In most organizations today, the greatest stress afflicts those working in groups: teams, task forces, and other units with special goals and purposes. Customary manners of management style and leadership largely fail to alleviate this stress. Olmstead's challenging new book shows why.^LRapid change is one reason. Extreme uncertainty is another. But the effects need not be so debilitating. This book argues that groups can be developed to resist stress and achieve effectiveness. Olmstead offers a conceptual framework and draws upon his own experiences-supported by the similar experiences of others who have worked in most types of organizations under various stressful conditions-to show how. He provides proven, practical means of analyzing, assessing, and improving your own leadership methods, and in doing so, bolstering your group's performance.

A 250-item annotated bibliography and lucid, readable style, this book is a straightforward, state of the art presentation of what leaders under stress need to know about themselves, and how to apply that understanding to the activities of the groups they lead.

JOSEPH A. OLMSTEAD is Vice President, Product Development, at the Vanguard Research Group, Columbia, S.C. He earned a doctorate in psychology from the University of Texas, and served as Senior Staff Scientist and Program Director at the Human Research Office of the George Washington University. Earlier, he was Chief of Training and Management Development at Eli Lilly and Co. Among his more than 50 papers, monographs, and technical reports is another book published by Quorum, Creating the Functionally Competent Organization (2002).