The effects of team strategic orientation on team process and information search

We tested the effects of team strategic orientation on team member perceptions, work strategy and information search. In Experiment 1, 80 teams worked on a hidden profile decision-making task. A defensive team strategic orientation increased members’ perceptions of the problem’s scope, leading to a more process-focused work strategy and broader information search compared to an offensive team strategic orientation. When teams needed critical information from the environment, defensive teams outperformed offensive teams; offensive teams performed better when critical information resided within the team. In Experiment 2, these findings were replicated with 92 teams performing a different decision task. When making a second decision, half of the teams were led to change their strategic orientation; teams shifting from offense to defense altered their information search behavior more readily than did teams shifting in the opposite direction, suggesting an asymmetric adaptation effect.     

Addendum to: Heterogeneity Coefficients for Mahalanobis' D as a Multivariate Effect Size

In a previous paper (Del Giudice, 2017 [Heterogeneity coefficients for Mahalanobis' D as a multivariate effect size. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 52, 216–221]), I proposed two heterogeneity coefficients for Mahalanobis' D based on the Gini coefficient, labeled H and EPV. In this addendum I discuss the limitations of the original approach and note that the proposed indices may overestimate heterogeneity under certain conditions. I then describe two revised indices H₂ and EPV₂, and illustrate the difference between the original and revised indices with some real-world data sets.     

Group norms,intra-group position and children's aggressive intentions

This study aimed to explore the peer group's role in childhood aggression. Participants (N = 356), aged 8.92 to 13.67 years (M = 11.22, SD = .96), were asked to pretend that they had been placed in a team and were then provided with information regarding their team's norms (aggression vs. helping) and their position within the team (prototypical vs. peripheral). Subsequently, participants were asked to rate the likelihood that they would directly or indirectly aggress towards another team. When compared to children in the helping norm condition, those in the aggression norm condition reported a significantly higher likelihood of engaging in direct and indirect aggression. For indirect aggression, prototypical members of aggressive groups also reported being more likely to engage in such behaviour than peripheral members of these groups did. Further, peripheral members of aggressive groups reported a greater likelihood of engaging in indirect aggression than either peripheral or prototypical members of helping groups. The contribution of these results to our understanding of the group mechanisms underlying childhood aggression is discussed.     

Happy-productive groups: How positive affect links to performance through social resources

Abstract

The current study extends the Broaden & Build theory to the collective (i.e. groups) level of analysis, focusing on the mediating role of group social resources (i.e. cohesion, coordination, teamwork, supportive team climate) between group positive affect (i.e. enthusiasm, optimism, satisfaction, comfort) and group performance (i.e. in-and extra-role performance, creative performance). To test our hypotheses, we conducted two studies using independent samples. Study 1 is a laboratory study with 449 participants nested in 112 small groups who performed an organizational simulation creative task. Study 2 is a field study that aggregated scores of 2159 employees nested in 417 groups. In both the lab and field studies, structural equation modeling results revealed that group social resources fully mediate the relationship between group positive emotions and performance.     

Group decision process and incrementalism in organizational decision making

In two studies examining resource allocation, support is found for the notion that group decisions are affected in systematic ways depending on whether or not there was individual consideration of the problem before meeting as a group. Specifically, compared to no prior consideration groups, prior consideration groups (1) escalate their commitment more in progress (i.e., ongoing) decisions, and (2) are less willing to concentrate resources on a single project in adoption (i.e., resource utilization) decisions. The findings challenge the blanket assertion that promoting divergent views in a group decision context is always related to better decisions.     

Model-based recursive partitioning of extended redundancy analysis with an application to nicotine dependence among US adults

Extended redundancy analysis (ERA) is used to reduce multiple sets of predictors to a smaller number of components and examine the effects of these components on a response variable. In various social and behavioural studies, auxiliary covariates (e.g., gender, ethnicity) can often lead to heterogeneous subgroups of observations, each of which involves distinctive relationships between predictor and response variables. ERA is currently unable to consider such covariate-dependent heterogeneity to examine whether the model parameters vary across subgroups differentiated by covariates. To address this issue, we combine ERA with model-based recursive partitioning in a single framework. This combined method, MOB-ERA, aims to partition observations into heterogeneous subgroups recursively based on a set of covariates while fitting a specified ERA model to data. Upon the completion of the partitioning procedure, one can easily examine the difference in the estimated ERA parameters across covariate-dependent subgroups. Moreover, it produces a tree diagram that aids in visualizing a hierarchy of partitioning covariates, as well as interpreting their interactions. In the analysis of public data concerning nicotine dependence among US adults, the method uncovered heterogeneous subgroups characterized by several sociodemographic covariates, each of which yielded different directional relationships between three predictor sets and nicotine dependence.     

Representing decision-makers using styles of behavior: An approach designed for group decision support systems

Supporting decision-making processes when the elements of a group are geographically dispersed and on a tight schedule is a complex task. Aiming to support decision-makers anytime and anywhere, Web-based group decision support systems have been studied. However, the limitations in the decision-makers’ interactions associated to this scenario bring new challenges. In this work, we propose a set of behavioral styles from which decision-makers’ intentions can be modelled into agents. The goal is that, besides having agents represent typical preferences of the decision-makers (towards alternatives and criteria), they can also represent their intentions. To do so, we conducted a survey with 64 participants in order to find homogeneous operating values so as to numerically define the proposed behavioral styles in four dimensions. In addition, we also propose a communication model that simulates the dialogues made by decision-makers in face-to-face meetings. We developed a prototype to simulate decision scenarios and found that agents are capable of acting according to the decision-makers’ intentions and fundamentally benefit from different possible behavioral styles, just as a face-to-face meeting benefits from the heterogeneity of its participants.     

Group boundary permeability moderates the effect of a dependency meta‐stereotype on help‐seeking behaviour

Previous studies have found that when low‐status group members are aware that their in‐group is stereotyped as dependent by a specific out‐group (i.e. a dependency meta‐stereotype is salient), they are reluctant to seek help from the high‐status out‐group to avoid confirming the negative meta‐stereotype. However, it is unclear whether low‐status group members would seek more help in the context of a salient dependency meta‐stereotype when there is low (vs. high) group boundary permeability. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to examine the moderating effect of permeability on meta‐stereotype confirmation with a real group. In study 1, we manipulated the salience of the dependency meta‐stereotype, measured participants' perceived permeability and examined their help‐seeking behaviour in a real‐world task. Participants who perceived low permeability sought more help when the meta‐stereotype was salient (vs. not salient), whereas participants who perceived high permeability sought the same amount of help across conditions. In study 2, we manipulated the permeability levels and measured the dependency meta‐stereotype. Participants who endorsed a high‐dependency meta‐stereotype sought more help than participants who endorsed a low‐dependency meta‐stereotype; this effect was particularly strong in the low‐permeability condition. The implications of these results for social mobility and intergroup helping are discussed.     

A prospective multilevel examination of the relationship between cohesion and team performance in elite youth sport

The purpose of the current research was to (a) develop and establish the factor structure of the Czech and Slovak versions of the Youth Sport Environment Questionnaire (YSEQ; Eys, Loughead, Bray, & Carron, 2009) and (b) examine the relationship between team performance and cohesion with a sample of European elite youth sport teams. At time point one, with 352 elite youth athletes from 22 teams, support was obtained for a two factor structure underlying the YSEQ. Based on data collected at the second (N = 291) and third (N = 246) time points, multilevel analyses revealed that, when controlling for midseason cohesion, midseason team performance significantly and positively predicted task and social cohesion later in the season. Neither task nor social cohesion predicted team performance. In addition to adapting the YSEQ for use in a unique context, these findings reveal the nature of the cohesion-performance relationship in elite youth sport.     

Collective Contexts in Conversation: Grounding by Proxy

Anecdotal evidence suggests that participants in conversation can sometimes act as a coalition. This implies a level of conversational organization in which groups of individuals form a coherent unit. This paper investigates the implications of this phenomenon for psycholinguistic and semantic models of shared context in dialog. We present a corpus study of multiparty dialog which shows that, in certain circumstances, people with different levels of overt involvement in a conversation, that is, one responding and one not, can nonetheless access the same shared context. We argue that contemporary models of shared context need to be adapted to capture this situation. To address this, we propose “grounding by proxy,” in which one person can respond on behalf of another, as a simple mechanism by which shared context can accumulate for a coalition as a whole. We explore this hypothesis experimentally by investigating how people in a task‐oriented coalition respond when their shared context appears to be weakened. The results provide evidence that, by default, coalition members act on each other's behalf, and when this fails they work to compensate. We conclude that this points to the need for a new concept of collective grounding acts and a corresponding concept of collective contexts in psycholinguistic and semantic models of dialog.