Group Process and Productivity

Group Process and Productivity is Ivan Steiner's 1972 monograph on why groups so often achieve less than the sum of what their members could achieve alone. Its organising device is a simple subtraction: actual productivity equals potential productivity minus the losses due to faulty process. Potential productivity is set by the members' resources and by the demands of the task, and the gap between that and what the group actually delivers is the thing to be explained, which Steiner divides into coordination losses and motivation losses. The book is also the source of the taxonomy of task types that the field still uses, distinguishing additive tasks, in which contributions sum, disjunctive tasks, in which the group depends on its best member, conjunctive tasks, in which it depends on its weakest, and discretionary tasks, in which the group may combine contributions as it chooses. It is an academic work and is the original source for material that later popular books on teams often present without attribution.

Written from the public record for the book.

What this vault takes from it

Reliability

Not audited here. 3 notes in this vault draw on it.

People

• Ivan Steiner