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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the role an intentional and cohesive research group for doctoral researchers and supervisors can play in surfacing and de-mystifying many of the implicit doctoral literacy practices involved in doctoral study.

This participatory, collaborative project, involving 11 doctoral researchers and three supervisors, was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, doctoral researchers and supervisors engaged in a discussion which resulted in a shared concept map. The concept map was then used as a prompt for stimulated recall interviews in which the participants reflected on the connections and peer learning afforded by the research group.

Drawing on ideas from Communities of Practice theory, the data revealed that the research group, including both supervisors and doctoral students, developed knowledge, relational connections and an awareness of a range of doctoral literacies.

This paper makes suggestions for how those in doctoral education can develop and embed research groups into institutional practices.

This study demonstrates the significant role a research group which is structured, intentional and guided plays in supervisors’ and doctoral students’ development of doctoral literacies and the fundamental intellectual and relational connections afforded by participating in such communities.

The characteristics of individual members and how the members are assembled in a group are critical foundations for various group processes and outcomes and often determine important staffing and hiring decisions in organizations. This chapter offers an overview of the history of group composition research across multiple disciplines and identifies three distinct approaches to studying group composition with an emphasis on the role of communication. Scholars treat group composition as a cause that leads to group outcomes, a consequence that results from social and psychological processes, or a process in response to dynamic team environments. A synthesis of previous research reveals that studying group composition as a cause has dominated the field and that the role of communication in group composition has gained little attention. The chapter concludes with a set of future research directions targeting the new digital environment, the role of communication, and research methodologies with special attention to the consequence- and process-oriented approaches.

This chapter reviews 30 years of Advances in Group Processes. Its primary purpose is to study the part the series has played in the advances in the study of group processes that have taken place between 1984 and 2014.

This chapter places the 30 years of Advances in Group Processes in the context of the changes that took place between small groups research in the 1950s and group processes research in the 1980s and beyond.

Analyzing the policies of Advances in Group Processes and its contents, this chapter reflects on its role in the advances in group processes that have taken place since the 1980s. Between 1950 and 1980, small group research reinvented, reconceptualized, and reinvigorated itself as group process research. Between the two periods, small group research, its applied research, and its research programs became increasingly theory-driven and its concept of the group and its levels increasingly analytic. As a consequence of these changes, the concept of the field itself became increasingly analytic. The changes between the two periods in its theory, research, application, programs, and in its concept of the group and the way the field was conceptualized led to marked advances in group process research in the 90s and beyond – to more theory, more impact of it on application, and more, and more cumulative, growth of it. Advances in Group Processes was at once a reflection of the changes that took place between the two periods and a driving force in the advances in group processes research that have taken place ever since.

Advances in Group Processes is a fundamental resource for the development of theory and research on small groups and group processes. This chapter provides an overview of its contributions and places them in the context of the development of the field as a whole.

Purpose – We outline how research on groups in disrupted environments can advance research on group processes.

Design/Methodology/Approach – We review studies of groups in disrupted environments, drawing mostly on military research to generate understanding of intra- and intergroup dynamics. We also identify new technologies and methods to improve measurement and modeling of groups.

Findings – When consolidated, the research documenting challenges groups operating in disrupted environments face suggests the importance of considering them as a unique set of circumstances for groups. It also identifies methods for objectively measuring and modeling groups in these environments.

Practical Implications – This chapter will help practitioners determine factors pertinent to groups working in disrupted environments, identify group processes that generate success and those that undermine group effectiveness, and point to emerging technologies to better measure and model group processes in disrupted environments.

Social Implications – Group processes affect both individuals and societies. In the context of the disrupted environments, group performance translates to enormous consequences for individuals, as well as national security and humanitarian implications.

Originality/Value of the Chapter – This chapter uniquely consolidates the vast amount of research on groups operating in disrupted environments and also is innovative in emphasizing the disrupted context as a generalizable situation that elucidates key dimensions of group processes and performance in disrupted environments.

Companies inevitably interact and entrench in complex organic systems of business relationships with other. These business networks are not objectively defined, instead they are shaped by the subjective perception of actors. This inherent subjectivity is associated with the notion of network pictures, that is, a research tool that researchers or managers can use to grasp practitioner theories. In this chapter, we discuss how the importance of identifying these theories results mainly from underlying principles of sense-making theory, as well as from the idea around performativity. Drawing on these theoretical groundings, this chapter has two objectives: to explore how practitioners actually perceive their business surroundings and to assess the extent of overlapping between (IMP Group) academic theories and practitioner theories. To achieve these objectives, the researchers use a dimensional network pictures model previously developed in the literature to analyze the network pictures of 49 top-level managers across 17 companies from two very distinct contexts or networks: a product-based network and a project-based network. Among other practices, findings illustrate how practitioners tend to simplify what is going on in their complex surroundings, to personalize their relationships with those surroundings, and to think in a stereotyped way. Moreover, the juxtaposition between the captured practitioner theories and academic (IMP Group) theories show that these are not always overlapping, and are in some cases quite the opposite. This research contributes to the ongoing discussion of the importance of grasping actors’ views of the world, arguing that sense-making theory and the notion of performativity are the two main conceptual drivers justifying the urgency in making those views more visible. This research also adds to the research on the impact and suitability of IMP Group theories on managerial thinking and practice. Finally, this research reinforces the current call for further practice-based research in business network contexts.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to provide an analytical overview of information research in the United Kingdom and of the role of the Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) in shaping the form and structure of that research.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach adopted is a detailed content analysis of the submissions made to the last UK RAE. This analysis is carried out in relation to four broad subject categorisations, and specific analysis of accounts of research carried out in the departments and research groups.

Findings – The RAE have played a key role in promoting research specialisms in library and information studies (LIS) research in the United Kingdom. The former general approach to research in information studies has been replaced by more focused research activities carried out in a variety of research groups spread across a diverse range of disciplines and departments, from LIS, to business and management, information systems, and computing and engineering.

Research implications – The prospects for general LIS research departments may be increasingly limited, as research becomes concentrated in sub-groups within larger organisational structures, subverting both departmental lines and conventional subject boundaries.

Originality/value – This overview provides a novel synthesis of information research in the United Kingdom in relation to four broad categories of research in information studies and information science, information management and social informatics, information systems and information interaction, and social computing and computational informatics. The account brings together a fragmented field of research in a compact and intelligible form.

The primary purpose of this chapter is to assess the effects of twenty-five years of the Group Processes Conference on advances in the study of group processes that have taken place between 1988 and 2014.

This chapter places the twenty-five years of the Group Processes Conference in the context of the changes that have taken place between small groups research in the 1950s and group processes research in the 1980s and beyond.

Between the 1950s and 1980s small groups research reinvented, reconceptualized, and reinvigorated itself as group processes research. In this period, small groups research, its applied research, and its research programs became increasingly theory-driven, and its concept of the group and its levels increasingly abstract, general, and analytic. As a consequence of these changes, the concept of the field itself became increasingly analytic. The Group Processes Conference was at once a reflection of these changes and a driving force in the subsequent advances in group processes research. It both quickened and amplified the effects of individual-level factors and of thirty years of Advances in Group Processes on the transformation of the field and was also, like Advances in Group Processes, a driving force in the subsequent advances in group processes research. The present chapter concludes with an analysis of the mechanisms of the effects of the Group Processes Conference on group processes research.

The program for the twenty-fifth year of the Group Processes Conference celebrates its effects on the field of group processes research.

Group decisions have taken a prominent part in strategic decision making but managerial research still lacks techniques to study these interpersonal processes comprehensively. Assuming that efficient decision making depends on shared cognitive structures within groups, an approach to analyze these structures and the affective and communicative dimensions causing convergence/divergence of individual cognitions is introduced. Suitable methods to study these variables are discussed and applied in an actual strategic decision to be made by a management team. The method shows a high degree of realism and preciseness in analyzing strategic group decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of enriched group work design and objective and perceived expertise diversity in interdisciplinary research groups with a focus on two critical group processes: task conflict and idea sharing.

Survey data were collected from 148 researchers and their advisors in 29 research labs at two doctorate-granting universities. The study tested the hypothesized model using hierarchical ordinary least squares regression and hierarchical linear modeling.

Results showed that objective and perceived (salient) expertise diversity jointly influenced task conflict. In addition, whether task conflict had a positive or negative impact on idea sharing depended on group work design enrichment and expertise diversity salience. Idea sharing improved group outcomes over and above the effects of task conflict.

Although this study could not test the causal relationships owing to a cross-sectional nature of data, it provides theoretical implications for the group work design, diversity and conflict literature.

Group work design represents an important tool for stimulating idea sharing in research groups. The findings suggest that managers should consider and manage the level of expertise diversity salience and the level of task conflict to increase the effectiveness of group work design.

The study provides insights on when task conflict may help creative groups. Work design and diversity salience represent important contextual features. The paper also examines both the objective and perceived diversity and disentangles task conflict and idea sharing.