Group Dynamics Summary

Understanding Group Dynamics

Core Concepts

  • Groups are social systems with interacting individuals.
  • Group dynamics are forces resulting from member interactions.
  • Workers should recognize and use group dynamics for positive outcomes.
  • Inattention or misuse can be detrimental.
  • Groups can have harmful or helpful forces; familiarity with group dynamics helps avoid negative influences.

Communication and Interaction Patterns

  • Social interaction modifies behavior and attitudes.
  • Communication involves encoding, transmission, and decoding of symbols.
  • Patterns can be beneficial or harmful.
  • Workers should intervene to help achieve goals and satisfaction.
  • People communicate for various reasons, including understanding, persuasion, gaining/maintaining power, self-defense, provoking reactions, making impressions, maintaining relationships and presenting a unified image.
  • Workers should be aware of these reasons to understand patterns.
  • Selective perception: Screening messages to align with one's belief system, influenced by life positions, stereotypes, status, experiences, values.
  • Workers can develop a "third ear" to understand hidden meanings and effects.
  • Distortions in transmission include language barriers and noise.
  • Feedback is crucial to check understanding; it should be descriptive, timely, and tentative.

Communication Techniques

  • Hearing-Impaired: Face the person, speak normally, slowly, and clearly, minimize background noise, and look for cues of misunderstanding.
  • Visually Impaired: Offer assistance, introduce members, describe the room, avoid moving objects, speak directly, and give explicit instructions.

Interaction Patterns

  • Maypole: Leader-centered, communication from leader to member.
  • Round Robin: Members take turns talking.
  • Hot Seat: Exchange between leader and one member.
  • Free Floating: Group-centered, all members responsible for communicating.
  • Workers should facilitate group-centered patterns for increased interaction, morale, and commitment.
  • Factors influencing interaction: Cues/reinforcements, emotional bonds, subgroups, size/arrangement, power/status.
  • Emotional bonds: positive bonds increase interaction, negative bonds reduce it.
  • Interest alliances: Alignments based on emotional bonds.
  • Subgroups: natural formations, but intense attraction can be problematic.
  • Physical arrangement: Circular seating promotes interaction.

Principles for practice

  • Members are always communicating; assess and help members communicate effectively.
  • Communication patterns can be changed.
  • Members communicate for a purpose; clarify intentions through discussion.
  • There is meaning in all communication.
  • Messages are often perceived selectively.
  • Messages may be distorted in transmission; clarify communications.
  • Feedback enhances accurate understanding.
  • Open, group-centered communications are often preferred.

Group Cohesion

  • Cohesion results from forces acting on members to remain in the group.
  • Factors for attraction include:
    • Needs for affiliation, recognition, security
    • Incentives and resources (prestige, goals, activities)
    • Subjective expectations
    • Comparison to other group experiences
  • Cohesive groups satisfy needs, provide security, and offer incentives.
  • Continued attraction depends on comparing satisfaction levels to alternatives.
  • Attraction affects functioning: Task-oriented vs. Personal-oriented
  • Cohesive groups:
    • Maintain membership
    • Influence members more
    • Higher attendance
    • Shared responsibility
    • Positive effects on task accomplishment, satisfaction, and adjustment.

Enhancing Cohesiveness

  1. Promote open interaction via discussions and activities.
  2. Help members define and achieve their goals.
  3. Foster noncompetitive relationships.
  4. Develop group identity and purpose through intergroup competition.
  5. Compose groups that allow full participation.
  6. Help members identify and meet their needs within the group.
  7. Clarify and address members' expectations.
  8. Provide rewards, resources, status, or prestige.

Social Control Dynamics

  • Social control: Compliance and conformity enabling orderly function.
  • Too stringent controls can reduce attraction and lead to conflict.
  • Influenced by norms, roles, and status.

Norms

  • Shared expectations about appropriate behavior.
  • Result from valued and accepted behavior in the group.
  • Clarified through rewards and punishments.
  • Vary in binding extent, elasticity, and saliency.
  • Stabilize and regulate behavior, increasing predictability and security.
  • Deviation can challenge old tasks and move groups in new directions.
  • Workers should ensure norms are beneficial.

Changing Norms

  • Unfreezing: Disequilibrium via crisis or tension.
  • Freezing: Return to equilibrium with new norms.
  • Refreezing: Stabilizing new equilibrium.

Ways to change norms:

  1. Discussing, diagnosing, altering
  2. High-status member intervention
  3. Respond to influences from the external environment.
  4. Hiring a Consultant
  5. Worker/members deviate and adapt to change.

Roles

  • Shared expectations about individual functions.
  • Allow division of labor and appropriate power use.
  • Changes best undertaken by discussion during the group's discussions.

Status

  • Evaluation and ranking of each member's position, varying by group.
  • Determined by prestige, position, expertise, and behavior.

Functions:

  • Low-status: Least likely to conform.
  • Medium-status: Conform to retain/gain status.
  • High-status: Conform initially, later deviate due to position.
  • Hierarchies changed by adding/removing members or group discussion.

Influence Social Control Dynamics

  1. Assess the norms, roles and statues and determine if they are helping the group meet its goals.
  2. Structure is needed to establish control dynamics
  3. Don't be too restrictive, members need to exercise their own judgement.
  4. Make the group feel that it is important to each member.
  5. Make sure each member feels that the group goals are important.
  6. Workers should consider the incentives for members to participate
  7. Asses whether that members are being rewards fairly.

Group Culture

  • Common values, beliefs, customs, and traditions.
  • Emerges slowly in diverse groups; quicker in homogeneous groups.
  • Influenced by the environment (agency, community, society).
  • Groups addressing community needs interact with their environment.

Developing Positive Culture

  1. Bring positive attitudes and values to the group.
  2. Workers should help members identify and understand values.
  3. Workers should help members eliminate stereotypical ways of relating to each other.
  4. Address value conflicts between members.
  5. Workers should emphasize positive behaviors.
  6. Workers should consider that the members socio-economic needs are being met.

Stages of Group Development

  • Stages are periods or degrees in growth and development.
  • Social structure, communication, cohesion, controls, and culture evolve.
  • Models:
    • Bales (1950): Orientation, Evaluation, Control.
    • Tuckman (1963): Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning.
    • Northen (1969) Planning & Orientation, Problem Solving, Termination.
    • Sarri & Galinsky (1985): Origin, Emergence, Development, Strong Feelings, Decline, Pretermination, Termination.
  • Empirical evidence suggests stages exist but vary across groups.