Leadership communication during group resource dilemmas

A resource dilemma is a circumstance in which an aggregate of people share a slowly replenishing resource pool out of which each person can harvest for her or his own use. Successful management of a resource pool demands adequate leadership, but the content of leadership-relevant communication and its relationship with group performance and group members' perceptions of their experience has not been examined. In a study of 97 experimental simulations of a group resource dilemma, procedural leadership and three types of substantive leadership (information giving, initiating, and evaluating) were consistently, although weakly, associated with total group harvesting and/or with participant judgments relevant to group cooperation.