Gersick, Connie J. "Time and Transition on my work in teams : looking
back on a new model of group development" In P. J. Frost & Re.
E. Stablein, Doing Exemplary organizational research. Newbury Park Sage
52-64.
This paper is her ruminations on what made her group work research so
successful.
She started by watching project teams for the duration (graduate students
on a group project). Teams established certain patterns and stuck to them.
She built some theories on team transitions and proceses from these observations.
She found a consistent "midpoint transition".
Then she wrote a technical report on her observations and folded it into
here doctoral dissseration. She continued her pursuit of group dynamics.
After struggling for a few months to find project team access she got four
teams. This time she was more systematic in documenting the talking in
meetings. A numbering and summary system reduced near verbatim transcripts
into lists. When the teams finished their projects, she interviewed the
members.
Lather she contemplated her summaries and tried to make it more conceptual.
Initially she was attacked for her qualitative stance on the study (didn't
measure performance). After she accpeted a position at UCLA she started
trying to make a paper out of her dissertation. Her first submission got
a revise and resubmit, saying her findings were not clear and she did not
really have a theory.
Later she connected puncutated equilibrium with the group work. Still,
the revised work was rejected by one top journal but accepted with more
revisions by AMJ. She learned that theory generating was not normal science.
Also, without a theoretical context findings aren't of much use to people.
Looking back, she saw that graduate school provided her the time to take
on a big,open question and pursue it with exploratory, qualitative field
methods to enabled her to make a new discovery. A dissertation is an opportunity
to do "special" research.
Her research was not theory centered but problem centered. She was not
a devotee of group literature.