Team Effectiveness and Decision Making in Organizations

Teams have become a dynamic force in the world of business--cross functional teams, quality circles, customer service teams, autonomous work groups, and even virtual, electronically linked teams. Vested with autonomy, information, and responsibility, today's teams don't just do--they decide. Although team activity often determines the success or failure of a project, a department--even an organization--research about how teams really work has not kept pace with this exponential growth, until now. Written for researchers, educators, practitioners, and serious students of the team phenomenon, Team Effectiveness and Decision Making in Organizations provides the latest research perspective on teams: their nature, their function, their effectiveness, their decision-making processes, and their ability to change the face of organizational life. Using a variety of methodologies, twenty-two leading researchers from the fields of management and social, industrial, and organizational psychology examine team-based projects worldwide, bringing their expertise to bear on core issues from member selection to conflict management to measuring productivity. In eleven groundbreaking chapters, the book investigates the internal processes and external factors that affect critical decision making in teams and presents tested models and methods for improving team effectiveness in any organizational context.