| Abstract | General, nonspecific, or vague.
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| Acceptance requirements | The degree to which the solution for a given problem must be accepted by the people it will affect.
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| Accommodation | The conflict management style, high in cooperativeness and low in assertiveness, where one person appeases or gives in to the other.
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| Action-oriented listener | A listener who focuses on the task, remembers details and prefers an organized presentation.
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| Active listening | Listening with the intent of understanding a speaker the way the speaker wishes to be understood and paraphrasing your understanding so the speaker can confirm or correct the paraphrase.
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| Activity group | A group formed primarily for members to participate in an activity such as bridge, bowling, hunting, etc.
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| Activity orientation | The extent to which a culture emphasizes doing or being, taking charge or going with the flow.
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| Ad hominem attack | An attack on a person rather than his or her argument, often involving name-calling; distracts a group from careful examination of an issue or argument.
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| Adaptive structuration theory | The version of structuration theory that examines how the structures of computer technology get used during group decision making.
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| Administrative duties | One of the major categories of responsibility of a designated leader; includes planning, sending meeting notices, keeping written records, and other administrative functions.
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| Affective conflict | Conflict resulting from personality clashes, likes, dislikes, and competition for power.
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| Agenda | A list of items to be discussed at a group meeting.
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| Aggressiveness | Behavior designed to win or dominate that fails to respect the rights or beliefs of others.
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| Ambiguous | A characteristic of any word or statement that can reasonably be understood in more than one way.
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| Antecedent phase | The preliminary phase in group socialization where individual member characteristics influence member readiness and ability to engage in effective group socialization.
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| Anticipatory phase | The phase in group socialization where members form initial expectations about each other and the socialization process.
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| Area of freedom | The scope of authority and responsibility of a group, including limits on the group's authority.
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| Assembly effect | A type of group synergy or nonsummativity whereby the decision of group members collectively is superior to adding together (summing) the wisdom, knowledge, experience, and skills of the members individually.
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| Assertiveness | Behavior that manifests respect both for your own and others' rights as opposed to aggressiveness and nonassertiveness.
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| Assimilation phase | The phase in group socialization where the member and the group have worked out a comfortable fit.
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| Attitude | A network of beliefs and values, not directly measurable, that a person holds toward an object, person, or concept; produces a tendency to react in specific ways toward the object, person, or concept.
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| Authoritarianism | Tendency to accept uncritically the information, ideas, and proposals of authority figures such as a high-status group member or leader; produces preference for strong leaders and subservience as a follower.
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| Autocratic leader | A leader who tries to dominate and control a group.
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| Avoidance | The passive conflict management style that ignores a conflict.
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| Backchannel | Nonverbal vocalizations such as mm-hmm and uh-huh that are uttered while another is speaking; partly determined by one's culture, can indicate interest and active listening.
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| Behavior | Any observable action by a group member.
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| Behavioral function | The effect or function a member's behavior has on the group as a whole.
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| Bibliography | A list of sources of information about a topic; usually includes books, journal or magazine articles, newspaper stories, interviews, and so forth.
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| Boomer generation | Individuals born from 1946 to 1964; key experiences include the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and Watergate.
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| Boundary spanner | A group member who monitors the group's environment to import and export information relevant to the group's success.
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| Brainstorming | A small group technique for stimulating creative thinking by temporarily suspending evaluation.
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| Brainwriting | Individual brainstorming producing a written list.
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| Builder generation | Individuals born before 1945; key experiences include the Great Depression and World War II.
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| Buzz group session | Method whereby attendees at a large group meeting can participate actively; the large meeting is divided into groups of about six persons each who discuss a target question for a specified time, then report their answers to the entire large assembly.
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| Bypassing | A misunderstanding that results from two people not realizing they are referring to different things by the same words, or who have the same referent for different words.
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| Charge | The assignment or goal given to a group, usually by a parent organization or administrator of the parent organization.
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| Closed system | A system, such as a small group, with relatively impermeable boundaries, resulting in little interchange between the system and its environment.
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| Co-culture | A grouping that sees itself as distinct but is also part of a larger grouping.
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| Cognitive complexity | The personal trait that refers to the level of development of a group member's construct system for interpreting signals; cognitively complex individuals are able to synthesize more information and think in more abstract and organized terms than are cognitively simple individuals.
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| Cohesiveness | The degree of attraction members feel for the group; unity.
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| Collaborating group | A group whose members come from different organizations to form a temporary alliance for a specific purpose.
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| Collaboration | The assertive, cooperative conflict management style that assumes a solution can be found that fully meets the needs of all parties to a conflict; a problem-solving conflict management style.
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| Collectivist culture | A culture in which the needs and wishes of the group predominate over the needs of any one individual; the idea of an individual following a path separate from the group is inconceivable.
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| Committee | A small group of people given an assigned task or responsibility by a larger group (parent organization) or person with authority.
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| Ad hoc or special committee | A group that goes out of existence after its specific task has been completed.
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| Conference Committee | A group composed of representatives from two or more groups; members' responsibilities are to represent the interests of their constituents.
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| Standing Committee | A group given an area of responsibility that includes many tasks and continues indefinitely.
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| Common Ground dialogue | A process of constructively managing divisive conflict where the participants are unlikely ever to agree, by focusing on the goals and values they can share and agree to.
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| Communication | A process in which signals produced by people are received, interpreted, and responded to by other people.
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| Communication apprehension (CA) | Anxiety or fear of speaking in a variety of social situations; reticence; shyness.
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| Communication network | The interpersonal channels open for interaction; collectively, who talks to whom.
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| Communicative competencies | The communication-related skills and abilities of members that help groups achieve their goals.
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| Competition | The uncooperative, aggressive conflict management style where one person attempts to dominate or force the outcome to his or her advantage.
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| Compromise | The conflict management style that assumes each party must give up something to get something; a shared solution to a conflict situation.
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| Computer-mediated communication (CMC) | Using computers to interact with others.
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| Concrete words | Low-level abstractions referring to specific objects, experiences, and relationships.
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| Conflict | The expressed struggle that occurs when interdependent parties (including group members) perceive incompatible goals or scarce resources and interference in achieving their goals.
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| Conformity | Following group norms and not deviating from them.
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| Conjunctive task | A type of group task where each member possesses information relevant to the decision, but no one member alone has all the needed information, thus requiring a high level of coordination among members.
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| Consensus decision | A choice that all group members agree is the best one that they all can accept.
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| Consultant | A nonparticipant observer who works with a group to determine what it needs, and then attempts to help by providing inputs, such as special techniques, procedures, and information.
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| Content analysis | An analysis of the content (topics, behaviors, specific words or ideas, fantasy themes, etc.) of a group's discussion.
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| Content-oriented listener | A listener who enjoys analyzing information, dissecting others' arguments; can be seen as overly critical.
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| Contingency approaches | The study of leadership that assumes the appropriate leadership style in a given situation depends on factors such as members' skills and knowledge, time available, the type of task, and so forth.
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| Control touches | Gentle, positive touching of another person in an effort to get that person's attention or request compliance.
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| Cooperative requirements | The degree to which members' efforts need to be coordinated for a group to complete its task successfully (see also Conjunctive task).
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| Criteria | Standards for judging among alternatives; may be absolute (must) or relative.
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| Critical thinking | The systematic examination of information and ideas on the basis of evidence and logic rather than intuition, hunch, or prejudgment.
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| Critique | Analysis and criticism of something, such as identification of strengths and weaknesses in a small group's process and interaction.
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| Cultural identity | The identification with and acceptance of a particular group's shared symbols, meanings, norms, and rules for conduct.
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| Culture | The patterns of values, beliefs, symbols, norms, procedures, and behaviors that have been historically transmitted to and are shared by a given group of persons.
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| Decision making | Choosing from among a set of alternatives.
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| Defensive listening | Thinking of how to defend some aspect of one's self-image while appearing to listen to what another is saying.
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| Democratic leader | An egalitarian leader who coordinates and facilitates discussion in a small group, encouraging participation of all members.
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| Designated leader | A person appointed or elected to a position as leader of a small group.
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| Deviate | A group member who differs in some important way, such as degree of participation, values, or opinions, from the rest of the group members; opinion or innovative deviates help groups examine alternatives more thoroughly by expressing opinions different from those held by the majority, thus forcing the group to take a closer look.
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| Dialect | A regional variation in the pronunciation, vocabulary, and/or grammar of a language.
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| Discussion (small group discussion) | A small group of people communicating with each other to achieve some interdependent goal, such as increased understanding, coordination of activity, or solution to a shared problem.
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| Disjunctive task | A type of group task in which members work on parts of the group problem independently, with little or no coordination of effort through discussion needed.
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| Distributed leadership | The concept that group leadership is the responsibility of the group as a whole, not just the designated leader; assumes all members can and should provide needed leadership services to the group.
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| Distributive approach | The approach to managing conflict that assumes there are fixed resources to distribute among parties to the conflict; thus, whatever someone wins, someone else loses.
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| Dogmatism | A tendency to hold rigidly to personal beliefs; closed-mindedness to evidence and reasoning contrary to one's beliefs.
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| Egalitarianism | Belief in the equality of all people, resulting in the preference for participation in problem solving by all group members rather than by just a few high-status members.
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| Electronic brainstorming (EBS) | Brainstorming on computers linked to a large screen that displays all responses without revealing the identities of their originators.
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| Emergent leader | Member of an initially leaderless group who, by virtue of information and communication competencies, rises from within the group to enact leadership functions and is viewed as the leader by all or most members.
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| Emoticon | Typographical symbols used in computer-mediated communication to convey emotions in regular text, such as the smiley face :-) .
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| Emotive words | Words that evoke specific emotions, connote more than they denote, and serve as triggers for recalling pleasant or unpleasant experiences.
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| Encounter phase | The phase in group socialization where members' expectations meet with the actual behaviors and member and group goals become negotiated.
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| Environment | The context or setting in which a small group system exists; the larger systems of which a small group is a component.
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| Ethics | The rules or standards that a person or group uses to determine whether conduct or behavior is right and appropriate.
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| Ethnocentrism | The belief that one's own culture is inherently superior to all others; tendency to view other cultures through the viewpoint of one's own culture.
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| Exit phase | The phase in group socialization where the group disbands or a member leaves and the group must adapt.
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| Extraversion-introversion dimension | The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(tm) dimension concerned with whether one's focus is the external world (extraversion) or one's internal, subjective landscape (introversion).
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| Fact | A verifiable observed event; a descriptive statement that is true.
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| Fallacy | A reasoning error.
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| False dilemma | Either-or thinking that assumes, incorrectly, that only two choices or courses of action are possible.
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| Fantasy | A statement not pertaining to the here and now of the group that offers a creative and meaningful interpretation of events, meeting a group's psychological or rhetorical need.
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| Fantasy chain | A series of statements by several or all group members in which a story is dramatized to help create a group's view of reality.
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| Fantasy theme | What the content of the dramatization of a fantasy or fantasy chain is about; the manifest theme is the overt, surface content, and the latent theme is the hidden, underlying meaning.
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| Faulty analogy | An incomplete comparison that stretches a similarity too far; assuming that because two things are similar in some respects, they are alike in others.
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| Feedback | A response to a system's output; it may come in the form of information or tangible resources and helps the system determine whether or not it needs to make adjustments in moving toward its goal.
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| Femininity (as applied to culture) | The quality of cultures that value nurturing and caring for others.
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| Focus group | A special group procedure that encourages freewheeling discussion focusing on a specific topic or issue, often used to analyze people's interests and values for market research.
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| Formation phase | The stage in the development of a group during which relationship issues predominate as members work out their relationships with each other.
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| Forum discussion | A large audience interacting orally, usually following some public presentation.
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| Functions approach | The study of functions performed by leaders; the theory that leadership is defined by the functions a group needs and can be supplied by any member.
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| Gatekeeper | Any member of a small group controlling who speaks during a discussion; any controller of the flow of messages among members.
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| Gender | Learned and culturally transmitted sex-role behavior of an individual.
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| Goal | The desired outcome a group works to achieve.
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| Group | Three or more people with an interdependent goal who interact and influence each other.
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| Group charter | A written document that describes the purpose of the group, its specific charge, area of freedom, membership, deadlines, and required output.
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| Group climate | A group's emotional and relational atmosphere.
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| Defensive climate | An atmosphere characterized by mistrust, in which members tear each other down.
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| Supportive climate | An atmosphere of respect, in which members feel valued and appreciated.
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| Group culture | The pattern of values, beliefs, and norms shared by group members, developed through interaction and incorporating members' shared experiences in the group, patterns of interaction, and status relationships.
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| Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) | (or group support systems (GSS)) Computer-based software and hardware systems designed to help groups improve a variety of group outcomes, such as creativity, problem solving, and decision making.
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| Grouphate | The feeling of antipathy and hostility many people have against working in a group, fostered by the many ineffective, time-wasting groups that exist.
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| Group polarization | The tendency for group members to make decisions that are more extreme (more risky or cautious) than they would make individually.
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| Group socialization | The process of learning to become part of a group, which involves reciprocal influence among members and between members and the group.
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| Groupthink | The tendency of some cohesive groups to fail to subject information, reasoning, and proposals to thorough critical analysis leading to faulty decisions.
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| Hidden antagonizer | An unintentional trigger word, not intended to offend, that does in fact provoke an emotional reaction.
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| High-context communication | Communication wherein the primary meaning of a message is conveyed by features of the situation or context instead of the verbal, explicit part of the message.
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| High-level abstraction | A word, phrase, or statement commonly used to refer to a broad category of objects, relationships, or concepts; typically refers to intangibles such as love, democracy, etc.
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| Idiosyncrasy credit | Additional leeway in adhering to group norms, given to a member for valuable contributions to the group.
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| Individualistic culture | A culture in which the needs and wishes of the individual predominate over the needs of the group.
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| Individual-level variables | Characteristics of the individual members of a group that affect the group's interaction, such as traits, attitudes, values, beliefs, and skills.
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| Inequity conflict | Conflict about perceived unequal workloads or contributions to the group effort.
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| Inference | A statement that includes more than a description of some event, thus going beyond fact; an inference involves some degree of uncertainty or probability and cannot be checked for accuracy by direct observation.
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| Input variables | The energy, information, and raw material used by an open system, which is transformed into output by throughput processes.
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| Integrative approach | The approach to managing conflict that assumes that solutions can be found to satisfy every party to the conflict.
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| Interaction | Mutual influence by two or more people through the communication process.
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| Intercultural communication | Interaction between and among individuals from different cultures or subcultures.
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| Interdependence | The property of a system such that all parts are interrelated and affect each other as well as the whole system.
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| Interdependent goal | An objective shared by members of a small group in such a way that one member cannot achieve the goal without the other members also achieving it.
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| Intracultural communication | Interaction between and among individuals from the same culture or subculture.
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| Intrinsic interest | Extent to which the task itself is attractive and interesting to the participants.
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| Intuitive problem solvers | People who size up a situation, then arrive at a solution without consciously following any perceptible procedure.
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| Kinesics | Study of communication through movements.
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| Laissez-faire leader | A do-nothing designated leader who provides minimal services to the group.
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| Leader | A person who uses communication to influence others to meet group goals and needs; any person identified by members of a group as leader; a person designated as leader by election or appointment.
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| Leader as completer | A leader who determines which functions or behaviors are most needed for a group to perform optimally, then supplies them or encourages others to do so.
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| Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) model | The leadership model based on the finding that supervisors develop different kinds of leadership relationships with their subordinates, depending on characteristics of both the leader and members.
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| Leadership | Influence exerted through communication that helps a group achieve goals; performance of a leadership function by any member.
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| Leadership emergence | The process by which someone emerges as the leader of an initially leaderless group in which all members start out as equals.
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| Learning group (study group) | A group conducting a learning discussion.
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| Least-sized group | The principle that the ideal group contains as few members as possible so long as all necessary perspectives and skills are represented.
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| Liaison | Communication between or among groups; interfacing; a person who performs the liaison function.
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| Listening | Receiving and interpreting oral and other signals from another person or source.
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| Low-context communication | Communication wherein the primary meaning of a message is carried by the verbal or explicit part of the message.
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| Maintenance functions | Relationship-oriented member behaviors that reduce tensions, increase solidarity, and facilitate teamwork.
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| Majority decision | Decision made by vote, with the winning alternative receiving more than half the members' votes.
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| Masculinity (as applied to culture) | The quality of cultures that value assertiveness and dominance.
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| Meeting notice | A written message providing the time, place, purpose, and other information relevant to an upcoming meeting.
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| Message | Either a set of signals from one person to others or interpretation/response of a listener to a set of signals.
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| Minutes | A written record of every relevant item dealt with during a group meeting, including a record of all decisions.
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| Moderator | A person who controls the flow of communication during a public presentation such as a panel or forum discussion.
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| Multiple causation | The principle that each change in a system is caused by numerous factors.
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| Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (tm) | A personality measure based on the work of Carl Jung that categorizes individuals on the basis of how they relate to the world around them.
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| Net conference | A meeting that is electronically mediated by networked computers.
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| Net generation | Individual born from 1977 to 1997; the first truly "wired" generation, comfortable with technology in all forms.
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| Noise | Interference in the communication process; can occur at any step in the process, from the sender's original encoding of the message to the receiver's decoding of it.
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| Nominal Group Technique | A special procedure in which group members brainwrite to generate ideas, then interact to pool, clarify, and evaluate these ideas until a solution has been accepted by weighted voting.
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| Nonsummativity | The property of a system that the whole is not the sum of its parts, but may be greater or lesser than the sum.
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| Nonverbal signals | Messages other than words to which listeners react.
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| Norm | An unstated informal rule, enforced by peer pressure, that governs the behavior of members of a small group.
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| Obstacle | Something that interferes or stands in the way of solving a problem, such as lack of information or resources, or attitudes of people who must support the solution.
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| Open system | A system with relatively permeable boundaries, producing a high degree of interchange between the system and its environment.
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| Output variables | Anything that is produced by the throughput processes of a system, such as a tangible product or a change in components of the system; in a small group, outputs are such things as reports, resolutions, changes in cohesiveness, and attitude changes in members.
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| Overgeneralizing | Assuming that because something is true about one or a few items, it is true of all or most items of the same type.
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| Panel discussion | A small group whose members interact informally and in impromptu manner for the benefit of a listening audience.
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| Paralanguage | Nonverbal characteristics of voice and utterance, such as pitch, rate, tone of voice, fluency, pauses, and variations in dialect.
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| Paraphrase | Restatement in one's own words of what one understood a speaker to mean.
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| Participant-observer | An active participant in a small group who is at the same time observing and evaluating its processes and procedures.
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| Passiveness | Nonassertive behavior that allows one's own rights and beliefs to be ignored or dominated, often to avoid conflict, even at the expense of good decision making.
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| People-oriented listener | A listener who is sensitive to others, nonjudgmental, and concerned about how his/her behavior affects others; can become distracted from task by others' problems.
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| Perceiving-judging dimension | The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(tm) dimension concerning how people organize the world; perceivers are spontaneous and flexible whereas judgers are decisive and sure.
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| Personal growth group | A group of people who come together to develop personal insights, overcome personality problems, and grow personally through feedback and support of others.
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| Phasic progression | The movement of a group through fairly predictable phases or stages, each of which is characterized by specific kinds of statements.
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| Population familiarity | The degree to which members of a group are familiar with the nature of a problem and experienced in solving similar problems or performing similar tasks.
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| Postmeeting reaction (PMR) form | A form, completed after a discussion, on which group members evaluate the discussion, the group, and/or the leader; PMR responses are usually tabulated and reported back to the group.
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| Power | The potential to influence behavior of others, derived from such bases as the ability to reward and punish, expertise, legitimate title or position, and personal attraction or charisma.
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| Power distance | The degree to which a culture emphasizes status and power differences among members of the culture; in low power-distance cultures, status differences are minimized, but in high power-distance cultures, they are highly emphasized.
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| Preference for procedural order | A trait characterized by need or desire to follow a clear, linear structure during problem solving and decision making.
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| Primary group | A group whose main purpose is to meet members' needs for inclusion and affection.
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| Primary tension | Tension and discomfort in members that stems from interpersonal (i.e., primary) sources, including the social unease that occurs when members of a new group first meet or during competition for power among members.
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| Principled negotiation | A general strategy that enables parties in a conflict to express their needs openly and search for alternatives that will meet the needs of all parties without damaging the relationship among parties.
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| Problem | The difference between what actually happens and what should be happening; components include an existing but undesired state of affairs, a goal, and obstacles to achieving the goal.
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| Problem census | A technique in which members of a small group are polled for topics and problems that are then posted, ranked by voting, and used to create agendas for future meetings.
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| Problem question | A question calling the attention of a group to a problem without suggesting any particular type of solution in the question.
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| Problem solving | A multistage procedure for moving from some unsatisfactory state to a more satisfactory one, or developing a plan for doing so.
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| Problem-solving group | A group that discusses to devise a course of action to solve a problem.
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| Procedural conflict | Conflict resulting from disagreement about how to do something.
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| Procedural Model of Problem Solving (P-MOPS) | A five-step general procedure, based on the scientific method, for structuring problem-solving discussions; P-MOPS is adaptable to any type of problem.
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| Production phase | The stage in the development of a group during which task concerns predominate after a group has reached some socioemotional maturity.
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| Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) | A procedure for planning the details to implement a complex solution that involves many people and resources.
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| Proxemics | The study of uses of space and territory between and among people.
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| Pseudolistening | Responding overtly as if listening attentively, but thinking about something other than what the speaker is saying.
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| Public interview | One or more interviewers asking questions of one or more respondents for the benefit of a listening audience.
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| Quality circle (quality control circle) | A group of employees meeting on company time to investigate work-related problems and to make recommendations for solving these problems.
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| Rating scale | A pencil-and-paper instrument to measure quantitatively some factor involved in a discussion.
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| Referent | Whatever is denoted by a symbol or statement.
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| Regulator | Nonverbal signal used to control who speaks during a discussion.
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| Rhetorical sensitivity | Speaking and phrasing statements in such a way that the feelings and beliefs of the listener are considered; phrasing statements so as not to offend others or trigger emotional overreactions.
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| RISK technique | A small group procedure for communicating and dealing with all risks, fears, doubts, and worries that members have about a new policy or plan before it is implemented.
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| Role | A pattern of behavior displayed by and expected of a member of a small group; a composite of a group member's frequently performed behavioral functions.
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| Rule | A statement prescribing how members of a small group may, should, or must behave, which may be stated formally in writing, or informally as in the case of norms.
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| Search engine | Software that lets you search the Internet using key words.
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| Secondary group | A group whose major purpose is to complete a task, such as making a decision, solving a problem, writing a report, or providing recommendations to a parent organization.
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| Secondary tension | Tension and discomfort experienced by group members that stem from task-related (i.e., secondary) sources, including conflicts over values, points of view, or alternative solutions.
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| Self-centered functions | Actions of a small group member, motivated by personal needs, that serve the individual at the expense of the group.
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| Self-managed work group | A small group of peers who determine within prescribed limits their own work schedules and procedures.
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| Self-monitoring | The extent to which someone pays attention to and controls his or her self-presentation in social situations; high self-monitors are able to assess how others perceive them and adapt their behavior to elicit a desired response.
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| Sensing-intuiting dimension | The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(tm) dimension concerned with the type of information individuals use; sensers prefer facts and figures whereas intuiters prefer to dream about possibilities.
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| Sex | Biologically determined femaleness or maleness.
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| Sidetracking | A poor listening habit whereby one group member spins off on a private reverie unrelated to what another group member has said, or whereby one group member moves the conversation in a direction completely different from what was being discussed.
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| Sign | A signal that has an inherent relationship with what it represents, such as a blush or scar.
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| Signal | Any stimulus a person can receive and interpret, including both signs and symbols.
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| Single Question format | A special procedure for structuring problem-solving discussions that facilitates critical thinking and systematic problem solving, but is more suitable for members low in preference for procedural order than more highly structured linear procedures.
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| Small group | A group of at least three but few enough members for each to perceive all others as individuals, who meet face-to-face, share some identity or common purpose, and share standards for governing their activities as members.
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| Small group communication | The scholarly study of communication among members of a small group, among two or more groups, and between groups and larger organizations; the body of communication theory produced by such study.
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| Small group discussion | A small group of people communicating with each other to achieve some interdependent goal, such as increased understanding, coordination of activity, or solution to a shared problem.
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| Social loafer | A person who makes a minimal contribution to the group and assumes the other members will take up the slack.
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| Social presence | The extent to which participants perceive that a communication medium is like face-to-face communication emotionally and socially.
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| Solution multiplicity | Extent to which there are many different possible alternatives for solving a particular problem.
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| Solution question | A question directed to a group in which the solution to a problem is suggested or implied.
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| Status | The position of a member in the hierarchy of power, influence, and prestige within a small group.
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| Ascribed status | Status due to characteristics external to the group, such as wealth, level of education, position, physical attractiveness, and so forth; status given on the basis of a member's input characteristics.
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| Earned status | Status earned by a member's valued contributions to the group, such as working hard for the group, providing needed expertise, being especially communicatively competent, and so forth; status that comes from performance during a group's throughput processes.
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| Structuration | The concept that a group creates and continuously re-creates itself through members' communicative behaviors; the group's communication both establishes and limits how the group develops.
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| Structure | Organization; arrangement of parts of a system; steps in a procedure.
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| Styles approach | The leadership approach that studies the interrelationship between leader style and member behaviors.
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| Substantive conflict | Conflict resulting from disagreements over ideas, information, reasoning, or evidence.
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| Symbol | An arbitrary, human-created signal used to represent something with which it has no inherent relationship; all words are symbols.
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| Symbolic convergence | The theory that humans create and share meaning through talk and storytelling, producing an overlapping (convergence) of private symbolic worlds of individuals during interaction.
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| SYMLOG | System for the Multiple-Level Observation of Groups, both a theory about member characteristics and effects on group interaction, and a methodology that produces a three-dimensional "snapshot" of a group at a given point in time.
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| Synectics | A special group technique that encourages members to use unusual analogies and metaphors to create innovative solutions to problems.
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| System | An entity made up of components patterned in interdependent relationship to each other, requiring constant adaptation among its parts to maintain organic wholeness and balance.
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| Systematic problem solvers | Organized problem solvers who follow a definite series of steps or sequence, such as those provided by P-MOPS.
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| System-level variables | Features or characteristics of the group as a whole, such as cohesiveness, interaction patterns, norms, roles, and so forth, that affect the group's interaction.
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| Task difficulty | Degree of problem complexity and effort required.
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| Task functions | Task-oriented member behaviors that contribute primarily to accomplishing the goals of a group.
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| Teambuilding | A set of planned activities designed to increase teamwork, cohesiveness, or other aspects of group performance.
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| Technical requirements | The degree to which the solution for a given problem is technically feasible or must meet standards of technical excellence.
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| Teleconference | A meeting of participants who communicate via mediated channels, such as television, telephone, or computer, rather than face-to-face.
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| Thinking-feeling dimension | The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(tm) dimension concerned with how individuals prefer to make decisions; thinkers are objective and fact based whereas feelers are subjective and emotion based.
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| Throughput variables | The actual functioning of a system, or how the system transforms inputs into outputs.
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| Time-oriented listener | A listener sensitive to time; may be impatient or try to move group prematurely to closure.
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| Trait | Relatively enduring, consistent pattern of behavior or other observable characteristic.
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| Traits approach | The approach to leadership that assumes leaders have certain traits that distinguish them from followers or members of a group.
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| Uncertainty avoidance | The degree to which members of a culture avoid or embrace uncertainty and ambiguity; cultures high in uncertainty avoidance prefer clear rules for interaction, whereas cultures low in uncertainty avoidance are comfortable without guidelines.
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| Variable | An observable characteristic that can change in magnitude or quality from time to time.
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| Verbal interaction analysis | An analysis of who talks to whom and how often during a discussion.
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| Vigilant Interaction Theory | The theory that suggests that group members not only must have expertise about a problem, but must also be knowledgeable about the process of problem solving, especially to ensure that all aspects of the problem have been examined and that the pros and cons of all the alternatives have been thoroughly assessed.
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| Virtual team | A group in which the members' interactions take place primarily through some combination of electronic systems, such as computers, telephones, and videoconferences, instead of face-to-face.
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| Worldview | One's beliefs about the nature of life, the purpose of life, and one's relation to the cosmos.
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| X generation | Individuals born from 1965 to 1976; key experience includes divorce on a massive scale.
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