This study follows the idea that the key to understanding team meeting effectiveness lies in uncovering the microlevel interaction processes throughout the meeting. Ninety-two regular team meetings were videotaped. Interaction data were coded and evaluated with the act4teams coding scheme and INTERACT software. Team and organizational success variables were gathered via questionnaires and telephone interviews. The results support the central function of interaction processes as posited in the traditional input-process-output model. Teams that showed more functional interaction, such as problem-solving interaction and action planning, were significantly more satisfied with their meetings. Better meetings were associated with higher team productivity. Moreover, constructive meeting interaction processes were related to organizational success 2.5 years after the meeting. Dysfunctional communication, such as criticizing others or complaining, showed significant negative relationships with these outcomes. These negative effects were even more pronounced than the positive effects of functional team meeting interaction. The results suggest that team meeting processes shape both team and organizational outcomes. The critical meeting behaviors identified here provide hints for group researchers and practitioners alike who aim to improve meeting success.

Research on humor in organizations has rarely considered the social context in which humor occurs. One such social setting that most of us experience on a daily basis concerns the team context. Building on recent theorizing about the humor-performance link in teams, this study seeks to increase our understanding of the function and effects of humor in team interaction settings. We examined behavioral patterns of humor and laughter in real teams by videotaping and coding humor and laughter during 54 regular organizational team meetings. Performance ratings were obtained immediately following the team meetings as well as at a later time point from the teams' supervisors. At the behavioral unit level within the team interaction process, lag sequential analysis identified humor and laughter patterns occurring above chance (e.g., a joke followed by laughter, followed by another joke). Moreover, humor patterns triggered positive socioemotional communication, procedural structure, and new solutions. At the team level, humor patterns (but not humor or laughter alone) positively related to team performance, both immediately and 2 years later. Team-level job insecurity climate was identified as a boundary condition: In low job insecurity climate conditions, humor patterns were positively related to performance, whereas in high job insecurity climate conditions, humor patterns did not relate to team performance. The role of job insecurity as a boundary condition persisted at both time points. These findings underscore the importance of studying team interactions for understanding the role of humor in organizations and considering team-level boundary conditions over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Demographic shifts challenge organizations to qualify employees across all career stages and to ensure the transfer of company-specific knowledge between experienced and young workers. Human resource development programs for employees from different generations may help address these challenges. However, there is a lack of insight into what types of knowledge employees in intergenerational training groups acquire from one another, and how these learning processes differ at different time points. Over a span of three years, we conducted 31 interviews at an automobile company involving young (16-19 years) and experienced participants (41-47 years) of a full-time intergenerational learning program and their instructors. Our findings show that both generations possess distinct expert, practical, social, and meta-cognitive knowledge, and that they exchange different types of knowledge at different time points. We integrate these findings into a phase model of intergenerational learning comprising three phases: (1) familiarization, (2) assimilation, and (3) detachment. Our results suggest that intergenerational learning should be conceptualized as a bidirectional process with different foci of mutual knowledge exchange across different temporal phases. To facilitate intergenerational learning, instructors should adapt their teaching methods to employees' phase-specific needs and find ways to systematically map older and younger employees' specific knowledge contents.