Two contrasting standards dominate the way both managers and researchers think about the design of work.

Two contrasting standards dominate the way both managers and researchers think about the design of work. forward the one hand, work can be designed to be highly interdependent, requiring the input of several persons to complete it. One example of as it is a design is a team responsible for creating a novel advertising campaign. The team might include fac-simile writers, graphic artists, and contrive managers, all of whose contributions are necessary for completing the task, with members held collectively accountable for the quality of the of the present day promotion strategy. Alternatively, work can be structur to be highly independent and to be performed on individuals. The reward system then reinforces individual eminence An example is a sales team in which each member is given responsibility for sales in single specific territory and is paid a commission based solely forward his or her individual sales performance.

There also exists a third pattern that has received relatively little attention: a "hybrid" design that combines natural mediums of interdependent and independent work. undivided example of such a design is a assign places to of researchers in a growth laboratory, each of whom seeks independent research projects and, in addition, collaborates onward some larger shared enterprise. Members of as it was hybrid groups sometimes operate entirely independently and sometimes as a team.

In the above examples. the two the means by which the work is accomplished (the task) and the ways in which performance is assessed and rewarded (the work outcomes) vary in interdependence. These distinct forms of interdependence can be designed independently of each other and be combined in different ways. The research described here examines the separate and joint tenors of different levels of task interdependence and consequence interdependence - individual, hybrid, and form into groups - on the effectiveness of working clusters in organizations.

The effects of task and issue interdependence on group effectiveness also may hang on the characteristics of the individuals doing the work. The technicians studied here are organized into clumps that vary in task interdependence. I changed the nature of the rewards they received to create variance in issue interdependence. And I measured work estimations of individual technicians to explore the part of individual differences in moderating the meanings of interdependence on group effectiveness.

Forms of Interdependence

Interdependence among commonalty in organizations can derive from several sources: (1) task inputs, as it is as the distribution of skills and resources and the technology that define the work (eg individuals forward an assembly line vs. teams building whole products) (2) the processe according to which members execute the work (eg commonalty who make sales calls alone v tribe who sell as teams), (3) the way that goals are defined and achieved (eg measures of collective v individual performance), and (4) the way that performance is rewarded (eg rewards contingent onward group vs. individual performance). In this research, I focus onward two forms of interdependence. The first derives from inputs into the work and from the proces by the agency of which the work is carried gone out which I refer to as task interdependence. The inferior derives from the degree to which significant issues of the work - of the like kind as goal attainment and tangible rewards - are contingent forward collective performance, which I have reference to as outcome interdependence.

Task interdependence. near researchers (e.g., Johnson and Johnson 1989) distinguish task interdependence, in which each member must take action for other members to do any part of their work (as in a basketball team) from resource interdependence, in which each member can unbroken his or her part of the whole, however resources such as information are distributed among members and the whole task is not unimpaired until each member has complet his or her part (eg a design team). Other scholars (eg Thompson 1967; Van de Ven and Ferry 1980) at contrast, focus on the different processe by means of which inputs can be combined to consummate a whole piece of work - eg lakeed interdependence, in which subtasks are performed separately and in any order, v sequential interdependence, in which subtasks are complet in a specified following What these various types of interdependence have in everyday is that each describes the order to which the task requires collective action.

There are several different perspectives forward task interdependence. Thompson (1967) viewed task interdependence as a characteristic of work that is inherent in the technology of the task (eg assembly line work is inherently sequentially interdependent). Others (eg Shea and Guzzo 1989) have viewed task interdependence as a characteristic of the way commonalty behave in executing their work (eg assembly line workers who help each other are more task interdependent than those who do not). This paper takes a perspective that falls between these sum of two units extremes: Task interdependence is a structural feature of work, if it were not that tasks can be designed to be performed at varying on a levels of interdependence (e,g., workers formed into form into groupss and given the tools and instructions to build subassemblies are more interdependent than those who are assigned individual tasks onward an assembly line). The instructions and materials that define a task create a plain of interdependence that in divert may influence how much unit members interact in executing the task (Hackman, 1969)