Games designed for teaching can also be used as diagnostic devices to spot weaknesses in the organization chart and as potent research tools into the dynamics of group behavior.
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References
1.
Validity data on the ATGSB are available from Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey.
2.
Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey.
3.
Hoffman and O'Mara originally computed an influence index suggested by Katz (4). This weights second-order and higher-order influence relationships according to the probability, a, that higher-order links will in fact be used. It is a more sophisticated measure than the one we finally decided on, but it was not feasible to estimate the a in Katz's equations empirically, or to choose a single value of a on a priori grounds that would yield solutions to Katz's equations for all the teams.
4.
In using the Carnegie game with five-man teams from our Program for Executives we were most successful in establishing formal divisions of work among functional specialties than we were playing the IBM game with five-man teams. (The executives were free to organize themselves as they pleased, and they did not have to report to boards of directors.) It is not clear in the executive runs of the Carnegie game, though, that hierarchical relations were any stronger than they were in runs of the IBM game. The chief executive did have a more substantial agenda planning and coordinating job to do.
5.
The intercorrelations between scores for the same men on the ATGSB and the aptitude section of the GRE are in the .7 to .9 range in studies that we have done at Carnegie.
6.
Ghiselli and Lodahl (3) report a high correlation between skewness in the distribution of certain traits among group members and group effectiveness; a finding which seems supportive of the one reported here.
7.
CohenK. J., “The Carnegie Tech Management Game,”Journal of Business, October, 1960.
8.
FestingerL.SchachterS.BackK., Social Pressures in Informal Groups (Harper, New York, 1950).
9.
GhiselliE. E.LodahlT. M., “Patterns of Management Traits and Group Effectiveness,”Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, July, 1958, Vol. 57, No. 1.
10.
KatzL., “A New Status Index Derived from Sociometric Analysis,”Psychometrica, March, 1953, Vol. 18, No. 1.