Chapter Eight: Group Processes
Fundamentals of Groups
What is a group?
- Group: A set of individuals who have direct interactions with each other over a period of time and share a common fate, identity, or set of goals
- Collectives: People engaging in a common activity but having little direct interaction with each other
- People tend to identify more strongly with more integrated, coherent groups and to get more satisfaction from them
- Ppl in western cultures are more likely to define and identify with groups based on what members do
- Ppl in eastern cultures are more likely to define and identify with groups based on how the group members relate to each other
Why join a group?
- Humans have an innate need to belong to groups
- Evolutionary pressures: ppls chances of survival and reproduction increased when they lived in groups rather than in isolation
- Social Brain Hypothesis: We have large brains in order to socialize
- Social Identity Theory: A large part of ppls feelings of self-worth comes from their identification with particular groups
Key Features of Groups: Roles, Norms, and Cohesiveness
- Once an individual has joined a group, a process of adjustment takes place as the individual is socialized to how things work in the group
- Explicit: Initiation / orientation, mentoring, documentation
- Implicit: Newcomers observe how established members behave
Roles
- Set of expected behaviors
- Formal Roles: Roles designated by titles
- Informal Roles: Less obvious, unstated roles
- Instrumental Role: Helps the group achieve its tasks
- Expressive Role: Provides emotional support and maintains morale
- Groups function better when members are assigned roles that best match their talents and personalities
- Group members are sometimes uncertain about what their roles are supposed to be
- Role uncertainty, instability, and conflict are associated with poorer job performance
- Group members can become so absorbed in their role that they lose themselves
Norms
- Rules of conduct for group members
- Formal Norms: Written, explicit rules
- Informal Norms: More subtle norms. figuring out the unwritten rules of a group can take time and cause anxiety
- Groups often exert strong conformity pressures on individuals who deviate from group norms
Culture
- Cultures vary in how much they tolerate behavior that deviates from the norm
- Tight Cultures: Strong norms and little tolerance for behavior that deviates from the norm
- Greater ecological and historical threats, higher population density, and more restrictive governments encourage the formation of tight societies
- Loose Cultures: Relatively weaker norms, greater tolerance for deviant behavior
- More likely to thrive in environments that have fewer historical and ecological threats
- Allows individuals to behave according to their own discretion
Cohesiveness
- Forces exerted on a group that push its members closer together
- Members of cohesive groups tend to feel commitment to the group task, feel positively toward the other members, and feel group pride
- Groups whose members share similar attitudes and closely follow the groups’ norms are more likely than other groups to be cohesive
- When a group is cohesive, group performance improves
Culture and Cohesiveness
- Collectivist Cultures
- Cohesiveness is associated more with social harmony, cooperation
- Respect and obedience to leaders is more important
- Individualistic Cultures
- Recognizing member’s unique skills and perspectives is essential for group cohesiveness
- More comfortable with conflict and debate among their members
Individuals in Groups: The Presence of Others
Social Facilitation: When Others Arouse Us
- The Zajonc Solution
- The presence of others creates general psychological arousal, which energizes behavior
- Increased arousal enhances an individual’s tendency to perform the dominant response
- Dominant Response: Reaction elicited most quickly and easily by a given stimulus
- The quality of an individual’s performance varies according to the type of task
- Easy Task: One that is simple or well learned
- The dominant response is usually correct or successful
- Difficult Task: One that is complex or unfamiliar
- The dominant response is often incorrect or unsuccessful
- Social Facilitation: A process whereby the presence of others enhances performance on easy tasks but impairs performance on difficult tasks
- Evaluation Apprehension Theory: Performance will be enhanced or impaired only in the presence of others who are in a position to evaluate that performance
- Distraction-Conflict Theory: Being distracted while we’re working on a task creates attentional conflict
- We’re torn between focusing on the task and glancing at the distracting stimulus
- When we’re conflicted about where to pay attention, our arousal increases
Social Loafing: When Others Relax Us
- Individuals exert less effort when they act collectively
- Individuals demonstrated poor coordination when working together
- Social Loafing: Group-produced reductions in individual output
- Sharing responsibility with others reduces the amount of effort that people put into more complex motor tasks
- Reducing social loafing
- Limit the scope of the project - break complex projects down into smaller components
- Keep the groups small
- Use peer evaluations
- Cyberloafing: A form of social loafing at the workplace that involves personal non-work use of online technology
- Huge drain on workers’ productivity
- Collective Effort Model: Individuals will try hard on a collective task when they think their efforts will help them achieve outcomes they personally value
- Less likely to socially loaf
- May even engage in social compensation
- Social Compensation: Increasing one’s efforts on collective tasks to try to compensate for the anticipated social loafing or poor performance of other group members
Culture and Social Loafing
- Less prevalent among women than among men
- Less prevalent among ppl from collectivist cultures
- They are still tempted to socially load if they’re working in a group that has established a group norm of low productivity and effort
Deindividuation
- The loss of a person’s sense of individuality and the reduction of normal constraints against deviant behavior
- Collective phenomenon that occurs primarily in the presence of others
- Caused by: arousal, anonymity, and reduced feelings of individual responsibility
- Environmental cues that make deviant behaviors more likely to occur
- Accountability Cues: Effect the individual’s cost-reward calculations
- When accountability is low, those who commit deviant acts are less likely to be caught and punished
- Ppl may deliberately choose to engage in gratifying but usually inhibited behaviors
- ex: being in a large crowd, wearing a mask
- Attentional Cues: Cues that focus a person’s attention away from the self
- People act on impulse
- Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE): A model of group behavior that explains deindividuation effects as the result of a shift from personal identity to social identity
Losses and Gains in Groups
- Process Loss: Reduction of group productivity due to problems in the dynamics of a group
- Some types of group tasks are more vulnerable to process loss than others
Additive Tasks
- The group product is the sum of all the members’ contributions
- ex: donating to a charity, making noise at a pep rally
- Ppl often indulge in social loafing during additive tasks, which creates process loss
- Each member’s contribution may be less than it would’ve been if that person had worked alone
- Group performs less than its potential
Conjunctive Tasks
- The group product is determined by the individual with the poorest performance
- ex: mountain-climbing teams
- The weakest link determines their success or failure
- Group performance on conjunctive tasks tends to be worse than the performance of a single average individual
Disjunctive Task
- The group product is determined by the performance of the individual with the best performance
- ex: trying to solve a problem / develop a strategy
- The more people involves, the more likely it is that someone will make a breakthrough
- Group processes can interfere with coming up with ideas and getting them accepted, resulting in process loss
Process Gain
- On some kinds of tasks, groups can show process gain
- Process Gain: Groups outperform even the best members
- Also known as synergy
- Groups often perform better than the best individuals on tasks in which
- The correct answer is clearly evident to everyone in the group once it’s presented
- The work on the task can be divided up so that various subgroups work on different aspects of the task
Brainstorming
- A technique that attempts to increase the production of creative ideas by encouraging group members to speak freely without criticizing their own or others’ contributions
- Developed by Alex Osborn in the 50s
- Groups can generate more and better ideas than could individuals working alone
- Can be effective, but individual brainstorming is more effecting
- People brainstorming in a group underperform
Making Brainstorming More Effective
- Alternating types of brainstorming sessions
- Training people in effective brainstorming
- Giving the group a subset of categories to begin the brainstorming process
- Using a trained facilitator during brainstorming sessions
- Giving groups more time
Electronic Brainstorming
- Using technology to allow groups to brainstorm
- Can help groups brainstorm more effectively
- Combines the freedom of working alone and not having to wait their turns with the stimulation of seeing others’ ideas
Group Polarization
- Group Polarization: The exaggeration through group discussion of initial tendencies in the thinking of group members
- Persuasive Arguments Theory: The greater the number and persuasiveness of the arguments to which group members are exposed, the more extreme their attitudes become
Groupthink
- An excessive tendency to seek concurrence among group members
- Concurrence: Agreement or uniformity
- Emerges when the need for agreement takes priority over the motivation to obtain accurate information and make appropriate decisions
- Highly cohesive groups are more susceptible to groupthink
- Groups that are composed of ppl from similar backgrounds and isolated from other people are particularly likely to fall prey to groupthink
- Stressful situations can provoke groupthink
Preventing Groupthink
- Groups should consult widely with outsiders
- Leaders should explicitly encourage criticism and not take a strong stand early on in the discussion
- Subgroups should separately discuss the same issue
- A member should be assigned to play devil’s advocate
- A second chance meeting should be held to reconsider the group decision before taking action
- Biased Sampling: A group may fail to consider important information that is not common knowledge in the group
- Commonly shared info is likely to be socially validated by the group, making it more easily remembered and trusted
- Validation also makes group members more confident in discussing and reiterating these pieces of info
- Communication Network: Defines who can speak with whom based on a group’s structure
- Conditions where biased sampling is less likely to occur
- Leaders who encourage a lot of group participation
- Group members had to make a plan of when and how they would review alternatives before settling on their ultimate decision
- Groups are even more susceptible to bias than individuals
- Transactive Memory: Helps groups remember more info more efficiently than individuals
- Process loss
- Social loafing
- Groups may not distribute the tasks and roles among group members in a rational or efficient manner
- Groups that develop good transactive memory systems have enormous advantages over other groups
- Transactive Memory: A shared system for remembering info that enables multiple people to remember info together more efficiently than they could do so alone
- Group must develop a division of knowledge
- Members must be able to communicate and remember this info in the group
- Group members must be able to trust each other’s specialized knowledge
- Group members need to coordinate their efforts so they can work together on a task smoothly and efficiently
Goals and Plans in Groups
- Groups, like individuals, tend to perform better on a task when they have specific, challenging, and reachable goals
- Groups are most likely to benefit when there are incentives in place for achieving these goals
- Group members can hold each other accountable and encourage each other to keep trying to achieve a goal
- If a group doesn’t make a good, specific plan, it can fail to utilize the expertise that various group members have
- Without the specific planning, the individuals’ expertise wasn’t used properly
- Group Support Systems: Programs that help remove communication barriers and provide structure and incentives for group discussions and decisions. helps groups avoid groupthink
Virtual Teams / Dispersed Teams
- Can be especially vulnerable to some of the factors that harm traditional groups bc of
- Physical distances between members
- Little interaction they have with one another
- Harder time building cohesiveness and keeping membership stable
- Offsetting these problems
- Directories should be available and updated
- Frequent teleconferencing sessions and occasional short visits to allow dispersed group members to spend some time together
Culture and Diversity
- Diversity is often associated with negative group dynamics
- Miscommunications and misunderstandings are more likely to arise among heterogenous group members
- Cliques and conflicts often form in diverse groups, causing some group members to feel alienated
- Positive effects of diversity on patterns of socialization, creativity, and the complexity and inclusiveness of group discussion
- Multicultural groups perform better if their members or leaders have relatively high cultural metacognition
- Cultural Metacognition: Awareness of their own and others’ cultural assumptions
- Multicultural Engagement: Adapting and learning about new cultures
Collective Intelligence: Are Some Groups Smarter Than Others?
- Factors that predict collective intelligence:
- Average social sensitivity of group members
- Tendency to allow the various group members to take turns participating in the discussion
- A higher proportion of women
- Women have higher social sensitivity than men
Conflict: Cooperation and Competition Within and Between Groups
Mixed Motives and Social Dilemmas
- The individual can gain something by pursuing their self-interests, but if everyone in the group pursues self-interests, all of the group members will ultimately be worse off than if they had cooperated with each other
- In a social dilemma, what is good for one is bad for all
- If everyone makes the most self-rewarding choice, everyone suffers the greatest loss
- Prisoner’s Dilemma
- Resource Dilemmas: Dilemmas concerning how two or more ppl share a limited resource
- Commons Dilemmas: If ppl take as much as they want of a limited resource that doesn’t replenish itself, nothing will be left for anyone
- Public Goods Dilemmas: All of the individuals are supposed to contribute resources to a common pool
- Individuals who tend to feel that they can’t depend on others were significantly more likely to cooperate on a social dilemma if they received a dose of oxytocin
- Collectivists tend to cooperate more when dealing with friends or in-group members but compete more aggressively when dealing with strangers or out-group members
- People with a prosocial, cooperative orientation seek to maximize joint gains or achieve equal outcomes
- Those with an individualist orientation seek to maximize their own gain
- People with a competitive orientation seek to maximize their own grain relative to that of others
- Groups tend to be more competitive than individuals in mixed-motive situations
- Harder to establish trust between groups
- Members of a group feel that they are more anonymous than if they act alone
- Large groups are more likely to exploit scarce resources than small ones are
Negotiation
- Both sides often have the opportunity to reach an integrative agreement
- Integrative Agreement: Both parties obtain outcomes that are superior to a 50-50 split
- Communication in which both sides disclose their goals and needs is critically important in allowing each side to see opportunities for joint benefits
Culture and Negotiation
- An individualistic perspective emphasizes direct communication and confrontation
- A collectivist perspective emphasizes more indirect communication and a desire to avoid direct conflict
- Individualistic negotiators may emphasize rationality
- Collectivistic negotiators have a greater tolerance of contradiction and emotionality
- Relationship building is an important part of the negotiation process among Chinese
- Individualists tend to prefer to make compromises and concessions toward the end of a negotiation
- Collectivists may prefer to begin with generous concessions and gradually reduce their concessions later
- Negotiations across cultures can be challenging because the participants have different ways of performing these dances
Finding Common Ground
- Recognition of a superordinate identity is one way to establish common ground between groups in conflict
- When group members perceive that they have a shared identity across group boundaries and interactions between the groups often become more peaceful