Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Over a century ago, the first questions tackled by the nascent discipline of social psychology were questions about group performance. Late in the 19th century, Ringelman (1913 ; Kravitz & Martin, 1986 ) studied how the size of a performance group affected its productivity, and laid the foundation for 25 years of research on group motivation and social loafing at the end of the 20th century. Triplett (1898) investigated the effects of the presence of coworkers on individual performance, and thereby broke ground for several decades of research on social facilitation (cf. Baron, 1986 ; Cottrell, 1972 ; Zajonc, 1965 ). Likewise, the origins of many other core issues in our discipline lie in early, seminal research on group performance, including the contrast of individual versus group productivity ( Shaw, 1932 ), social influence processes ( Sherif, 1936 ), and leadership ( Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939 ). Although our discipline's interest in groups has fluctuated (cf. Steiner, 1974, 1986 ) and diversified in many ways, the questions of how people collaborate to do work and solve common problems remain fundamental questions for social psychology. The goal of the present chapter is to review recent progress on these questions, noting at times some promising directions for further research. We will focus on two broad group performance topics. The first is performance ... log in or subscribe to read full text