| Sumario: | Work can be designed to require the efforts of several people working interdependently toward a group reward, or to require the effort of one person working independently toward an individual reward. A third possibility is to combine elements of both interdependent and independent work and group and individual rewards. An experiment was conducted in which group, individual, and hybrid rewards were created for 150 existing teams of Xerox Corp. service technicians having group, individual, or hybrid tasks to perform. Groups performed best when their tasks and outcomes were either of an entirely group nature or an entirely individual nature. Hybrid groups' performances were quite poor, interactions were of low quality, and member satisfaction was low. The interdependence of task and outcome affected different aspects of group functioning, with tasks influencing variables related to cooperation and outcomes influencing variables related to effort.
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