Group Performance

Group performance represents the extent to which a group's products or services meet the expectations of those who use, receive, or evaluate them. Expectations concerning performance derive from the group's mission or role as defined by the group's primary counterparts: the manager responsible for assigning and supervising the group's work; customers who receive the group's output; and possibly others with an interest in the group's practices, processes, or results, such as professional peers, regulators, stakeholders, or support staff.

Defining and clarifying the group's role are critical for group performance. Usual sources of role definition include the group's manager (for example, in a new product team), members (for example, physicians in a medical practice), and their individual roles in the larger organization (for example, a surgical team). Clarifying a group's role in the workplace calls for specifying the group's responsibility for negotiating and organizing its work, based on the combination of members’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and preferences. Role specification also focuses on the group's responsibilities, timelines, work standards, and methods for measuring performance. Objective criteria of performance—based on counts of output—are ideal, although not always available. Reports or ratings of satisfaction by customers or managers are more common, and are best when specific.

Group effectiveness encompasses group performance plus viability, or long-term, continuing capability of performing as a group in the future. Because a group can burn out, fall apart, or otherwise lose its capacity to perform, effectiveness requires more than performance. Viability depends on the extent to which (a) working in the group continues to meet the members’ needs, (b) members maintain the necessary individual expertise and collective capacities for coordinated effort, and (c) members maintain positive interpersonal relationships and willingness to continue working together in the future. For example, an[Page 232] effective ER team not only provides excellent emergency services, but its members also maintain and update their individual, specialized skills; the group maintains its teamwork skills; and members like and respect one another well enough to continue working together.

Psychologist Ivan Steiner (1972) proposed an equation to describe group productivity, a form of performance (output produced with available resources):

Actual productivity = potential productivity – process losses + process gains

In this equation, group performance (productivity) depends on (a) potential productivity expected in view of its resources—especially members’ expertise—and constraints; (b) process losses, or failures to apply the resources to the mission, through faulty interaction processes; and (c) process gains, or increments in performance beyond the expected potential, gained through interaction in which members’ collaborative results exceed the expected sum of their separate, individual efforts.

The following sections describe the terms on the right-hand side of the equation and identify factors related to process losses and gains.