Chapter 9 Foundations of Group Behavior Page
CHAPTER 9
Foundations of Group Behavior
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, students should be able to:
9-1. Distinguish between the different types of groups.
9-2. Describe the punctuated-equilibrium model of group development.
9-3. Show how role requirements change in different situations.
9-4. Demonstrate how norms exert influence on an individual’s behavior.
9-5. Show how status and size differences affect group performance.
effectiveness.
9-7. Contrast the strengths and weaknesses of group decision making.
INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
Instructors may wish to use the following resources when presenting this chapter.
Text Exercises
Myth or Science?: “Gossip and Exclusion Are Toxic for Groups”
An Ethical Choice: Using Peer Pressure as an Influence Tactic
MyLab Management
oPersonal Inventory Assessment: Communicating Supportively
oWatch It!: Witness.org: Managing Groups and Teams
oTry It!: Group Behavior
Career OBjectives: Can I Fudge the Numbers and Not Take the Blame?
Point/Counterpoint: More Innovative
Questions for Review
Experiential Exercise: Surviving the Wild: Join a Group or Go it Alone?
Ethical Dilemma: Is It Okay to Violate a Psychological Contract?
Text Cases
Case Incident 1: The Calamities of Consensus
Case Incident 2: Intragroup Trust and Survival
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Instructor’s Choice
This section presents an exercise that is NOT found in the student’s textbook. Instructor’s
Choice reinforces the text’s emphasis through various activities. Some Instructor’s Choice
activities are centered on debates, group exercises, Internet research, and student
experiences. Some can be used in class in their entirety, while others require some
additional work on the student’s part. The course instructor may choose to use these at
any time throughout the class—some may be more effective as icebreakers, while some
may be used to pull together various concepts covered in the chapter.
Web Exercises
and ideas for researching OB topics on the Internet. The exercises “Exploring OB Topics
on the Web” are set up so that you can simply photocopy the pages, distribute them to
your class, and make assignments accordingly. You may want to assign the exercises as
an out-of-class activity or as lab activities with your class.
Summary and Implications for Managers
We can draw several implications from our discussion of groups. First, norms control
behavior by establishing standards of right and wrong. Second, status inequities create
frustration and can adversely influence productivity and willingness to remain with an
organization. Third, the impact of size on a group’s performance depends on the type of
task. Fourth, cohesiveness may influence a group’s level of productivity, depending on
the group’s performance-related norms. Fifth, diversity appears to have a mixed impact
on group performance, with some studies suggesting that diversity can help performance
and others suggesting it can hurt it. Sixth, role conflict is associated with job-induced
tension and job dissatisfaction. Specific implications for managers are below:
Recognize that groups can dramatically affect individual behavior in
organizations, to either positive or negative effect. Therefore, pay special attention
to roles, norms, and cohesion—to understand how these are operating within a
group is to understand how the group is likely to behave.
To decrease the possibility of deviant workplace activities, ensure that group
norms do not support antisocial behavior.
Pay attention to the status aspect of groups. Because lower-status people tend to
participate less in group discussions, groups with high status differences are likely
to inhibit input from lower-status members and reduce their potential.
Use larger groups for fact-finding activities and smaller groups for action-taking
tasks. With larger groups, provide measures of individual performance.
To increase employee satisfaction, make certain people perceive their job roles
accurately.
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The chapter begins with a vignette describing the story of Lisa Mahon and her friend Jamal’s encounter
with police. As individuals, we all belong to groups based on our occupations, our race, our gender, and
many other categories. When we are part of a group, it changes our perception of a situation. In the case of
above, identification with a racial group may make us more likely to identify with Lisa and Jamal. If we
work in law enforcement, however, we may be more likely to side with the officers, believing that they were
serving their roles as police officers by using force when a citizen did not respond to orders.
These disagreements are very common, especially in cases where a police officer used force on an African
American. When speaking of relations with the African American community, Chief Ed Flynn of the
Milwaukee Police Department noted that many African Americans in high crime areas have strong
antipathy towards law enforcement, partly because “the police have often been in the middle of great
conflict and not infrequently been agents of social control to preserve a status quo.”
Tensions between African American communities and law enforcement officers highlight one of the pitfalls
of group identification. Some groups can exert a powerful positive influence, and others can create bias.
The objectives of this chapter and Chapter 10 are to familiarize you with group and team concepts, provide
you with a foundation for understanding how groups and teams work, and show you how to create effective
working units. Let’s begin by defining a group.
BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Defining and Classifying Groups
A. Definition
2. Groups can be either formal or informal.
designated work assignments establishing tasks.
b. Informal groups—alliances that are neither formally structured nor
organizationally determined.
B. Social Identity
2. Social identity theory proposes that people have emotional reactions to the
performance of the group.
3. Social identities help us understand who we are and where we fit in with other
people, but they can have a negative side as well.
seeing another group suffer.
b. We often see these feelings of schadenfreude in the joy fans experience
when a hated team loses.
negative situations to internal or insurmountable reasons.
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C. Ingroups and Outgroups
agreeableness are more susceptible to ingroup favoritism.
3. Whenever there is an ingroup, there is, by necessity, an outgroup, which is
ingroup’s members.
them.
5. One of the most powerful sources of ingroup–outgroup feelings is the practice
of religion, even in the workplace.
resources.
D. Social Identity Threat
1. Ingroups and outgroups pave the way for social identity threat, which is akin
to stereotype threat (see Chapter 6).
may lose confidence and performance effectiveness.
II. Stages of Group Development
A. Temporary groups have their own unique sequencing of actions (or inaction):
4. A transition initiates major changes.
5. A second phase of inertia follows the transition.
6. The group’s last meeting is characterized by markedly accelerated activity.
9-1.
7. Alternative models suggest that teams progress through a formation stage; a
conflict resolution or “storming” stage; a “norming” stage where members
agree on roles and make decisions; and a “performing” stage where members
begin to work collaboratively. The forming, storming, norming, and
performing stages may occur at phase one of the punctuated equilibrium,
while a second performing and conforming stage may occur in the second
phase, following a short period of reforming group norms and expectations
III. Group Properties: Roles, Norms, Status, Size, and Cohesiveness
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A. Introduction
1. Work groups are not unorganized mobs; they have properties that shape
members’ behavior and help explain and predict individual behavior within
the group, as well as the performance of the group itself.
a. Some of these properties are roles, norms, status, size, cohesiveness, and
diversity.
B. Group Property 1: Roles
1. Introduction
a. All group members are actors, each playing a role.
b. We are required to play a number of diverse roles, both on and off our
jobs.
2. Role perception: One’s view of how one is supposed to act in a given
situation is a role perception.
3. Role expectations: How others believe you should act in a given situation.
a. When role expectations are concentrated into generalized categories, we
have role stereotypes.
b. The psychological contract is an unwritten agreement that exists between
employees and their employer.
c. If role expectations as implied are not met, expect negative effects on
employee performance and satisfaction.
4. Role conflict: When an individual is confronted by divergent role
expectations.
a. At the extreme, two or more role expectations are mutually contradictory.
b. Within organizations, most employees are simultaneously in occupations,
workgroups, divisions, and demographic groups, and these identities can
conflict when the expectations of one clash with the expectations of
another.
c. During mergers and acquisitions, employees can be torn between their
identities as members of their original organization and of the new parent
company.
i. Multinational organizations also have been shown to lead to dual
identification—with the local division and with the international
organization.
5. Role Play and Assimilation
a. Zimbardo’s prison experiment
i. One of the most illuminating role and identity experiments was done a
number of years ago by Stanford University psychologist Philip
Zimbardo and his associates. They created a “prison” in the basement
of the Stanford psychology building, hired at , a day, two dozen
emotionally stable, physically healthy, law-abiding students who
scored “normal average” on extensive personality tests, randomly
assigned them the role of either “guard” or “prisoner,” and established
some basic rules.
ii. It took little time for the “prisoners” to accept the authority positions
of the “guards” and for the mock guards to adjust to their new
authority roles. Consistent with social identity theory, the guards came
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to see the prisoners as a negative out-group, and their comments to
researchers showed they had developed stereotypes about the “typical”
prisoner personality type. After the guards crushed a rebellion attempt
on the second day, the prisoners became increasingly passive.
Whatever the guards “dished out,” the prisoners took. The prisoners
to watch out for them in case they try something.’” Surprisingly,
during the entire experiment—even after days of abuse—not one
prisoner said, “Stop this. I’m a student like you. This is just an
experiment!”
different from their inherent personalities.
C. Group Properties 2: Norms
1. Introduction
a. All groups have norms—acceptable standards of behavior that are shared
by the group’s members that tell members what they ought and ought not
to do under certain circumstances.
2. Norms and Emotions
3. Norms and Conformity
a. The impact that group pressures for conformity can have on an individual
member’s judgment was demonstrated in studies by Solomon Asch and
others. (Exhibit 9-2)
b. Do individuals conform to the pressures of all groups to which they
belong?
vary and sometimes are contradictory.
d. People conform to their reference groups, in which a person is aware of
other members, defines himself or herself as a member or would like to be
a member, and feels group members are significant to him or her. The
implication, then, is that all groups do not impose equal conformity
pressures on their members.
4. Norms and Behavior
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the physical environment and productivity.
c. As a follow-up, the researchers began a second set of experiments in the
relay assembly test room at Western Electric.
d. In essence, workers in both the illumination and assembly-test-room
experiments were reacting to the increased attention they received.
i. Don’t be a rate-buster, turning out too much work.
ii. Don’t be a chiseler, turning out too little work.
iii. Don’t squeal on any of your peers.
h. How did the group enforce these norms?
norms.
ii. Members also ostracized individuals whose behavior was against the
group’s interest.
5. Positive Norms and Group Outcomes
a. One goal of every organization with corporate social responsibility (CSR)
would grow exponentially.
b. We might expect the same outcomes from political correctness (PC)
norms. But what is the effect of strong positive norms on group outcomes?
c. The popular thinking is that to increase creativity in groups, for instance,
norms should be loosened. However, research on gender-diverse groups
factors are present, too.
i. As powerful as norms can be, though, not everyone is equally
susceptible to positive group norms.
ii. Individual personalities factor in, too, as well as the level of a person’s
social identity within the group.
6. Negative Norms and Group Outcomes
both. (Exhibit 9-3)
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b. Few organizations will admit to creating or condoning conditions that
characterized by positive or negative attributes.
ii. Second, employees have been reporting an increase in rudeness and
disregard toward others by bosses and coworkers in recent years.
(a) Workplace incivility, like many other deviant behaviors, has many
negative outcomes for the victims.
actually quit because of it.
iii. Research suggests that a lack of sleep, which is often caused by
heightened work demands and which hinders a person’s ability to
regulate emotions and behaviors, can lead to deviant behavior.
c. Someone who ordinarily wouldn’t engage in deviant behavior might be
7. Norms and Culture
a. Do people in collectivist cultures have different norms than people in
individualist cultures? Of course they do.
b. But did you know that our orientation may be changed, even after years of
living in one society.
A. Group Property 3: Status
1. Status is a socially defined position or rank given to groups or group
members by others.
2. What determines status?
a. Status characteristics theory—differences in status characteristics create
status hierarchies within groups.
(c) Individual’s personal characteristics.
3. Status and norms
a. High-status members of groups often are given more freedom to deviate
from norms than other group members.
b. High-status people are also better able to resist conformity pressures.
4. Status and Group Interaction
a. High-status people tend to be assertive.
5. Status Inequity
a. When inequity is perceived, it creates disequilibrium that results in
corrective behavior.
b. Hierarchical groups can lead to resentment among those at the lower end
of the status continuum.
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group.
d. Groups generally agree within themselves on status criteria; hence, there is
usually high concurrence in group rankings of individuals.
e. Managers who occupy central positions in their social networks are
typically seen as higher in status by their subordinates, and this position
members have heterogeneous backgrounds.
g. When groups are heterogeneous or when heterogeneous groups must be
interdependent, status differences may initiate conflict as the group
attempts to reconcile the differing hierarchies.
6. Status and Stigmatization
others with their stigma.
i. This “stigma by association” effect can result in negative opinions and
evaluations of the person affiliated with the stigmatized individual,
even if the association is brief and purely coincidental.
B. Group Property 4: Size
on the dependent variables.
a. Large groups—a dozen or more members—are good for gaining diverse
input.
b. Smaller groups—seven members—are better at doing something
productive with that input.
working collectively than when working individually.
3. Social loafing directly challenges the assumption that the productivity of the
group as a whole should at least equal the sum of the productivity of the
individuals in it, no matter what the group size.
a. Causes of social loafing
c. Preventing social loafing
i. Set group goals, so the group has a common purpose to strive toward.
ii. Increase intergroup competition, which again focuses on the shared
outcome.
iii. Engage in peer evaluation so each person evaluates each other person’s
contribution.
groups.
v. If possible, base group rewards in part on each member’s unique
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contributions.
A. Group Property 5: Cohesiveness (Exhibit 9-4)
1. Groups differ in their cohesiveness—the degree to which members are
attracted to each other and are motivated to stay in the group.
2. The relationship of cohesiveness and productivity depends on the
performance-related norms established by the group.
productive.
4. How to encourage group cohesiveness:
a. Make the group smaller.
b. Encourage agreement with group goals.
c. Increase the time members spend together.
membership in the group.
e. Stimulate competition with other groups.
f. Give rewards to the group rather than to individual members.
g. Physically isolate the group.
B. Group Property 6: Diversity
different from, one another.
2. A great deal of research is being done on how diversity influences group
performance.
3. However, culturally and demographically diverse groups may perform better
over time—if they can get over their initial conflicts.
in underlying attitudes, values, and opinions.
4. The impact of diversity on groups is mixed.
a. It is difficult to be in a diverse group in the short term.
b. However, if members can weather their differences, over time, diversity
may help them be more open-minded and creative and to do better.
research.”
5. One possible side effect in diverse teams—especially those that are diverse in
terms of surface level characteristics—is faultlines, or perceived divisions
that split groups into two or more subgroups based on individual differences
such as sex, race, age, work experience, and education.
detrimental to group functioning and performance.
b. Overall, although research on faultlines suggests that diversity in groups is
a potential double-edged sword, recent work indicates they can be
strategically employed to improve performance.
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