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Clients with a drink problem tend to be demanding, and it is difficult, given the time constraints of the job, to meet their needs purely by one-to-one work. The author describes three years experience of specialist group work in her team, links this to other available help, and demonstrates what is possible in a medium-sized town with very limited resources.

This naturalistic study focuses on problem talk (PT) in hospital management group meetings. The study aims to understand how PT constitutes the hospital organization through the different uses of PT within the meetings, and, therefore, to understand the organizing role of these meetings. The communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective forms the theoretical background of the research. The results of the qualitative analysis show that PT comprises many intertwined tasks that aim to perform the meetings, enhance problem solving, and maintain the relational level of group life. Thus, PT is much more than merely solving problems. In PT, problems are discussed from the viewpoints of the group and the organization. Meetings as an institution and as a nonhuman agent affect organizing because they influence both the group's communication and organizational processes. Future research on groups should develop the use of the CCO concept of nonhuman agency.

Many scientific, educational, business, military, and political groups assume that people who solve problems in groups and teams will solve subsequent problems better as individuals than people without previous group problem-solving experience. In order to assess such group-to-individual transfer, sets of three people solved four letters-to-numbers decoding problems as groups (G) or individuals (I) in five conditions: GGGG, GGGI, GGII, GIII, or IIII. Results supported four hypotheses: (a) groups performed better than individuals, (b) positive group-to-individual transfer occurred, (c) one group experience was sufficient for transfer, (d) transfer was at the level of group performance (complete) on problems 2 and 3 but incomplete on problem 4, due to exceptional performance in the GGGG condition.

Many scientific, educational, business, military, and political groups assume that people who solve problems in groups and teams will solve subsequent problems better as individuals than people without previous group problem-solving experience. In order to assess such group-to-individual transfer, sets of three people solved four letters-to-numbers decoding problems as groups (G) or individuals (I) in five conditions: GGGG, GGGI, GGII, GIII, or IIII. Results supported four hypotheses: (a) groups performed better than individuals, (b) positive group-to-individual transfer occurred, (c) one group experience was sufficient for transfer, (d) transfer was at the level of group performance (complete) on problems 2 and 3 but incomplete on problem 4, due to exceptional performance in the GGGG condition.

This article summarizes over 10 years of research on the effects of disjunctive versus conjunctive and multistage versus single-stage problem solving in a classroom setting. By a comparison of real classroom work triads with nominal groups, it is shown that the real triads perform at the level of four-member nominal groups on conjunctive tasks but are not superior on disjunctive tasks. Group participation has a demonstrable effect on individuals: persons working in groups are less likely to drop out of class and tend to give higher subjective ratings of motivation to learn the materials, to perform better on independent tests of classroom material, to know more classmates at the end of the course, and to score higher on the Raven's Progressive Matrices Test than students who do not work in groups.

International audience ; Many scientific, educational, business, military, and political groups assume that people who solve problems in groups and teams will solve subsequent problems better as individuals than people without previous group problem-solving experience. In order to assess such group-to-individual transfer, sets of three people solved four letters-to-numbers decoding problems as groups (G) or individuals (I) in five conditions: GGGG, GGGI, GGII, GIII, or IIII. Results supported four hypotheses: (a) groups performed better than individuals, (b) positive group-to-individual transfer occurred, (c) one group experience was sufficient for transfer, (d) transfer was at the level of group performance (complete) on problems 2 and 3 but incomplete on problem 4, due to exceptional performance in the GGGG condition.

According to the diversity-beats-ability theorem, groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers (Hong and Page 2004). This striking claim about the power of cognitive diversity is highly influential within and outside academia, from democratic theory to management of teams in professional organizations. Our replication and analysis of the models used by Hong and Page suggests, however, that both the binary string model and its one-dimensional variant are inadequate for exploring the trade-off between cognitive diversity and ability. Diversity may sometimes beat ability, but the models fail to provide reliable evidence of if and when it does so. We suggest ways in which these important model templates can be improved.