Every day in communities across America hundreds of committees, boards, church groups, and social clubs hold meetings where they spend their time engaged in shouting matches and acrimonious debate. Whether they are aware of it or not, the procedures that most such groups rely on to reach decisions were first laid out as Robert's Rules more than 150 years ago by an officer in the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers. Its arcane rituals of parliamentary procedure...

"This volume critically evaluates more than a century of empirical research on the effectiveness of small, task-performing groups, and offers a fresh look at the costs and benefits of collaborative work arrangements. The central question taken up by this book is whether - and under what conditions - interaction among group members leads to better performance than would otherwise be achieved simply by combining the separate efforts of an equal number...