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A longitudinal study of 390 students in 64 Practical Organizational Behavior Education (PROBE) project teams was conducted on the effects of intragroup diversity and student diversity-management skills. The impact of gender, age, and nationality variables on student grades, cognitive processes, perceptions of team effectiveness, and satisfaction were examined. Although the PROBE method places emphasis on the development of teamwork skills, the study found that students were disadvantaged in their grade performance and other outcomes depending on the type of group to which they were assigned and their particular position within the group.

This design involves having students create actual companies and focuses all classroom attention on the interpersonal processes of managing a small group. This article describes modifications made to Nirenberg's model that were stimulated by feedback from our culturally diverse student body. Our modifications and innovations include: (a) providing "thought starters" to help students evaluate their course experiences, (b) changing the method of selecting group leaders, (c) requiring a business plan for the project, (d) requiring teams to develop a performance appraisal and feedback system for assessing members, (e) adding the use of textbooks, and (f) using several team-building activities during the semester.

Diversity is an increasingly important factor in organizational life as organizations worldwide become more diverse in terms of the gender, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, and other personal characteristics of their members. The exact impact of within-group diversity on small group processes and performance is unclear. Sometimes the effect of diversity seems positive, at other times negative, and in other situations, there seems to be no effect at all. In this article, we suggest that these types of findings might be explained by using a "group-development" model to examine the impact of diversity on group processes and performance. Our model uses concepts from Jackson et al.'s (1995), Milliken and Martins' (1996), and other models, as well as our own concepts, to show how diversity affects group development and performance. Among the concepts included in the model are readily detectable personal attributes, underlying personal attributes, cognitive paradigm dissimilarity, cognitive costs and rewards, diversity management skills, group behavioral integration, and cognitive performance resources. In the pages that follow, we will explain each of the components of the model and suggest specific hypotheses generated from the model.

The need for a unified, cross-level (organization, work group, individual employee) model of organizational downsizing has been suggested by several authors (e.g., Kozlowski et al., 1993). The definition of downsizing, in terms applicable only at the organization level, prevents researchers from developing a more cohesive view of the interactive impact of downsizing for the organization, work groups, and individuals. In this paper, we define downsizing more broadly as a constellation of stressor events centering around pressures toward work force reductions which place demands upon the organization, work groups, and individual employees, and require a process of coping and adaptation. This stress-based view of downsizing allows researchers to develop concepts to guide research on downsizing that are more broadly applicable across levels of analysis. To show the advantages of this stress-based view of downsizing, this paper uses concepts from the stress coping literature to identify a set of critical dependent variables that should be studied in downsizing research. We argue that these variables are applicable for organization, group, and individual employee-level research.

Evaluations of new methods of teaching Organizational Behavior (OB) usually rely on course ratings collected at the end of the semester. This article discusses the need for more rigorous designs for assessing teaching innovations, and proposes evaluating OB courses on the basis of change in self-ratings of managerial competencies. Selfratings of managerial competencies and a more sophisticated evaluation design are used to compare the Practical Organizational Behavior Education (PROBE) method to the lecture/tutorial method of delivering of OB material. PROBE produces greater perceived managerial skill learning than lecture/tutorial delivery for females, younger students, students with little work experience, and students from Western cultures. The discussion points out how incorrect conclusions might have been reached about the relative effectiveness of the two methods had a less sophisticated evaluation design been used.

This study examines the effects of educational specialty and nationality faultline strength on the team processes of task-relevant information sharing and social interactions and subsequent team performance using data from 308 individuals working in 50 student project teams. We found that educational specialty faultline strength negatively predicted task-relevant information sharing, and that nationality faultline strength negatively predicted off-task social interactions. Furthermore, task-relevant information sharing enhanced team performance and heightened identity salience. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.