On the evaluation of group effectiveness for designing work groups

SUMMARY

This study suggests a method evaluating the effectiveness of the individual work group, i.e. group effectiveness. In the design process it is very important to know what effectiveness we can expect from a proposed work group, and also when redesigning or reappraising a work group we must be able to evaluate the existing State of effectiveness. In either case the evaluation of group effectiveness is carried out through a procedure for ascertaining the goals for which the work group is designed.

A special characteristic of our suggested method is that the group effectiveness is evaluated on the basis of configural patterns in multidimensional space. That is. each group member's response to effects is discriminated as an ‘effect-point’ in the multidimensional ‘effectiveness space’, which is formed by the use of a multidimensional scaling method, and then the relative effectiveness is assessed from the patterns of the effect-points in the effectiveness space.

In order to appraise the existing state and estimate the design goals, the effectiveness must be related to the attributes of the work group. These relationships can he found from analyses employing ‘multidimensional classification methods’, i.e. M DC, CMDC-I, and CMDC-II. Thus the designer is able to predict effectiveness from the attributes of the proposed work group. In this paper we examine these relationships by the analysis of two indices of effectiveness (job satisfaction and work performance) and the attributes of the worker and task which are the critical elements for the design of an effective work group. We suggest a procedure to evaluate group effectiveness and identify the design goals. Our procedure will be applied to the design of more effective and better work groups.