Excerpt from The Influence of Group Longevity on Project Member Responses to Their Work Settings

One of the most important functions of a group manager is to make sure his team is performing effectively and that it will continue to be effective as members work together over time. Despite these concerns, research studies in professional settings have consistently uncovered significant decrements in project performance when group membership has remained fairly constant over too long a time period. Specifically, the empirical findings of Shepard Pelz and Andrews and Katz (l982a) show how project performance varies curvilinearly with group longevity as measured by averaging the individual project tenures of all group members. In all of these studies, project groups with group longevity scores of five or more years were significantly lower in performance than project teams with lower levels of group longevity.

Although this curvilinear relationship between performance and group longevity is now well documented, we must still learn considerably more about the different processes underlying these performance variations. What changes take place within a group that could account for the significantly lower performances of long - tenured project teams? Moreover, is there any chance of keeping a group effective with increasingly high levels of mean group tenure? Furthermore, when one examines the research literature on group dynamics, one discovers that virtually every empirical study is either based on new groups or has failed to differentiate among groups according to how long members have interacted with one another. In short, there is as yet no empirical basis from which to suggest how one might manage increasingly stable project groups in order to maintain creativity and high performance.

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