Relationship of Group Cohesion to Group Performance: A Research Integration Attempt

摘要

The Army's increasing interest in group cohesion has led to increased research effort in that area. This report describes an effort to integrate the cohesion performance research that employed real world groups using a meta-analytic approach. Tukey's (1977) stem and leaf display was used to display the data. The median effect size (product-moment correlation coefficient) for the 14 codable studies was .36, and the unweighted mean r was .42. When study effect sizes were weighted by the number of groups involved, the mean became .32. Rosenthal and Rubin's (1982) Binomial Effect Size Display (BESD) demonstrated that a correlation of .32 increases success rate (high performance) from 34 percent to 66 percent when cohesion is increased from low (below median) to high (above median). Although these findings are problematical because of the very small number of codable studies, as well as the conceptual and methodological problems associated with the cohesion performance research, higher levels of cohesion would seem to be very desirable for real world groups such as Army units. (sdw)