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This article integrates the literature on group interaction process analysis and group learning, providing a framework for understanding how patterns of interaction develop. The model proposes how adaptive, generative, and transformative learning processes evolve and vary in their functionality. Environmental triggers for learning, the group's readiness to learn, stage of development, control mechanisms, and facilitation influence the interaction patterns that emerge, are reinforced, and repeated over time. The model has implications for research on the evolution of adaptive, generative, and transformative group learning and for diagnosing group conditions and implementing interventions that promote group learning.
Keywords: group interactions; group readiness to learn; adaptive, generative, transformative group learning
Group development and facilitation are an important part of human resource development, given the importance of group work in organizations (Hackman, 2002; London & London, 2007). This article focuses on identifying and understanding the development and effects of learned patterns of group interaction. In doing so, we examine and integrate literature on group learning and interaction processes to help guide human resource development research and practice. Prior theory and research have focused mainly on analyses of members' statements (e.g., Bales, 1950, 1980; Futoran, Kelly, & McGrath, 1989) and more recently on more macrolevel taxonomies of actions, transition and task episodes, and interpersonal dynamics (e.g., Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). Groups have been viewed as networks of interconnected relationships that provide opportunities and limitations for patterns of behavior (Klein, Lim, Saltz, & Mayer, 2004; Pearsall & Ellis, 2006). Applications to enhance group process identify functional interaction patterns and incorporate them into structured group processes (e.g., brainstorming) and computer-assisted group support systems (e.g., Briggs, de Vreede, Nunamaker, and Tobey, 2001). Here, we develop a model for understanding how functional and dysfunctional patterns of group interaction are learned and repeated and for determining ways to intervene to increase group learning.
Group interaction refers to the activities that the group engages in to coordinate members, tasks, and tools (Ericksen & Dyer, 2004). Theory and research on group interaction processes have focused on member-to-member verbal expressions that can be categorized and followed over time as group discussions unfold. Verbal statements can be categorized in a variety of ways. For example, in Bales's (1950, 1980) interaction process framework, task statements include giving...