Table of Contents

Abstract...................................................................................................................................................1
Group definition......................................................................................................................................2
Types of groups.......................................................................................................................................3
Recruitment.............................................................................................................................................6
Development of a group......................................................................................................................7
Social Facilitation.....................................................................................................................................8
A drive to perform.............................................................................................................................10
Distracted and conflicted...................................................................................................................10
Groups: good or bad for performance?.............................................................................................11
Causes and remedies.........................................................................................................................13
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory.............................................................................................................14
The 4 Basic Principles of Optimal Distinctiveness..............................................................................15
Altruistic Punishment............................................................................................................................17
The Trucking Game................................................................................................................................18
Groupthink............................................................................................................................................20
Symptoms of Groupthink...................................................................................................................20
Groupthink and the News Media.......................................................................................................22
Remedies for Groupthink..................................................................................................................23
Group Polarization.................................................................................................................................24
Leadership in group...............................................................................................................................26
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................28
References.............................................................................................................................................29
Abstract

This paper will basically give you an overview of the different elements which
need to be explored while dealing with a group. All these different elements are
essential elements which make the synergy of the group and to be able to
understand a group, we need to understand its functioning.So, this paper
highlights all the major elements which make a group and though this the
different elements which emerge like leadership, groupthink which can contribute
to make the group successful or cause its downfall. This is important because in
social interventions, usually you have to intervene in groups and without knowing
what constitutes a group, the intervention may not have the desired outcomes.
Group definition
A social group is any number of people who share common goals and/or beliefs. A
true group exhibits some degree of social cohesion and is more than a simple
collection or aggregate of individuals, such as people waiting at a bus stop, or
people waiting in a line. Characteristics shared by members of a group may
include interests, values, representations, ethnic or social background,
and kinship ties. Paul Hare regards the defining characteristic of a group as social
interaction. The members of the groups contact each other which Ackeema
Johnson calls a "regular interaction." This group also should have a common
identity, rules, structure, etc.
Types of groups
Primary groups are small groups with intimate, kinship-based relationships:
families, for example. They commonly last for years. They are small and display
face-to-face interaction.
Secondary groups, in contrast to primary groups, are large groups
involving formal and institutional relationships. They may last for years or may
disband after a short time. The formation of primary groups happens within
secondary groups.
Primary groups can be present in secondary settings. For example, attending a
university exemplifies membership of a secondary group, while the friendships
that are made there would be considered a primary group that you belong to.
Likewise, some businesses care deeply about the well being of one another, while
some immediate families have hostile relations within it.
Individuals almost universally have a bond toward what sociologists call reference
groups. These are groups to which the individual conceptually relates him/her,
and from which he/she adopts goals and values as a part of his/her self identity.
Other types of groups include the following:
Peer group
A peer group is a group with members of approximately the same age,
social status, and interests. Generally, people are relatively equal in terms
of power when they interact with peers.

Clique
A group of people that have many of the same interests & commonly in
High/College setting; and most of the time have a name & rules for
themselves
Club
A club is a group, which usually requires one to apply to become a member.
Such clubs may be dedicated to particular activities: sporting clubs, for
example.

Household
All individuals who live in the same home. Anglophone culture may include
various models of household, including the family, blended families, share
housing, and group homes.

Community
A community is a group of people with a commonality or sometimes a
complex net of overlapping commonalities, often–but not always–in
proximity with one another with some degree of continuity over time.

Gang
A gang is usually an urban group that gathers in a particular area. It is a
group of people that often hang around each other. They can be like some
clubs, but much less formal.

Mob
A mob is usually a group of people that has taken the law into their own
hands. Mobs are usually groups which gather temporarily for a particular
reason.
Posse
A posse was originally found in English common law. It is generally
obsolete, and survives only in America, where it is the law enforcement
equivalent of summoning the militia for military purposes.. However, it can
also refer to a street group.

Squad
This is usually a small group, of around 3 to 8 people, who work as a team
to accomplish their goals.

Team
Similar to a squad, though a team may contain many more members. A
team works in a similar way to a squad.
Recruitment
Social groups acquire and renew their members via recruitment. Unless in the
initial stages of expansion, the groups usually do not accept every applicant.
One of the ways to build a reasonably closed group is to accept new members
after one or more existing members propose and recommend them. Such
group expands along the lines of other existing social networks. Other
approach is to use existing members to evaluate the applicant, like
in Microsoft interview. Member evaluation can also be delegated to some
team that is not part of the group itself (like in High IQ societies). Some
groups may choose to easily accept easily a lot of people but only leave the
most efficient new members after probation (discarding others).

Development of a group

If one brings a small collection of strangers together in a restricted space and

environment, provides a common goal and maybe a few ground rules, then a
highly probable course of events will follow. Interaction between individuals
is the basic requirement. At first, individuals will differentially interact in sets
of twos or threes while seeking to interact with those with whom they share
something in common: i.e., interests, skills, and cultural background.
Relationships will develop some stability in these small sets, in that
individuals may temporarily change from one set to another, but will return
to the same pairs or trios rather consistently and resist change. Particular
twosomes and threesomes will stake out their special spots within the overall
space.
Again depending on the common goal, eventually twosomes and threesomes
will integrate into larger sets of six or eight, with corresponding revisions of
territory, dominance-ranking, and further differentiation of roles. All of this
seldom takes place without some conflict or disagreement: for example,
fighting over the distribution of resources, the choices of means and different
subgoals, the development of what are appropriate norms, rewards and
punishments. Some of these conflicts will be territorial in nature: i.e., jealousy
over roles, or locations, or favored relationships. But most will be involved
with struggles for status, ranging from mild protests to serious verbal conflicts
and even dangerous violence.
Social Facilitation

When an ant builds a nest on her own she does so with little enthusiasm. She
moves as though tired of life, bored with the whole business of excavating earth,
perhaps dreaming of a better life elsewhere. But give our ant a co-worker and she
is transformed into a dynamo, a workaholic, an Olympian amongst insects. Soon
she is digging at five times the rate or more...
Ants aren't the only ones.
Four decades before S. C. Chen reported his ant findings in 1937, the psychologist
Norman Triplett had already noticed much the same behaviour in cyclists. Triplett
scoured the records of the 'League of American Wheelmen' and found that racing
cyclists rode faster when paced or in competition. Analyzing the results of many
races he found that, on average, cyclists with a pacemaker covered each mile
about 5 seconds quicker than those without. He suspected it was more than just
the purely physical effect of slipstreaming behind another cyclist, that the effect
was also psychological -- something to do with the mere presence of other
people.

To test his hunch Triplett (1898) set children winding a thread on a reel,

sometimes on their own and sometimes against others. What he found confirmed
his theory: the children went faster when in competition. While interesting,
though, the finding that people work faster in competition is hardly ground-
breaking, but what if the competitive element could be removed and effect of
mere presence could be measured?

Two decades later Gordon Allport -- one of the founders of personality

psychology did just that. He had participants write down as many words as they
could that were related to a given target word. They were given three one-minute
periods and told they were not in competition with each other. Again,
participants reliably produced more words when others were present than when
alone.
While Allport's experimental procedure might not have completely eliminated the
effects of competition, subsequent studies, and there were many, certainly did.
This boost to people's performance when watched by others became known as
social facilitation and for a few decades it was all the rage in psychology.
Unfortunately experimenters soon discovered that human psychology is a fraction
more complicated than ant psychology.

Most worryingly experimenters failed to find the expected social facilitation in a

whole range of other tasks, for example when people were asked to learn lists of
nonsense syllables or navigate a complicated maze. It emerged that when the
tasks were harder their performance wasn't improved, quite the contrary, it got
worse. People seemed to be experiencing not social facilitation but social
inhibition. They were choking and so were the psychologists who all but
abandoned social facilitation research as a bad lot.

A drive to perform

It wasn't until the 1960s that research in this area was revived by the noted
psychologist Professor Robert Zajonc. He thought that the contradictory results
could be explained by a new approach called 'drive theory'. Zajonc said that when
other people are watching us we get more alert and excited and this excitement
fires up what he called our 'dominant response'. Dominant responses are things
like well-practised skills or particular habits. If this dominant response fits with the
situation then our performance is enhanced, but if the dominant response is
inappropriate then we tend to perform poorly.

This theory explained the evidence quite well but critics thought it too simplistic,
arguing that it's not just whether an audience is present or not, it is also how we
react to that presence. To help account for this cognitive process, a new theory
was put forward by Robert S Baron in the 1980s.
Distracted and conflicted

Distraction-conflict theory argues that when other people are watching us it

creates an attentional conflict between the task we are performing and the
watching others. When the task is easy we can successfully narrow our focus to
the task at hand and so our performance improves, probably because of the drive
effect to which Zajonc refers. When the task is tricky, though, we suffer from
attentional overload and our performance gets worse. Pessin (1933) had already
noted just this effect when people performed tasks with flashing lights and loud
noises distracting them instead of an audience.
Here at last, 100 years after Triplett had children winding fishing reels, came a
theory that in concert with Zajonc's drive theory, has the potential to explain just
when and how an audience either improves our performance or worsens it.
Distraction-conflict theory in particular makes the complex effects of an audience
much easier to understand because it focuses on how we manage our attention.

The psychology of attention, though, is a strange beast affected by all kinds of

factors that consequently also tweak the social facilitation effect:
1. Audience evaluation. How we evaluate the audience determines our
reaction, i.e. is the audience watching closely or are they just passing
through? Huguet et al., (1999) unsuprisingly found that attentive audiences
are more distracting than inattentive audiences.
2. Opposite sex audience. People usually find opposite sex audiences more
distracting and so men are more inhibited on difficult tasks (but better on
well-practised tasks) when watched by women and vice versa.
3. Mood. Good moods may in certain circumstances facilitate performance
and bad moods inhibit them (Mash & Hedley, 1975).
And the list goes on. If it affects attention it's likely to affect the social
facilitation/inhibition effect.
Groups: good or bad for performance?

Whether other people improve or worsen performance naturally depends on the

exact circumstances of the group. Research in social loafing finds that when
people are involved in an additive task like pulling on a rope, they slack off, often
by more than 50%. In this situation groups are bad for performance partly
because individuals can hide. In contrast social facilitation/inhibition effects come
to the fore when individuals can be picked out of the bunch, when they are being
judged on their performance alone.
Like ants the presence of others can push us on to greater achievements, but,
because we are human, it can also push us towards disaster. Psychological
research suggests it all depends on managing attention, channelling the body's
physiological response and how good we are at the task itself.

Groups can be fantastically unproductive because they provide such wonderful

camouflage. Under cover of group work people will slack off, happy in the
knowledge others are probably doing the same. And even if they're not: who'll
know?

This is what psychologists have nattily called social loafing and it was beautifully
demonstrated by a French professor of agricultural engineering called Max
Ringelmann as early as the 1890s.
Ringelmann, often credited as one of the founders of social psychology, had
people pull on ropes either separately or in groups of various sizes and he
measured how hard they pulled. He found that the more people were in the
group, the less work they did (see graph).

Notice that people did about half as much work when there were 8 others in the
group than they did on their own.

Since Ringelmann's original study many others have got the same result using
different types of tasks. Most entertainingly Professor Bibb Latané and colleagues
had people cheering, shouting and clapping in groups as loud as they could
(Latané et al., 1979). When people were in groups of six they only shouted at one-
third of their full capacity. The lazy so-and-sos.
The effect has been found in different cultures including Indians, Taiwanese,
French, Polish and Americans, it's been found in tasks as diverse as pumping air,
swimming, evaluating poems, navigating mazes and in restaurant tipping.
However social loafing is less prevalent in collectivist cultures such as those in
many Asian countries, indeed sometimes it is reversed.

It's not hard to see why this finding might worry people in charge of all kinds of
organisations. But note that social loafing is most detrimental to the productivity
of a group when it is carrying out 'additive tasks': ones where the effort of each
group member is summed. Not all tasks fit in to this category. For example a
group problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group
- social loafing wouldn't necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.
Causes and remedies
These are some of the standard explanations put forward for the social loafing
effect:
 People expect each other to loaf. Whether consciously or unconsciously
people say to themselves: everyone else is going to slack off a bit so I'll slack
off a bit as well because it's not fair if I do more work than the others.
 Anonymity. When groups are larger the individuals become more
anonymous. Imagine you're doing something on your own: if it goes well you
get all the glory, if it goes wrong you get all the blame. In a group both blame
and glory is spread, so there's less carrot and less stick.
 No standards. Often groups don't have set standards so there's no clear
ideal for which to aim.
These explanations naturally beg the question of how people would behave if
they didn't expect each other to loaf, they weren't anonymous and there were
clear standards - after all groups do often work under much better conditions
than those induced in some laboratory studies. Indeed lab studies have often
been criticised for giving people boring or meaningless tasks and for putting them
in random groups.

Still people in groups clearly do loaf in real life so here are a few factors found to
be important in reducing social loafing:

 Task importance. Studies have shown that when people think the task is
important they do less loafing. Zacarro (1984) found that groups constructing
'moon tents' (don't ask me!) worked harder if they thought the relevance of
the task was high, thought they were in competition with another group and
were encouraged to think the task was attractive.
 Group importance. When the group is important to its members they work
harder. Worchel et al. (1998) had people building paper chains in two groups,
one which had name tags, matching coats and a sense of competition.
Compared to a group given none of these, they produced 5 more paper chains.
 Decreasing the 'sucker effect'. The sucker effect is that feeling of being
duped when you think that other people in the group are slacking off.
Reducing or eliminating this perception is another key to a productive group.

This is just three, many more have been suggested, including: how easily each
member's contribution can be evaluated, how unique each individual's
contribution is and how individually identifiable they are. The drift is that people
can be made to work harder by cutting off their natural tendency to hide in the
group.
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory
Psychology encompasses a wide range of theories and ideas. In 1991, Dr.
Marilynn Brewer proposed a theory on optimal distinctiveness that assumes
individuals work to attain a balance between three basic emotional needs
including: to be assimilated into a group, to be linked to family and friends and to
have a certain degree of distinctiveness and independence.

Dr. Marilynn Brewer suggests that when individuals feel similar to a group of
people, they tend to look for a way to differentiate them. On the other hand,
whenever a person believes they are dissimilar to others, they attempt to become
more like others.

Psychology holds that optimal distinctiveness theory further states that

individuals will continue to adjust their behavior to keep an optimum balance
between being too different and too similar. People will strive to find things in
common with their personal group if they think that they are too dissimilar by
making comparisons within the group.

In contrast, if people think that they are too much like a group, they will compare
themselves to another group as a whole in order to distinguish how different they
are to themselves. When people reach the point where they believe that they are
similar enough, but still maintain a sufficient amount of individualism, they reach
an agreeable state of equilibrium.

The concept of optimal distinctiveness says that differentiation in itself is the drive
behind how a person selects a social identify and how much stronger the group
identity becomes over an individual’s basic psychological desires.

Optimal distinctiveness originated from the evolution of human beings according

to psychology master Dr. Marilynn Brewer. She believed that as human beings
evolved, they adapted their ways of living to work dependently within groups
instead of living independently. This adaption developed into the human need to
be part of a group to ensure their own survival.
The 4 Basic Principles of Optimal Distinctiveness

1. An individual’s identification will be the most intense within a social group

depending on how much the inclusiveness resolves the conflict between the need
for assimilating with a group and the need for being different and independent.

2. The need for optimal distinctiveness is separate from the subjective

implications of being a member of a group. However, with everything being
equal, most individuals want to be associated with a highly regarded group rather
then a poorly regarded one.

Research has shown that when an individual has grown attached to a certain
social category or group, any positive affects or evaluations related to the
individual’s self-image become automatically associated with the overall group.

3. The distinctiveness of a particular social identity is directly related to its

circumstances. The social identity depends on the viewpoint of the people at a
specific time, that may include only the members that participate in the social
meetings or extend to the entire human population.

4. The optimal balance between group assimilation and individual differentiation

is related to the associated strength of the force between the conflicting needs of
inclusiveness and distinctiveness. For most individuals, the cultural values, current
individual experiences and personal socialization determine how strong these two
needs become.

Altruistic Punishment
 Altruistic punishment is a cornerstone of cooperation theory, linking biological-
evolutionary, psychological, and collective action elements. Free-riders are an
obstacle to collective action, and organizing punishment for free-riders is itself
a collective action problem (a "second order social dilemma"). Linking negative
emotions to free-riders, thus making punishment a satisfying act, distributes
the policing function through the society and internalizes the rule that makes
more complex rules possible.

The evolutionary origins of human cooperation pose a puzzle - why do people so

frequently cooperate with non-relatives, including people they are not likely to
meet again? Existing theories for explaining the evolution of cooperation in a
competitive environment include kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and costly
signaling. Kin selection, performing altruistic acts at a cost to oneself but at the
benefit of one's genes, does not explain non-familial cooperation. Reciprocal
altruism does not explain generalized reciprocity, in which one performs altruistic
acts for a member of a group, but not limited to actors who have specifically
performed altruistic acts one one's behalf in the past. Signaling theory, which
holds that altruistic acts enhance one’s reputation and increase the chances of
mating or useful alliances, does not explain human cooperation when reputation
enhancement is not a factor? Using economic games like Prisoner's Dilemma, in
which players were given the opportunity to punish free-riders from previous
rounds at a cost to themselves, Fehr and Gachter show that cooperation
flourishes when free-riders are punished, and that negative emotions toward
free-riders "are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment." These
results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should
include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.
The Trucking Game
Factors influencing cooperation in these games
Cooperation s as conflict between own & others’ interests ¯s

2. Cooperation s as rewards for coop

3. Communication s cooperation

4. Cooperation s when players know each other

5. More likely to cooperate with ingroup members

6. d no. of participants leads to d conflict

7. Initial social value orientation - competitive vs. cooperative

Criticisms of dilemma games

Assumes individuals are rational, motivated to maximise self-interest

Lack ecological/external validity

Are they about intergroup cooperation?

Groupthink

What is Groupthink?
 
Groupthink, a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis (1972), occurs when
a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of
“mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment” (p. 9).  Groups affected by
groupthink ignore alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that
dehumanize other groups.  A group is especially vulnerable to groupthink when its
members are similar in background, when the group is insulated from outside
opinions, and when there are no clear rules for decision making.

Symptoms of Groupthink

 
Janis has documented eight symptoms of groupthink:
 
1. Illusion of invulnerability –Creates excessive optimism that encourages
taking extreme risks.
2. Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not
reconsider their assumptions.
3. Beliefs in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their
cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their
decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make
effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express
arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group
consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be
unanimous.
 8. Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader
from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s
cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.
 
When the above symptoms exist in a group that is trying to make a decision,
there is a reasonable chance that groupthink will happen, although it is not
necessarily so.  Groupthink occurs when groups are highly cohesive and when
they are under considerable pressure to make a quality decision.  When pressures
for unanimity seem overwhelming, members are less motivated to realistically
appraise the alternative courses of action available to them.  These group
pressures lead to carelessness and irrational thinking since groups experiencing
groupthink fail to consider all alternatives and seek to maintain unanimity. 
Decisions shaped by groupthink have low probability of achieving successful
outcomes.
 
Examples of Groupthink: Past and Present
 
Examples of groupthink “fiascoes” studied by Janis include US failures to
anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the escalation of
Vietnam war, and the ill-fated hostage rescue in Iran.  Current examples of
groupthink can be found in the decisions of the Bush administration and Congress
to pursue an invasion of Iraq based on a policy of “preemptive use of military
force against terrorists and rogue nations”.  The decision to rush to war in Iraq
before a broad-based coalition of allies could be built has placed the US in an
unenviable military situation in Iraq that is costly in terms of military deaths and
casualties, diplomatic standing in the world, and economically.
 

Groupthink and the News Media

 
Knowledge is power and we as citizens and as a nation is becoming less powerful. 
We face an administration that believes in operating under high levels of secrecy. 
The American press, especially the television news media, has let down the
American people and the American people have allowed this to happen.  US
television news is geared more toward providing entertainment than
information.  When one compares the news Americans received about the “war
on terrorism” and “war in Iraq” with the news citizens of other countries received,
it is easy to see why many Americans were eager to launch an attack on Saddam
Hussein while most of the world thought this was not a good idea.  The major
news networks eagerly voiced almost exclusively the Bush administration’s
(questionable) justifications for the attack on Iraq and ignored the voices of
millions who knew that other ways of addressing the issues were still possible. 
Furthermore, the rapid pace of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News opinion programs
makes it difficult for viewers to process information in any depth.  Americans
need a press that serves as a devil’s advocate to alleviate the ongoing groupthink
concerning the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq.
 
Review the following consequences of groupthink and consider how many of
them apply to the Bush administration’s handling of the ‘war on terrorism’ and
the issues related to Iraq and Saddam Hussein:
 
 incomplete survey of alternatives
 incomplete survey of objectives
 failure to examine risks of preferred choice
 failure to reappraise initially rejected alternatives
 poor information search
 selective bias in processing information at hand
 failure to work out contingency plans
 low probability of successful outcome 

Remedies for Groupthink

 
Decision experts have determined that groupthink may be prevented by adopting
some of the following measures:
 
 The leader should assign the role of critical evaluator to each member

 The leader should avoid stating preferences and expectations at the outset

 Each member of the group should routinely discuss the groups'

deliberations with a trusted associate and report back to the group on the
associate's reactions

 One or more experts should be invited to each meeting on a staggered

basis.  The outside experts should be encouraged to challenge views of the
members.

 At least one articulate and knowledgeable member should be given the role
of devil's advocate (to question assumptions and plans)

 The leader should make sure that a sizeable block of time is set aside to
survey warning signals from rivals; leader and group construct alternative
scenarios of rivals' intentions.

Group Polarization

In social psychology, group polarization refers to the tendency for groups to make

decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members. These
more extreme decisions are towards greater risk if individual's initial tendency is
to be risky and towards greater caution if individual's initial tendency is to be
cautious. The phenomenon also holds that a group's attitude toward a situation
may change in the sense that the individual's initial attitudes have strengthened
and intensified after group discussion.

Group polarization is the phenomenon that when placed in group situations,

people will make decisions and form opinions to more of an extreme than when
they are in individual situations. The phenomenon has shown that after
participating in a discussion group, members tend to advocate more extreme
positions and call for riskier courses of action than individuals who did not
participate in any such discussion. This phenomenon was originally coined risky
shift but was found to apply to more than risk, so the replacement term choice
shift has been suggested.
The importance of group polarization is significant as it is helps explain group
behavior in a variety of real-life situations. Examples of these situations include
public policy, terrorism, college life, and violence. For instance, group polarization
can largely be seen at political conventions which are broadcasted nationwide
before a large election. Generally, a political party holds the same ideals and
fundamentals. At times, however, individual members of the party may wavier on
where they stand on smaller subjects. During a political convention, the political
party as a group is strongly united in one location and is exposed to many
persuasive speakers. As a result, each individual in the political party leaves more
energized and steadfast on where the party as a whole stands with regards to all
subjects and behind all candidates, even if they were wavering on where they
stood before hand. The phenomenon is also largely observed in the decision-
making of a jury, particularly when considering punitive damages in a civil trial.
Studies have shown that after deliberating together, mock jury members often
decided on punitive damage awards that were either larger or smaller than the
amount any individual juror had favored prior to deliberation. The studies
indicated that when the jurors favored a relatively low award, discussion would
lead to an even more lenient result, while if the jury was inclined to impose a stiff
penalty, discussion would make it even harsher.  Moreover, in recent years, the
Internet and online social media have also presented opportunities to observe
group polarization and compile new research. Psychologists have found that
social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that group
polarization can occur even when a group is not physically together. As long as
the group of individuals begins with the same fundamental opinion on the topic
and a consistent dialogue is kept going, group polarization can be observed.

Leadership in group
Leadership is concerned with control and power in a group. Leadership can be
aimed at either maintaining the interpersonal relationships in the group or
prodding the group to achieve its task. Groups will sometimes have two leaders:
one for the social dimension and one for the task dimension. There are also three
main perspectives on leadership. First, some researchers believe some people are
born with traits that will make them a good leader. A second perspective is that
the group's leader selects an appropriate leadership style for the given task. A
third way of understanding leadership says that to some degree, leaders are born
with traits that make them good leaders, but that they also learn how to become
a leader and use strategies appropriate to a given situation. Learn more about
leadership and then complete the interactive exercise at the end of the
discussion.
This approach says that people are born with traits
that make them effective leaders. The challenge for
the group is to find a person with these traits.

 One-Best-Style Good leaders are born

 This approach says that in a given situation, one
particular style of leadership is most effective.
There are four main styles:

 Autocratic: Leader uses his or her authority to

make decisions.

 Democratic: Authority is shared and all group

members help make decisions.

 Laissez-faire: A "hands-off" style in which the

leader allows the group to make its own
decisions.

 Abdacratic: No one in the group exercises

leadership. This style, says researchers, leads to
group disintegration and is followed by
autocratic leadership
This approach says that leaders are to some degree born with leadership traits,
but that the situation, personalities of other group members, pressures on the
group, and group norms also determine leadership.

Conclusion

To conclude, we can say that all these elements mentioned above are essential
to form a group. Groups influence the behaviour of individuals and lead to
phenomenon such as groupthink. Group decisions tend to be different to
individual decisions (but not necessarily worse) and above all a these elements
should be brought together to make the group function as a whole.
References
http://helpingpsychology.com/psychology-101-optimal-distinctiveness-theory

http://www.cooperationcommons.com/node/345

http://www.psysr.org/about/pubs_resources/groupthink%20overview.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization