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

Group Performance: Problems and Solutions

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

Communicating Information and Utilizing Expertise

Information Sharing and Biased Sampling

• 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

Information Processing and Transactive Memory

• 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