I was waiting for my wife at the dentist, and right before she came out, I glance to my left, across the courtyard (on the same 3rd floor as me), the attached photo shoot was occurring. So I pulled out my cellphone to catch this. The photographer had three front and one back light setups, for the four people standing in a shaded area. After checking, he tore the diffusers off the lights. Does anyone think that this was overkill for this four person grouping? I am assuming it was for a magazine promo or something of that nature as they did not have uniforms on, and at one point one of the males left and they took more photos. But what a detailed setup, and why?

I can't tell what models of lights he's using, but I suspect they are fairly low powered. Notice that he has two of them ganged up to act as his main light. I do that too with my "location" lights, because they are only about 320 watt seconds each. One reason for the lower power is that I have the option to use batteries with them, when there is no power available. Maybe that's the case with his lights, too.

His arrangement actually looks a lot like what I've used over the years: a main light (two lights ganged), a fill light to the other side, then a light in the rear. He appears to be using the rear light for rim lighting the subjects... I'll sometimes do that, other times use it to illuminate a background. I also have fifth light that I sometimes put on a boom above the subject for a hair light.

Probably the earlier response is right... that he's using the lighting to have more complete control. By reducing his exposure so that the lights become the dominant light source it gives him a lot more control than if he tried to mix it with ambient light or just use ambient light alone. Saves a lot of time later in post-processing.

This is actually a fairly simply lighting setup. A friend of mine did a lot of high-end architectural photography in the past. Most of his jobs paid 5 figures and some paid 6. He traveled a lot and would show up with a van full of lighting gear and sometimes spend 6 or more hours just setting up the lighting in a large, complicated interior. He even had boxes of bulbs to replace all the existing ones in fixtures at the location, in order to have correct color match. That was back when he was shooting film (large format). Today with digital he's been able to simplify it quite a bit more, but still spends more time setting up shots than actually taking them.

Executive head shots for use in annual reports, on websites and elsewhere can be good paying gigs. That might be what's happening here.