SUMMARY—Teams of people working together for a common purpose have been a centerpiece of human social organization ever since our ancient ancestors first banded together to hunt game, raise families, and defend their communities. Human history is largely a story of people working together in groups to explore, achieve, and conquer. Yet, the modern concept of work in large organizations that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is largely a tale of work as a collection of individual jobs. A variety of global forces unfolding over the last two decades, however, has pushed organizations worldwide to restructure work around teams, to enable more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses to the unexpected. This shift in the structure of work has made team effectiveness a salient organizational concern. Teams touch our lives everyday and their effectiveness is important to well-being across a wide range of societal functions. There is over 50 years of psychological research—literally thousands of studies—focused on understanding and influencing the processes that underlie team effectiveness. Our goal in this monograph is to sift through this voluminous literature to identify what we know, what we think we know, and what we need to know to improve the effectiveness of work groups and teams. We begin by defining team effectiveness and establishing the conceptual underpinnings of our approach to understanding it. We then turn to our review, which concentrates primarily on topics that have well-developed theoretical and empirical foundations, to ensure that our conclusions and recommendations are on firm footing. Our review begins by focusing on cognitive, motivational/affective, and behavioral team processes—processes that enable team members to combine their resources to resolve task demands and, in so doing, be effective. We then turn our attention to identifying interventions, or ‘‘levers,’ ’ that can shape or align team processes and thereby provide tools

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Information Processing and Leadership: A Review and Implications for Application In the current paper, contemporary research that has examined the role of information processing in the context of leadership is reviewed and the implications of this research for application are discussed. Although the vast majority of the leadership literature has focused on external and observable outcomes, such as a leader’s behaviors, the current paper takes an alternative perspective, reviewing literature that has examined leadership from an information processing vantage point. In contemplating the utility of this perspective, consider for a moment the following questions: How does a subordinate decide whether his/her supervisor is a leader? Why does an organizational supervisor punish one subordinate for poor performance but not another? Why does a supervisor utilize a particular behavioral style? As the literature reviewed throughout this paper shall indicate, the answer to each of these questions lies in developing a better understanding of how leaders and subordinates process information. To provide an organizational framework, the present paper is divided into three main sections. In the first portion of this paper, a working definition of leadership and information processing are provided. Next, relevant literature dealing with a leader’s information processing is reviewed, and finally, relevant literature dealing with follower information processing is discussed. Defining Leadership and Information Processing As a starting point, leadership is conceptualized as a social process, one involving both a