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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

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

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

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