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We conducted a field study of 71 action teams to examine the relationship between team mental model similarity and accuracy and the performance of real-world teams. We used Pathfinder to operationalize team members' taskwork mental models (describing team procedures, tasks, and equipment) and teamwork mental models (describing team interaction processes) and examined team performance as evaluated by expert team assessment center raters. Both taskwork mental model and teamwork mental model similarity predicted team performance. Team mental model accuracy measures were also predictive of team performance. We discuss the implications of our findings and directions for future research.

Humor is a quintessentially social phenomenon, since every joke requires both a teller and an audience. Here we ask how humor operates in task-oriented group discussions. We use theories about the functions of humor to generate hypotheses about who jokes, when and in what situations. Then we use event history techniques to analyze humor attempts and successes in six-person groups. Our results combine to suggest an image of joking as a status-related activity, with men, high participators, frequent interrupters, and those who are frequently interrupted all showing status-related patterns of humor use. We find substantial time dependence in humor use, in which humor may serve to form a status hierarchy early in a group's development and to dissipate task-related tension later in the discussion. We use these results, in conjunction with core insights on status and emotion from the group processes literature, to develop a new theory of humor use in task-oriented groups. The new theory generates predictions about the content of humor episodes, which we examine with additional data from our group discussions. Consistent with the theory, we find that a higher proportion of men's humor is differentiating, while a higher proportion of women's humor is cohesion-building. We find the same general pattern with our other status variable, participation.

The domain of social influence is central to social psychology, and is claimed as a core aspect of the explanatory domain of two important theories: self-categorization theory and the theory of status characteristics and expectation states. In this paper we contrast predictions derived from each theory about the relative influence of group members who differ both on shared category membership and on status characteristics. In the first of two experiments, participants were asked to decide which of four people were most likely to know the correct answer to a task; shared group membership, relative group status, and relevant/irrelevant expertise were varied. We found both status and in-group identity effects. A second experiment provided evidence about the importance of perceptions of relative competence and similarity, as related to shared identity and status, in the influence process.

Drawing upon identity theory, expectation states theory, and legitimation theory, we examine how the task leader identity in task-oriented groups is more likely to be verified for persons with high status characteristics. We hypothesize that identity verification will be accomplished more readily for male group members and legitimated task leaders than female group members and those who are not legitimated. We found that there is an interaction of gender and legitimation on identity verification. Legitimated female leaders and non-legitimated males had higher levels of identity verification. Further examination revealed that legitimated male leaders were consistently overevaluated in the amount of their leadership relative to their own identity standards, while non-legitimated female leaders' leadership behavior was consistently underevaluated relative to their own identity standards. The implications of our findings for the study of identity verification and social structural processes are discussed.

The mechanisms governing the composition of formal social groups (e.g., task groups, organizational founding teams) remain poorly understood, owing to (1) a lack of representative sampling from groups found in the general population, (2) a \"success\" bias among researchers that leads them to consider only those groups that actually emerge and survive, and (3) a restrictive focus on some theorized mechanisms of group composition (e.g., homophily) to the exclusion of others. These shortcomings are addressed by analyzing a unique, representative data set of organizational founding teams sampled from the U.S. population. Rather than simply considering the properties of those founding teams that are empirically observed, a novel quantitative methodology generates the distribution of all possible teams, based on combinations of individual and relational characteristics. This methodology permits the exploration of five mechanisms of group composition--those based on homophily, functionality, status expectations, network constraint, and ecological constraint. Findings suggest that homophily and network constraints based on strong ties have the most pronounced effect on group composition. Social isolation (i.e., exclusion from a group) is more likely to occur as a result of ecological constraints on the availability of similar alters in a locality than as a result of status-varying membership choices.

Two theories of social influence, status characteristics theory (SCT) and social identity theory (SIT), have achieved an uncommon degree of theoretical cumulation. SCT focuses on the influence of status-differentiated actors in goal-oriented settings, while SIT addresses the influence of in-group versus out-group members in intergroup contexts. We explore the joint effect of status and social identity. Using a modification of SCT's standardized experimental setting, we found that status-organizing and social identity processes operated concurrently: group membership combined with a diffuse status characteristic in a manner consistent with the aggregation assumption of SCT. The study has implications for the theoretical integration of SCT with SIT. The avenue we suggest would describe how status-organizing and social identity processes are interrelated through their interactive effect on the legitimation of informal power and prestige orders.

We explore the capacity of positive sentiments, those enduring affective states one achieves when one likes another, to impact status structures. Do positive sentiments combine with existing aspects of interaction to create status hierarchies and potentially change the social order, or do they moderate the effects of extant structure by dampening the magnitude of status differences? Using the theoretical framework of Status Characteristics Theory (SCT) and the Camilleri-Berger model of decision-making, we designed an experiment to adjudicate between these two potentialities. Participation in the study consisted of 168 students. Results found support for the notion that positive sentiments moderate the effects of structural factors on indicators of social status; interestingly, this moderation effect varies by gender. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings, and new directions for research concerning sentiment and status processes.

Using recent developments on \"second-order expectations\" from status characteristics theory, we examine how the weighting of three motives (task performance, avoidance of status loss, and facilitation of interaction) affects an actor's orientation toward task performance and other group members, as well as an actor's behavior towards others. We propose that a differential weighting of these motives affects the extent to which actors in the same status position behave assertively in a group.

Purpose - To investigate the effects of within-group task interdependence and the degree of communications synchrony on performance in virtual teams (VT).Design methodology approach - A 2 × 2 factorial design of 240 participants in Spain, randomly assigned to 80 three-person teams, was used. Teams worked virtually (not meeting face-to-face), performing a merit-rating task in a laboratory setting.Findings - The analyses revealed an interaction effect between task interdependence and synchrony of communication. High values of VT performance were found both under conditions of \"low task interdependence\" and \"asynchrony of communication\" and under conditions of \"high task interdependence\" and \"synchrony of communication\". The results show that superior VT performance is contingent on the match between the nature of the task and the choice of communications modality.Research limitations implications - First, additional research will be needed to confirm and extend the findings in actual working environments. Second, a closer look is necessary at the different mediation processes employed by teams in situations where there is a better or worse fit between task characteristics and type of communication (e.g. team strategy).Practical implications - This study makes it clear that it is necessary to optimize and nurture one's investments in communication technologies, and calls for further consideration of the requirements for the design of technological solutions in accordance with task interdependence.Originality value - This work complements past research that has focused mainly on virtual teams using asynchronous technologies or comparing them with face-to-face teams.

Social stereotypes of women as less instrumentally competent than men may lead to the expectation that women are unlikely to excel in task-performing groups. Because other group members do not perceive them as especially competent, their ideas are not judged credible and little attention is paid to their contributions. Tow experiments examined ways in which women can surmount these barriers to influence in male-dominated task-performing groups: an initial demonstration of their specific skill at the task, a behavioral style that conveys a cooperative motivation, and a style that attracts others' attention to their high-quality solutions.