Transcript Group Process - University of Missouri–Kansas City

Major Objectives of the Course
 Discover there is a long standing and valuable body of ideas
and theory about effective teams that speak directly to the action
skills of team leadership.
 Gain some keen insights about the nature of the leadership
challenges in teams. I hope you have come to realize, for
example, that leadership in teams is learning to set the right
conditions for effective team performance, that leadership
does not have to reside in single individuals. Leadership in
smart, self-managed teams is more about circuits of influence
and patterns of skillful interactions among members than
leadership" traits" that reside in a single, appointed “leader.”
 Realize a valid diagnosis about group problems and challenges
requires knowing how to ask the right questions and design
effective interventions. Bad questions lead to a faulty diagnoses.
Faulty diagnoses and we try to fix the wrong things
A Helpful Distinction:
between
“Group Social Processes”
and
“Content of What a Group
Does”
Groups operate on two levels
 Content: an overt conscious level
that focuses on task, what a group
does
 Social Group Processes: a more
implicit level, HOW the group is
functioning.


Task processes—how groups accomplish their work
Maintenance processes—how groups meet psychological
and relationship needs
Content: the "business at hand, "
the subject matter, the concrete
examples:
 The literal or data/facts relevant to the
problem being handled
 The content of what folks say (what it
“means” to others is part of the process)
 Quantifiable measures of performance
 Measurable outcome statements
 Formal structure of authority
By contrast……PROCESS is:
 Often dynamic and fluid, and for the
untrained, sometimes difficult to follow.
The Creation of a Norm
 We Seek Out Others for Social
Comparison
Ambiguous,
confusing
circumstance
How should I
act?
Psychological
reactionarousal
Increase in
affect
(emotions)
Uncertainty
Need for
information
Comparison
with others
Establis
ha
norm
WHEW! NOW I KNOW WHAT I SHOULD DO
Social comparison: gaining information from other people’s reactions
(Festinger, 1954)
Norms
a group's unspoken rules:
generally agreed-on informal
rules that guide all members'
behavior in the group. Norms
represent shared ways of
viewing the world, and as a
result, become terms for
membership.
Norms come from groups
 Fundamental human need to belong to social groups.
 We learn that survival and prosperity is more likely if




we live and work together.
To live together, we need to agree on common
beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors that reduce
in-group threats; act for the common good.
We thus learn to conform to rules of other people.
And the more we see others behaving in a certain
way or making particular decisions, the more we feel
obliged to follow suit.
This will happen even when we are in a group of
complete strangers. We will go along with the others
to avoid looking we don’t know what to do.
Norms, if codified
Become formal rules of proper
conduct. However, in most
instances, norms are adopted
implicitly as people align their
behaviors during the group
formation process until
consensus about appropriates
actions emerges.
Examples of Process




Who talks to whom and who listens to whom?
Use of space
“Handshake"
How roles are filled or not filled? task vs.
maintenance
 How the patterns of influence evolve, their nature and
how informal leadership responds to formal authority
 Tacit norms
 Groups sometimes are explicit about how they will
decide; often a decision making methodology just
evolves as a function of process.
Examples of Group Social Processes
 Social facilitation
 Group think
 Loafing
 Risk taking and polarization
The Very Presence of Others Effects
Our Behavior
Social Facilitation
When we have tasks which we find
relatively easy, we find the presence of
other people a positive stimulus such
that we perform even better. However,
when the tasks are difficult, we find the
audience unnerving and we are more
likely to put in a worse performance.
Social Facilitation
 Michaels et al. (1982)
 2 groups of subjects
categorized as good
or bad players
 Unobtrusive
observation
 2 conditions: play with
vs without audience
 Results?
Example of “Field Research”
Watched pool players at the university union to observe
social facilitation.
 Good pool players, who made an average of 71% of
their shots when playing alone, increased
performance to 80% when a group of 4 people began
watching them.
 Average pool players, who made about 36% of their
shots when playing alone, decreased to about 25%
shots made when 4 people started watching them.
Micheals, J. W., Blommel, J. M., Brocato, R. M., Linkous, R. A., & Rowe, J. S.
(1982). Social facilitation and inhibition in a natural setting. Replications in Social
Psychology, 2, 21-24.
Should you play pool in public?
% Shots Made
Good players
Bad players
No Audience
Audience
Group Level of Analysis
Groups can “have a life of
their own.”
Tuckman’s stages as
example
Performing
Task
Norming
Storming
Adjourning
Forming
What Methods Do Researchers Use to Measure Individual and
Group Processes?
 Observational
measures: observing
and recording events

Qualitative and
quantitative
(structured) measures

Bales's
Interaction
Process Analysis
(IPA) classifies
behaviors into
two categories:
task and
relationship
behaviors
What Methods Do Researchers Use to
Measure Individual and Group Processes?
 Self-report measures: group members
describe their perceptions and experiences
 Example: Moreno's sociometry method
USING PATTERNS OF INFLUNCE TO
DEFINE LEADERSHIP
Two “groups”; same members
 Group A: Who influences the group the
most?
 Group B: Who influences you the most?
Patterns of interdependency
 All relationships to some extent have
interdependencies
 Mutually beneficial
What Are Communication Networks?


Types: three, four, five person
Centralized vs. decentralized
Social Loafing
Why Do People Loaf in Groups?
VS
Group Papers
“Hate ‘em”
“Hey prof, why should she get
the same grade as I when she
loafed her way thru.”
Social Loafing Theory: Modification
of Social Facilitation Theory
 The tendency for people to do worse on
simple tasks but better on complex tasks
when they are in the presence of others and
their individual performance cannot be
evaluated.
Social Loafing
 Tendency to reduce effort when pooling effort
toward a common goal and when group
members are not individually accountable.
 Decreases when tasks are challenging or
appealing, and when fellow group members
are friends (as opposed to strangers) and can
be held accountable.
Social Loafing
 Williams
and Karan (1985):
 Task Difficulty (easy or hard maze)
 Type of evaluation (individual vs collective)
 Time to solve maze
Time to Complete Maze
Social Loafing
.6
.4
Individual
Evaluation
.2
0
Collective
Evaluation
-.2
-.4
-.6
Easy
Difficult
Group Decision Making
Group Think:

The tendency for members of highly cohesive
groups to assume that their decisions can’t be
wrong, that all members must support the group’s
decision strongly, and that contrary information
should be ignored
Group Decision Making
 Causes of Group Think:
 Cohesiveness
 Emergent group norms
 Norms suggesting that the group is moral and infallible
 Biased Processing of Information
 Groups motivated to find reasons to support their views
rather than seeking truth and accuracy
 Groups Often Fail to Pool Information
 Focus on Information all members already know
 Devil’s Advocate Technique and Authentic Dissent
ameliorate such tendencies
Group Polarization
 Originally dubbed the “risky

shift”
The risky shift is the tendency for group
decisions to be riskier than the average
decision of the individuals in the group.
Group Decision Making
 Basic Nature of Group Polarization:

Group polarization is the tendency of group
members to shift toward more extreme positions
After Group Discussion
Before Group Discussion
+
Neutral
Views Held by Group Members
-
+
Neutral
Views Held by Group Members
-
Group Polarization
 Why?
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Group discussion leads you to hear more
information.
Active participation in a discussion leads you
to “rehearse” your thoughts leading to more
attitude change.
Safer to provide more extreme answers once
the normative opinion of the group has been
determined.
Social Group Processes
Observing and understanding
process can lead to a more
complete understanding of what
is really going on.