Chapter 10
Groups, Teams, and Their Leadership
Groups versus Teams
Team
Group
2-teams have common goals or tasks;
3-task interdependence typically is greater with teams than with groups
1-team members usually have a stronger sense of identification among themselves
4-team members often have more differentiated and specialized roles than do group members.team members often play a single, or primary, role on a team.
2-Group members may belong to the group for a variety of personal reasons, and these may clash with the group’s stated objectives
3-group members often can contribute to goal accomplishment by working independently; the successful completion of their assigned tasks may not be contingent on other group members.
4-Group members often play a variety of roles within the group
1-identifying members of a group may be more difficult.
The Nature of Groups
Group: two or more persons who are interacting with one another in such a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each other person
Three aspects of this definition are
particularly important to the study of leadership.
First, this definition incorporates the concept of reciprocal influence between leaders and followers—an idea considerably different from the one-way influence implicit in the dictionary’s definition of followers.
Second, group members interact and influence each other. Thus people waiting at a bus stop would not constitute a group because there generally is neither interaction nor influence between the various individuals.
Third, the definition does not constrain individuals to only one group.
groups and organizations are not the same thing:
-Organizations can be so large that most members do not know most of the other people in the organization.
- organizations typically are just too large and impersonal to have much effect on anyone’s feelings, whereas groups are small and immediate enough to affect both feelings and self-image.
Group Size:
First, leader emergence is partly a function of group size. The greater number of people in a large versus a small group will affect the probability that any individual is likely to emerge as leader.
Second, as groups become larger, cliques are more likely to develop.
Cliques are subgroups of individuals who often share the same goals, values, and expectations.
cliques generally wield more influence than individual members, they are likely to exert considerable influence—positively or negatively—on the larger group.
Third, group size also can affect a leader’s behavioral style.
Leaders with a large span of control tend to be more directive, spend less time with individual subordinates, and use more impersonal approaches when influencing followers.
Leaders with a small tend to display more consideration and use more personal approaches when influencing followers.
Fourth, group size also affects group effectiveness. Although some researchers have suggested the optimal number of workers for any task is between five and seven.
limitations of certain tasks
process loss the inefficiencies created by more and more people working together (5 people doing a 3-person task).
social loafing the phenomenon of reduced effort by people when they are not individually accountable for their work
additive task a task where the group's output simply involves the combination of individual outputs.
social facilitation any time people increase their level of work due to the presence of others
Developmental Stages of Groups
Forming polite conversation, gathering of superficial members and low trust
Storming marked by an intragroup conflict, heightened emotional levels, and status differentiation as remaining contenders struggled to reach allianced and fulfill the group's leadership role
Norming settling down, clear emergence of a leader and the development of group norms and cohesiveness
Performing group members play functional, interdependent roles that are focused on the performance of group tasks
punctuated equilibrium when the team experiences the equivalent of a midlife crisis where there is a flurry of activity and reexamination of the strategy to see if it will them to complete their work
Group role
group roles :sets of expected behaviors associated with particular jobs or positions.
task role getting the task done
relationship role supporting relationships within the work group
dysfunctional roles for these roles, the person's behavior serves selfish or egocentric purposes rather than group purposes
role Conflict
Role conflict involves receiving contradictory messages about expected behavior and can in turn adversely affect a person’s emotional well-being and performance.
interrole conflict when someone is unable to perform all of his roles as well as he would like
person-role conflict when role expectation violates a person's values
intersender role conflict when someone receives inconsistent signals from several others about expected behavior
role ambiguity problem: lack of clarity about what the expectations are
intrasender role conflict when the same person sends mixed signals
Group Norms
Norms informal rules groups adopt to regulate and regularize group members' behaviors.
Norms are more likely to be seen as important and are more apt to be enforced if they
( 1) facilitate group survival;
( 2 ) simplify, or make more predictable, what behavior is expected of group members;
( 3 ) help the group avoid embarrassing interpersonal problems; or
( 4 ) express the central values of the group and clarify what is distinctive about the group’s identity.
Group Cohesion
group cohesion the glue that keeps a group together. the sum of forces that attracts members to a group, provides resistance to leaving it, and motivates them to be active in it.
Highly cohesive groups interact with and influence each other more than less cohesive groups do.
A highly cohesive but unskilled team is still an unskilled team, and such teams will often lose to a less cohesive but more skilled one.
Other problems also can occur in highly cohesive groups.
Over bounding occurs in highly cohesive groups, raise harmful boundaries between themselves in the outside, can block the use of outside resources that could make them more effective
Groupthink disadvantage of highly cohesive groups, they are more concerned with striving for unanimity than in objectivity appraising different courses of action