Chapter 11
Groups
What the Chapter Covers
This chapter marks a change in focus from the eight that precede it, all of which deal with individual characteristics or individual processes. Here the focus shifts to the primary collective unit of organisations; the group. Nevertheless, since groups are made up of individuals and, to some extent, the characteristics of a group are influenced by the individual characteristics of its members, there are clear connections with the preceding chapters. The matters covered in the chapter are:
- the concept of group
- the types of group that are encountered in organisations
- why groups are so important to their members
- the organisational and personal functions that groups perform
- the process of group formation and development
- the effects of the context in which a group develops on its characteristics
- some of the characteristics of mature groups
- group cohesiveness and the factors that influence this attribute
- decision making in groups
- group effectiveness and what this expression can be taken to mean
- relations between groups
- groups and job design
The chapter closes with an overview section which pulls together all the foregoing material and traces some of the implications for managing groups in organisations. In addition to the ten learning outcomes for the chapter set-out at its start, it has two interconnected themes that emerge and re-emerge throughout the chapter.
- That when an individual becomes a member of a group, he or she surrenders the right to be completely idiosyncratic, and learns to restrict his or her patterns of behaviour to those that are in line with the norms of the group. Thus bringing people together into groups, unleashes extremely potent social forces, that militate against giving free reign to individuality.
- Since a group sometimes seems to have a life of its own, with its own goals and norms of behaviour, it is by no means inevitable that a group is always an entity that works in favour of achieving organisational aims and objectives. Indeed, unless the goals that a group has for itself are the same as those that an organisation has for it, there are times when it may well seem to be working against the organisation.
New Concepts Introduced in Chapter
Adjourning: the final stage of a group's existence, in which it is disbanded
Altercasting: the process of tacit negotiation between a role occupant and senders, about behaviour which is acceptable to both
Ambassadors: group members who represent a group with other groups
Command Group: permanent groups of people, all under a single manager who perform like activities
Enacted Role Problems: inappropriate role behaviour
Environmental Factors (groups): characteristics of a group's environment that influence its degree of cohesiveness
Expected Role Problems: a clash between role sender and role occupant about the content of their respective roles
Forming: the first stage in a group's development, in which it is essentially a collection of individuals
Formal Groups: groups brought into existence by the structure of an organisation
Group Cohesiveness: the attractiveness of a group to its members together with their desire to retain membership
Group Factors: characteristics of a group and its members that affect its degree of cohesiveness
Group Norms: the rules of behaviour adopted by the members of a group
Groupthink: impaired decision making by a group, which occurs because the desire for unanimity overrides examining the consequences of a decision
Guardians: group members who shield it from external pressure
Norming: the third stage of a group's development, in which ground rules for its ways of functioning begin to emerge
Organisational Factors (groups): organisational features that influence a group's cohesiveness
Perceived Role Problems: a misinterpretation by a role occupant, of a role sender's expectations
Performing: the final stage of a group's development, in which it becomes capable of effective functioning
Risky Shift: the tendency of groups to make riskier decisions than their members would as individuals
Role: a set of expectations and obligations to act in a specific way in certain contexts
Role Ambiguity: the role occupant is unsure of the requirements of his/her role
Role Conflict: a clash between the different sets of role expectations
Role Expectations: the role occupant's expectations about what the role entails
Role Senders: individuals who have behavioral expectations of a role occupant
Role Set: the total of all role senders for a given role
Scouts: group members who maintain contact with its environment and import information
Semiautonomous Work Groups: self managed teams that have a high degree of responsibility for their own work activities
Socio-emotive (Group Maintenance) Leader: the person who ensures that group members have their social needs catered for
Sociotechnical Systems Approach: an approach to work design in which the people and the technical system (and the relationships between them) are accorded equal importance
Soft goals: those that are more subjective and qualitative in nature, open to interpretation and whose achievement is much harder to evaluate that employees think about themselves and what they do so that they willingly subscribe to management’s aims
Storming: the second stage of a group's development, which is characterised by interpersonal conflict
Task Groups: temporary formal groups formed for a specific short-term purpose
Task Leader: the person who occupies the role concerned with ensuring a group completes its task
Team: a strongly task-orientated formal group
Teamworking: the current name for use of semi-autonomous work groups
Time Out Exercises: Hints for Completing
Exercise on page 322: Group Membership
With this exercise you should try to be very clear about the groups on which you will focus. You
should also identify specific group functions, and try to resist the temptation to answer questions
with a simple yes or no.
Question 1
Here it is useful to re-examine the six formal functions of a group given on page 321 of the textbook and then ask yourself how many of these are facilitated by the existence of the formal group.
Question 2
Having identified whether the formal group facilitates formal functions, now ask yourself whether it is totally concerned with task achievement, or whether one or more of the five informal functions are fulfilled as well.
Questions 3 and 4
After having answered 1 and 2 these should be relatively straightforward.
Exercise on page 325: Group Norms
Groups that you might identify are: a workgroup in an employment situation, a group where the members live together; a group that often works together on assignments or presentations; a group that meets socially in the evening or at weekends.
Question 1
For a group that lives together, you could ask yourself questions about domestic arrangements such as cleaning, cooking, use of the TV etc. For a working group, either in an employment situation or at college try asking yourself whether it has evolved rules about such matters as fair shares of work, or when it meets to tackle work etc. For a social group ask yourself whether it has evolved norms about such matters as where it meets, or punctuality.
Questions 2 and 3
Answers are usually fairly easy to derive if the first question has been answered. The trick here can be to focus on the second part of question 1 and concentrate on what happens if one of the rules of the group is broken.
Exercise on page 337: Group Roles
Question 1
Although there are three roles are mentioned in the text (see page 335), there are many others such as:
Peacemakers: those who resolve internal disputes;
Jokers:those who provide humour or relieve tension;
Sages:people acknowledged to be knowledgeable and wise.
Questions 2 and 3
Here you could try asking yourself some very specific questions such as: what do you seem to do more of in the group, than most of the other people; or what do you do as part of the group that nobody else seems to do?
Question 4
The aim here is to determine whether the group has a task leader and a socio-emotive leader. To do this try asking yourself:
Task Leader: if there is a job to be done by the group, who usually takes the lead, or who does the group expect to take the lead?
Socio-Emotive Leader: is there someone in the group who tends to make sure that nobody’s feelings get trampled on?
Question 5
This is usually fairly easily identified if you ask yourself how people in the group get to hear about things that affect them.
Question 6
This is usually answered quite readily, but if you experience a problem try asking yourself whether there has there been an occasion when one member of the group did something that seemed to offend everybody?
Exercise on page 339: Cohesiveness
If the previous exercise has been undertaken and the same group is used for this one, answers usually flow quite readily.
Question 1
Here the trick is often to focus your attention on the definition of cohesiveness given on page 337 and ask yourself whether both criteria are satisfied.
Questions 2 and 3
These are usually easily answered, but much will depend on whether you focus on a task group, or one that mainly exists for social purposes.
Question 4
Here you could ask yourself whether the group ever comes into conflict with other groups, and if so what happens? Another useful question you could ask yourself is whether it is easy for newcomers to become part of the group.
Exercise on page 347: Group Effectiveness
This exercise requires consideration of the same group that was used for the previous two time outs. If these have been completed, the exercise usually runs fairly smoothly, particularly if all three exercises are considered in the same session.
Question 1
Here it can be useful to start by focusing your attention to the two criteria given on pages 344 and also your answers to the previous two exercises.
Question 2
Much will depend on whether the group is a task group or a social group. As such, it can sometimes be useful to re-examine your answers to questions in earlier exercises to examine the basic reason for the group’s existence.
Question 3
One way to answer this is to compare your perceptions of yourself with perceptions of other people.
Question 4
Again this is best tackled by discussing the matter with other people, but be sure that you all focus on the same specific incident.
Supplementary Illustrative Materials
In addition to the OB in Action features in this chapter of the book, given below are two more that you might find useful. The first is associated with the material on page 320-321 of the chapter. It illustrates the point that although the current emphasis on teamworking could have a number of advantages to organisations, it is not a panacea that solves all problems.
OB in Action: Not the Answer to Everything
Like most off-the-shelf recipes for success, teamworking has been eagerly embraced in management circles and to question the superiority of the team concept over other ways of working can be regarded as heresy, if not downright stupidity. However, according to David Butcher of Cranfield Management School the cracks are beginning to show, and senior managers on both sides of the Atlantic are starting to become disillusioned with the results of teamworking initiatives.
Conventional wisdom has it that teams are so successful at coordinating individual effort that a group becomes more than the sum of its parts and so in appropriate circumstances, a well functioning team is likely to make a significant contribution to efficiency and effectiveness. However, so fashionable is the teamworking idea that teams have become the latest management ‘must have’, and it is assumed that that just having them automatically delivers performance improvements. An additional problem is that senior managers often have very fixed stereotypes about what an effective team is, and how it should work. They usually envisage a group in which every member is highly committed to its goals, they work closely with each other most of the time, are open and honest with each other and share in decision making. Thus anything that does not conform to this stereotype is assumed not to be working properly.
Butcher points out that in most organisational situations this prescription is highly impractical and so managers need to be much more selective and flexible in their approach to teams. For example, if one or two people can carry out a task successfully by only meeting when necessary, why bother to involve a whole team; all that happens is another frustrating meeting that wastes time. A prime example of this can be the ‘cross-functional team’, which has become popular as a coordinating mechanism in flexible, delayered organisations. In order to allow everyone to have their say, a team is sometimes so large that it is extremely difficult to bring everyone together and when it does meet, because people come from very diverse organisational backgrounds, they probably see the same problem in different ways. Thus communication is difficult and the group can fragment into cliques based on functional specialisms. Butcher also points out that rather than being formally established by an organisation, some of the most successful teams are those that spring into existence informally, because their members are enthused by a problem, and feel a strong need to solve it.
For these reasons Butcher urges managers to be more cautious about embracing the teamworking idea. It is not suitable for every task, and for those tasks that it is, teams need to be set specific outcomes to achieve and allowed to find their own most appropriate ways of achieving these goals.
SOURCESCaulkin, S (2000) Kick off the tired old team dream, The Observer, 2 July; 9
Butcher, D and C Bailey (2000) Crewed awakenings, People Management, 3 August; 35-37
The second OB in Action feature is connected with what is covered on pages 344 of the chapter and illustrates the idea that there is no universal recipe for ensuring group effectiveness. Thus a contingency approach, in which careful consideration is given to member competencies and the composition of a group could prove the most fruitful.
OB in Action: Effective Groups and Teams – A Contingency Perspective
While it is well recognised that effective groups or teams are composed of individuals who bring a diversity of different, but complementary skills and competencies to the group, recent research shows that high performing teams also have key competencies of a collective nature. Thus an important issue is whether these collective competencies are the same for all successful groups. This matter is addressed in a research project undertaken jointly by Crane Davies, a human resource consultancy and Cranfield School of Management.
The research has so far examined a wide variety of high-performing teams, ranging from football teams through groups in organisations to jazz groups and interim results suggest that there are two important drivers for team success: development of task capability and sustaining an appropriate psychological climate. These are influenced by four important clusters of collective competence: enabling, resourcing, fusing and motivating.
Although all successful teams need all four of the different competence clusters, the relative importance of each one varies according to the context in which the group operates. Different contexts call for different types of team, and the key factors that differentiate the contexts are: the degree of structure in the team’s task; the stability of the team’s membership. This gives four different contexts and four types of team:
High Task Structure and Stable (unchanging) membership- e.g the sports team
High Task Structure and Unstable (changeable) membership – e.g. a project team or task force
Low Task Structure and Stable membership – e.g. a senior management team, or board of directors
Low Task Structure and Unstable membership – virtual teams
Each of these contexts produces a set of circumstances that a team or group has to cope with to be successful, which requires a different balance of the four collective competencies. In effect this means that there is no universal recipe for a high performance team. Therefore a contingency approach to team development and functioning may be required in order foster the collective competencies (group processes and characteristics) appropriate to the context.
SOURCE:Finn, R, T Mills and S Tyson (2000) United notions, People Management, 20 July; 37-39
Useful Sources of Additional Material
For those who enjoy exploring study materials on the internet, given below are a number of potentially useful websites that give further information on the topics and issues covered in the chapter.
An extremely useful and encyclopedic website maintained by Monash University, Australia for its Open Learning courses. It covers virtually every branch of psychology and has cross-links to many other websites, bibliographies and other sources of material. Very good coverage of groups and group dynamics.