Maintaining interpersonal continuity of experience is a process by which groups ensure that new information is available to members who require it. Groups and organizations continuously encounter new information. Sometimes this information is encountered by a single member (or subset of the group), who may have to redistribute it to other members for it to be useful to the group as a whole. Redistribution is conceptualized as a collaborative activity where members recall past episodes during group discussion, thereby creating shared knowledge. Discourse data from an observational study of groups managing a simulation show that redistribution takes place mainly at the outset of meetings. Members with different perspectives on new information participate differently in the redistribution process. Outgoing members (the possessors of new information) initiate a majority of references to the preceding meeting, and contribute the most memories. Incoming (previously inactive) members also participate in redistribution by focusing recall and contributing information of their own from earlier meetings. Redistribution is a dynamic process that evolves in the course of interaction.
Albert, S. , & Kessler, S. (1976). Processes for ending social encounters: The conceptual archaeology of a temporal place. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 6, 147-170.
2.
Albert, S. , & Kessler, S. (1978). Ending social encounters. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14, 541-553.
3.
Allport, F. (1961). The contemporary appraisal of an old problem. Contemporary Psychology, 6, 195-196.
4.
Arrow, H. , McGrath, J. E., & Berdahl, J. L. (2000). Small groups as complex systems: Formation, coordination, development, and adaptation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
5.
Bangerter, A. (2000). Identifying individual and collective acts of remembering in task-related communication. Discourse Processes, 30, 237-264.
6.
Bangerter, A. , Cranach, M. von, & Arn, C. (1997). Collective remembering in the communicative regulation of group action: A functional approach. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16, 365-388.
7.
Carley, K. (1992). Organizational learning and personnel turnover. Organization Science, 3, 20-46.
8.
Carter, S. M. , & West, M. A. (1998). Reflexivity, effectiveness, and mental health in BBC-TV production teams. Small Group Research, 29, 583-601.
9.
Cicourel, A. V. (1990). The integration of distributed knowledge in collaborative medical diagnosis. In J. Galegher, R. E. Kraut, & C. Agido (Eds.), Intellectual teamwork: Social and technological foundations of cooperative work (pp. 221-242). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
10.
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11.
Clark, H. H. , & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127-149). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
12.
Clark, H. H. , & Schaefer, E. F. (1989). Contributing to discourse. Cognitive Science, 13, 259-294.
13.
Cranach, M.von, Ochsenbein, G. , & Valach, L. (1986). The group as a self-active system: Towards a theory of group action. European Journal of Social Psychology, 16, 193-230.
14.
Edwards, D. , & Middleton, D. (1986). Joint remembering: Constructing an account of shared experience through conversational discourse. Discourse Processes, 9, 423-459.
15.
Engeström, Y. , Brown, R., Engeström, R., & Koistinen, K. (1990). Organizational forgetting: An activity-theoretical perspective. In D. Middleton & D. Edwards (Eds.), Collective remembering (pp. 139-167). London: Sage.
16.
Fine, G. A. , & Elsbach, K. D. (2000). Ethnography and experiment in social psychological theory building: Tactics for integrating qualitative field data with quantitative lab data. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 51-76.
17.
Fleiss, J. L. (1981). Statistical methods for rates and proportions. New York: Wiley.
18.
Gauron, E. F. , & Rawlings, E. I. (1975). A procedure for orienting new members to group psychotherapy. Small Group Behavior, 6, 293-307.
19.
Gersick, C. J. G. (1988). Time and transition in work teams: Toward a new model of group development. Academy of Management Journal, 31, 9-41.
20.
Gersick, C. J. G. , & Hackman, J. R. (1990). Habitual routines in task-performing groups. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 47, 65-97.
21.
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in public. New York: Harper & Row.
22.
Goodwin, C. (1987). Forgetfulness as an interactive resource. Social Psychology Quarterly, 50, 115-130.
23.
Gruenfeld, D. H. , & Hollingshead, A. B. (1993). Sociocognition in work groups: The evolution of group integrative complexity and its relation to task performance. Small Group Research, 24, 383-405.
24.
Habermas, T. , & Bluck, S. (2000). Getting a life: The emergence of the life story in adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 748-769.
25.
Hinsz, V. B. , Tindale, R. S., & Vollrath, D. A. (1997). The emerging conceptualization of groups as information processors. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 43-64.
26.
Hirst, W. , & Manier, D. (1996). Remembering as communication: A family recounts its past. In D. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past: An overview of autobiographical memory (pp. 271-289). New York: Cambridge University Press.
27.
Hollingshead, A. B. (1998). Distributed knowledge and transactive processes in decision-making groups. In E. A. Mannix, M. A. Neale, & D. H. Gruenfeld (Eds.), Research on managing groups and teams (Vol. 1, pp. 105-125). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
28.
Huber, G. P. (1991). Organizational learning: the contributing processes and the literatures. Organization Science, 2, 88-115.
29.
Kenny, D. A. , & La Voie, L. (1984). The social relations model. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 18, pp. 142-182). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
30.
Larson, J. R. , & Christensen, C. (1993). Groups as problem-solving units: Toward a new meaning of social cognition. British Journal of Social Psychology, 32, 5-30.
31.
Larson, J. R. , Christensen, C., Franz, T. M., & Abbott, A. S. (1998). Diagnosing groups: The pooling, management, and impact of shared and unshared case information in team-based medical decision-making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 93-108.
32.
Levine, J. M. , & Moreland, R. L. (1999). Knowledge transmission in work groups: Helping newcomers to succeed. In L. L. Thompson, J. M. Levine, & D. M. Messick (Eds.), Shared cognition in organizations: The management of knowledge (pp. 267-296). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
33.
Maxis Software (1993). Sim city user’s manual.
34.
Middleton, D. (1997). Conversational remembering and uncertainty: Interdependencies of experience as individual and collective concerns in teamwork. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16, 389-410.
35.
Moreland, R. L. (1999). Transactive memory: Learning who knows what in work groups and organizations. In L. L. Thompson, J. M. Levine, & D. M. Messick (Eds.), Shared cognition in organizations: The management of knowledge (pp. 3-31). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
36.
Moreland, R. M. , & Levine, J. M. (1988). Group dynamics over time: Development and socialization in small groups. In J. E. McGrath (Ed.), The social psychology of time (pp. 151-181). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
37.
Price, J. L. (1989). The impact of turnover on the organization. Work and Occupations, 16, 461-473.
38.
Resnick, L. B. , Levine, J. M., & Teasley, S. D. (Eds.). (1991). Perspectives on socially shared cognition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
39.
Schegloff, E. A. , & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8, 289-327.
40.
Seltzer, M. M. (1988). Reunions: Windows to the past and future. American Behavioral Scientist, 31, 644-653.
41.
Thompson, L. , & Fine, G. A. (1999). Socially shared cognition, affect, and behavior: A review and integration. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 278-302.
42.
Tschan, F. , Semmer, N. K., Nägele, C., & Gurtner, A. (2000). Task adaptive behavior and performance in groups. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 3, 367-386.
43.
Wegner, D. M. (1995). A computer network model of human transactive memory. Social Cognition, 13, 319-339.
44.
Wittenbaum, G. M. , & Stasser, G. (1996). Management of information in small groups. In J. L. Nye & A. M. Brower (Eds.), What’s social about social cognition? Research on socially shared cognition in small groups (pp. 3-28). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
