Simply Grasp

What is a group? How a group behaves?

Being a clown in a circus

Happy day, amazing people!!!

Groups are formed for two main reasons.

Synopsis

Stages of group development

Group properties

Groupthink and Group shift

Let’s say Tom is a new employee in an advertising firm. He works for creative department. Being in the team gives Tom a Social identity meaning, who he is and what is expected from him.

Within a week, the creative team got a new project from their clients. It was to create an ad campaign for their new product launch (perfume). The team has to come up with a concept, copywrite and graphic design.

Stages of group development

Since the creative team already knows it’s purpose, structure and leadership, forming and storming stage is scripted for them. But for Tom, it’s new. He initially “test the waters” to determine what types of behaviors are acceptable in the forming stage. Next up is that he accepts the existence of the group but resist the constraints it imposes on his individuality (Tom’s ideas and plans) this stage is called as storming stage. To make Tom understand what are the acceptable behavior in the group and in the firm, briefing about the norms are done. It is known as norming stage. Now all members perform their task in sync in the performing stage. But adjourning stage doesn’t not apply here because it is an ongoing employment unlike temporary committees, task forces and so.

For temporary groups with deadlines, punctuated-equilibrium model is the best. In this model, groups are given a goal. The members will follow the same course of action until the transition. Transition phase happens exactly when the group had used up half of its allotted time. So, they will then change the ideas, drop the old patterns and adopt new perspectives to complete the given job within the timeframe.

Back to Tom

Group properties

Role

His views on how he should act in a given situation is called role perception. Other’s views on how he should act is called role expectation. Example: Tom as a copywriter- his perception about his role as a copywriter is to write great copies to sell. But others perception about his role is to write flattery words to sell.

Norms

Acceptable standards of behavior are called as norms. Which all members ought and ought not to do under certain circumstances. As we have mentioned earlier, Tom was briefed about the norms. Do you guys want to know on what? It was on performance, appearance, social arrangement and resource allocation. All companies give more importance to performance norm so that they can reach the desired level of outcome.

Status

Socially defined position or rank given to groups or group members by others is called as status. The determining factors of status are power, person’s ability to contribute to group’s goal and individual’s personal characteristics. Tom and his team are the members of creative department. The highest-ranking member in their team is copy director and in their department is creative director. Highest ranking members have freedom to deviate from norms than others. They are also more assertive members of the group.

Size

When deciding about the ideal size of a group there is no definite answer. Smaller groups or larger groups each have their fair share of benefits and drawbacks. Smaller groups are faster at completing tasks and larger groups are better at problem solving. Yet beware of the social loafing (members contributing less effort to a group’s goal as the number of members increase)

Cohesiveness

Cohesiveness means the degree to which members are attracted to each other and motivated to stay in the group. Since Tom is new to the team, he has less cohesiveness with his group members but because of his company’s high-performance norms they are able to provide moderate productivity.

Diversity

The degree to which members of the group are different from one another is called diversity. Some researches shows that diversity causes less satisfaction within the groups, less cohesive, and more conflict but some other researches shows that diversity leads to open minded, creative and unique ways to solve the problems. Before Tom joined the team, the team would always have clash of ideas for ad campaigns but over the time they learned to wither the surface level diversity (nationality, race and gender) and started concentrating on productivity.

Groupthink and Group shift

What if Tom doesn’t like the concept idea for the perfume launch and also the group has asked him to conform to it. This may lead to groupthink, which neglects to appraise unusual, minority or unpopular views.

Group shift or group polarization happens when group members become more extreme in their decisions after group discussion.

Scenario 1

For instances, If Tom and his group members are conservative type in creating an ad copy then after discussion, they would all come up with even more basic and generic ad copy idea.

Scenario 2

And on the other hand, if they are non-conservative type then they would definitely come up with a more unique and different ad copy idea.

 In the above given scenarios we could see that the group members had an initial leaning towards a given opinion or decision (conservative ad copy or non-conservative ad copy). This leaning gets intensified after group discussion with like-minded people.

We hope you guys have understood about group behavior concepts with this example.

Ok before signing off

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Simply grasp