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Keywords
Interpersonal communications, Thinking styles, Group working
Abstract
Global competition and its resultant product proliferation have left a multitude of organizations scrambling to deal with their oft-chaotic environment. Many organizations have responded to the changing nature of international business by developing new cooperative forms (joint ventures, self-managed work teams, virtual corporations, etc.). The success of these relatively new organizational forms depends on clear communication between co-workers. However, business practitioners and theoreticians have insufficiently researched the question "How do we group people to improve communication and performance?" This study seeks to fill that void by analyzing the relationship between individual cognitive flexibility, cooperative context, and communication competence. Results show that groups comprising individuals with similar cognitive processes outperform diverse thinking groups. Additionally, collaborative exercises appear to be an important precursor to the establishment of perceptions of communication competence. Recommendations for managers include front loading activities with collaborative exercises and evaluating cognitive flexibility prior to assigning individuals to groups.
Introduction
The dynamic changes sweeping the business world have led many organizations to adapt to this reality by seeking the assistance of others (Roy and Dugal, 1998). Paradoxically, inter- and intra-organizational cooperation have become an accepted means to compete (Khanna and Palepu, 2000). Recently, practitioners and researchers alike have begun to question what we really know about cooperation and ask whether past research applies to new organizational realities. The authors encourage more work on these topics and point out that the heightened importance of cooperation "also highlights the growing importance of new related research areas, such as interpersonal trust, cross-functional boundary spanning, team behavior, and communicative relationships" (Smith et al., 1995, p. 9).
Communication, long recognized as crucial to the success of cooperative arrangements, will become even more important in the future (McAllister, 1995). The reasons for the heightened attention to intra- and interorganizational communication are:
* gains in information technology have collapsed the once formidable boundaries of time and space, creating a new international division of thought with the power of combining the best minds in the world at the push of a button (Casson, 1990); the shifting nature of the market has created a situation where interactions and interactants have become short-lived, innumerable and multifarious (Dugal and Roy, 1994);
* research in business...