Category Archives: *Small Group Research

Group Job Satisfaction Determined by the Emotional Intelligence of Its Leader

Reply

Topic: Leadership, Teams, Emotional Intelligence, Job Satisfaction
Publication: Small Group Research (JAN 2011)
Article: Managers’ Trait Emotional Intelligence and Group Outcomes: The Case of Group Job Satisfaction
Authors: L. Zampetakis & V. Moustakis
Reviewed By: Allison B. Siminovsky

Regardless of the nature of an organization’s end goals, it is in any organization’s best interests to have employees that are satisfied with their jobs.  Individual job satisfaction has been linked to increased performance and higher organizational loyalty, amongst other positive implications.  It has been found in the past that individual job satisfaction and trait emotional intelligence, or one’s emotional self-awareness, are linked, as being able to identify and regulate one’s emotions has had positive effects on job satisfaction. 

As organizational structure is becoming more and more group-focused, this study raises the possibility that the trait emotional intelligence of a leader could play a role in group job satisfaction.  If such a relationship could be found, organizations could use this information to place those employees with high trait emotional intelligence in leadership roles, potentially boosting group job satisfaction and benefiting the organization as a whole.

Supporting the notion that groups tend to develop shared judgments and evaluations over time, the researchers found that the groups they studied developed unitary evaluations of their leaders’ emotional intelligence. 

Continue reading →

Does Size Matter . . . In Workgroup Effectiveness?

Reply

Topic: Teams
Publication:  Small Group Research
Article: Group size, group development, and group productivity.
Author: S.A. Wheelan

Featured by:  Lit Digger

Endurance When it comes to workgroup teams, YES!  You have already probably noticed that working in larger
groups often means less cohesiveness and less participation from group members,
and often the opportunity for more free-riding.  But have you ever wondered if group size matters? A recent article by Susan Wheelan dove
into this research question by empirically examining group productivity and
developmental processes of 329 work groups of various sizes.  A notable contribution of this study
was that it looked at groups that had been together for a minimum of a 6-month
period, which was different from most previous studies involving short-term,
laboratory experiments.

Wheelan found that, indeed, group size DOES matter when it comes
to group productivity and development, such that smaller groups (ballpark 3-6
people) are most ideal.  That’s
right: “strength in numbers” does NOT apply here.  So, what can smaller groups do that larger groups can’t?

For one thing, Wheelan reports that smaller groups are more likely
to pass through all four stages of group development.  So what does group development look like?  We can think of this in the following stages:

Continue reading →