Task Interdependence as a Moderator of the Relation Between Group Control and Performance

Data were collected from the managers of 77 groups in a large service organization and a large manufacturing organization. The results revealed that the relation between group control over decision making and group performance became more positive with increased levels of task interdependence. The main implication of the findings is that increasing group control over decisions may result in high performance only for groups that are highly task interdependent. The performance of groups that are low in task interdependence may suffer when provided with group-level control of decisions.