In a group situation, something goes wrong but no individual feels personal responsibility. This is called the "pie" phenomenon because everybody has a piece of the action, but all believe they are innocent. Each contributes to contagion and chaos but all say, "We didn't do nothing." In this article, the author, a pioneer in work with troubled…

The argument presented in this paper is that today's workplaces and universities both require and promote individual and collective responsibility for work and that students need to be adequately prepared for this. UK national culture has been characterised as highly individualist. Therefore, internationalisation of home management students in the…

The basketball players sit in a corner of the cafeteria. The rockers hang out near the stage. The ditchers and smokers congregate near the school gates. The JV football players and cheerleaders? They're near the field. This is how students at California's Hawthorne High described the typical lunch period at their school. In doing so, they also…

A remarkable present-day phenomenon in rural areas in the Netherlands is that young people, mostly males, often meet in small groups in self-built or at least self-fitted out sheds or caravans ("keten"). At first glance, these "keten" seem to be substitutes for more official entertainment sites in the relatively sparsely…

The group's absence norm, a construct from the applied psychology literature, was used to examine session absences in personal growth groups. Rather than examining the absence norm statically, we modeled it dynamically as a time-varying covariate (Tasca et al., 2010). We also examined moderation by modeling the interaction of the absence norm and…

The purpose of this study was to uncover compositional and emergent influences on unethical behavior by teams. Results from 126 teams indicated that the presence of a formalistic orientation within the team was negatively related to collective unethical decisions. Conversely, the presence of a utilitarian orientation within the team was positively…

According to the deprovincialization thesis, interethnic contact involves a reappraisal and distancing from the ingroup. Contact can broaden one's horizon by acknowledging and recognizing the value of other cultures and thereby putting the taken-for-granted own cultural standards into perspective. The current research uses data from three surveys…

The purpose of this study was to explore group forming strategies by examining participation behaviours during whole class discussions associated with active participation in a following small group activity. Written communication data, posted in class discussion forums (843 messages/70,432 words) and small group forums (732 messages/59,394…

Students and faculty are grappling with learning teams in the online environment - more than half of all higher education organizations offer online courses (Hoffman, 2006). As online course developers try to replicate the best practices of traditional classrooms, the asynchronous technology of the Internet has added great capability while also…

We developed a dual-level transformational leadership scale to measure individual-focused behavior at the individual level and group-focused behavior at the group level, and we validated the scale using a sample of 203 members from 60 work groups in a Canadian company. Results show that individual-focused leadership behavior, at the individual…

Understanding the dynamics of individual or group adaptation can provide valuable information for constructing professional development strategies to increase chances of instructional success. This paper reports on an exploratory study that identifies indicators of convergent vs. non-convergent adaptation in two cases of teachers working together…

This study investigated communication patterns and behavior in problem-solving groups in a graduate online course. An inductive qualitative analysis method was employed to analyze 732 messages that were retrieved from small group forums. The current study identified a temporal pattern of group development was in comparison with existing…

Studies of primary education within the UK have shown that small groups can feature within classrooms; however, equivalent research within secondary education remains scarce. Research has established effective group work approaches, yet secondary teachers may encounter difficulties employing approaches tied to parameters embedded within primary…

This study examines the relationship between multicultural events in group supervision, group climate, and supervisee multicultural competence using a mixed qualitative/quantitative design. The discovery-oriented approach yielded 196 helpful and hindering multicultural events among 136 participants. The most common events included multicultural…

Purpose: One of the main issues that many organizations will face in the coming years is the management of increasing diversity in the workforce. The purpose of this paper is to examine the levels of individualism and collectivism of managers in two different cultural environments, that is, Malaysia and Australia. Design/methodology/approach: Data…