity beliefs held by team leaders mitigate the negative impact of socio-demographic and experience-based faultlines on team functioning. In a heterogeneous multisource field sample of 217 employees nested in 44 teams and their leaders, we tested our assumptions. Results of a path-analytic model showed that socio-demographic faultlines were negatively related to perceived cohesion and positively related to perceived loafing. The impact of socio-demographic faultlines on team functioning was less detrimental when leaders held strong diversity beliefs. Against our expectations, we found no support for an impact of experience-based faultlines on perceived cohesion or a moderating role of leaders’ diversity beliefs in this context. Potential explanations for these results and implications for organizations and team leaders are discussed.

A substantial body of research has highlighted the effects of experience on individual performance in groups. However, the challenges individuals confront after moving between groups require the adoption of more finely grained categorizations of experience to understand how they will help or hinder performance in novel group environments. This article develops a distinct form of experience here termed transition experience to deal specifically with insights individuals accumulate as they shift membership between different groups and contrasts its impact with that of the frequently examined component of related task experience. Player movement data from the National Basketball Association is used to show that related task experience can produce negative consequences, consistent with prior research. Conversely, low to moderate levels of transition experience can aid performance. This holds true for both individual performance and performance more closely related to coordinated actions with teammates.