Major Objectives of the Course

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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

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A Helpful Distinction

• between
• Group Social Processes
• and
• Content of What a Group Does

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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 processeshow groups accomplish their work
• Maintenance processeshow groups meet
  psychological and relationship needs

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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

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By contrastPROCESS is

• Often dynamic and fluid, and for the untrained,
  sometimes difficult to follow.

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The Creation of a Norm

• We Seek Out Others for Social Comparison

• Psychological reaction-arousal
• Increase in affect (emotions)
• Uncertainty
• Need for information

Establish a norm
Comparison with others
Ambiguous, confusing circumstance
How should I act?
WHEW! NOW I KNOW WHAT I SHOULD DO
Social comparison gaining information from other
peoples reactions (Festinger, 1954)
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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.

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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 dont know what to do.

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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.

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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.

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Examples of Group Social Processes

• Social facilitation
• Group think
• Loafing
• Risk taking and polarization

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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.

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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?

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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. 

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Should you play pool in public?
Good players
Shots Made
Bad players
No Audience
Audience
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Group Level of Analysis

• Groups can have a life of their own.
• Tuckmans stages as example

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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

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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
  LEADERSHIPTwo groups same members
• Group A Who influences the group the most?
• Group B Who influences you the most?

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Patterns of interdependency

• All relationships to some extent have
  interdependencies
• Mutually beneficial

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What Are Communication Networks?

• Types three, four, five person
• Centralized vs. decentralized

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Social LoafingWhy Do People Loaf in Groups?
VS
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Group Papers

• Hate em
• Hey prof, why should she get the same grade as I
  when she loafed her way thru.

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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.

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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.

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Social Loafing

• Williams and Karan (1985)
• Task Difficulty (easy or hard maze)
• Type of evaluation (individual vs collective)
• Time to solve maze

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Social Loafing
.6
.4
Individual Evaluation
.2
Time to Complete Maze
0
Collective Evaluation
-.2
-.4
-.6
Easy
Difficult
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Group Decision Making

• Group Think
• The tendency for members of highly cohesive
  groups to assume that their decisions cant be
  wrong, that all members must support the groups
  decision strongly, and that contrary information
  should be ignored

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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
• Devils Advocate Technique and Authentic Dissent
  ameliorate such tendencies

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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.

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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
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Group Polarization

• Why?
• 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.

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Social Group Processes

• Observing and understanding process can lead to a
  more complete understanding of what is really
  going on.