Notes on Group Behavior

• The social process by which people interact

face to face in small groups is called group
dynamics. The word “dynamics” comes from
the Greek word meaning “force”. Hence,
group dynamics refers to the study of forces
operating within a group.
Types of Groups. There are many ways of
classifying groups. A key difference exists
between formal groups, which are established
by the organization and have a public identity
and goal to achieve, and informal groups, which
emerge on the basis of common interests,
proximity and friendships.
• Another fundamental distinction is between two
types of formal groups. Some have a relatively
temporary life; they are created to accomplish a
short-term task and then disband. An example of
a temporary group is a task force.
• The other type of formal group is a more natural
and enduring work group. This type of group is
formed when people regularly perform tasks
together as part of their job assignments and is
called a team.
Comparison of Informal and Formal
Organizations:
The informal organization is a network of
personal and social relations not established or
required by the formal organization but arising
spontaneously as people associate with one
another.
• The emphasis within informal organizations is
people and their relationships, whereas the
formal organization emphasizes official
positions in terms of authority and
responsibility. Informal power, therefore,
attaches to a person, whereas formal
authority attaches to a position and a person
has it only when occupying that position.
Informal power is personal, but formal
authority is institutional.
• Power in an informal organization is given by
group members rather than delegated by
managers; therefore it does not follow the
official chain of command. It is more likely to
come from peers rather than from superiors
in the formal hierarchy; and it may cut across
organizational lines into other departments. It
is usually more unstable than formal authority
since it is subject to the sentiments of people.
• A manager typically holds some informal
(personal) power along with formal
(positional) power, but usually a manager
does not have more informal power than
anyone else in the group. This means that the
manager and the informal leader usually are
two different persons in work groups.
• Formal organizations may grow to immense
size, but informal organizations (at least the
closely knit ones) tend to remain small in
order to keep within the limits of personal
relationships. The result is that a large
organization tends to have hundreds of
informal organizations operating throughout
it.
• The employee with the largest amount of status
in the informal organization usually becomes its
informal leader. This person emerges from within
the group, often acquiring considerable informal
power.
• Sometimes, the informal leadership of a group is
unclear, at least to outside observers or
managers. However, informal leaders often
exhibit distinct behaviors that allow them to be
identified.
• Each manager needs to learn who the key
informal leader is in any group and to work
with that leader to encourage behavior that
furthers rather than hinders organizational
objectives.
• The informal organization is a desirable
source of potential formal leaders, but an
informal leader does not always make the best
formal manager.
Benefits of Informal Organizations:
• Makes a more effective total system
• Lightens workload on management
• Helps get the work done
• Tends to encourage cooperation
• Fills in gaps in a manager’s abilities
• Gives satisfaction and stability to work groups
• Improves communication
• Provides a safety valve for employee emotions
• Encourages managers to plan and act more
carefully
• Contributes to higher cohesiveness
Problems Associated with Informal Organizations:
• Develops undesirable rumor
• Encourages negative attitudes
• Resists change
• Leads to interpersonal and intergroup conflicts
• Rejects and harasses some employees
• Weakens motivation and satisfaction
• Operates outside of management’s control
• Supports conformity
• Develops role conflicts
• Influencing Informal Organizations:
Management did not establish informal
organizations, and it cannot abolish them. But
management can learn to live with them and
have some measure of influence on them.
Management guidelines include the following:
• Accept and understand informal organizations
• Identify various levels of attitudes and
behaviors within them.
• Consider possible effects on informal systems
when taking any kind of action.
• Integrate as far as possible the interests of
informal groups with those of the formal
organization.
• Keep formal activities from unnecessarily
threatening informal organizations.

The informal organization needs to be strong

enough to be supportive, but not strong enough
to dominate.
• Formal Groups. Whether called meetings,
conferences, task forces, or committees, the
time spent in formal groups has been
described as a total waste of time , a source of
confusion and misinformation, and an excuse
for indecision on the part of an individual
decision-maker.
Some factors that contribute to the often-pervasive
negative attitudes about time spent in committee
meetings:
• A lack of trust causes participants to withhold
their true feelings.
• A negative mind-set exists that “meetings aren’t
really work”and hence people don’t take them
seriously (e.g. they come late or leave early, they
miss them completely, or they are distracted
• while there).
• Missing or incomplete information prevents
participants from making important decisions
when appropriate.
• Meetings are poorly run (the person in charge
fails to have an agenda, a plan to follow, a finite
length for the session, or the discipline to keep
the discussion moving).
• Meetings are viewed as the end result, not the
means to an end (the group fails to focus on
creating a product or outcome).
Committees. Formal groups are created for
many purposes. Group members may be asked
to generate ideas, make decisions, debate issues
and negotiate resources, provide status reports
and receive constructive feedback. A committee
is a specific type of group meeting in which
members in their group role have been
delegated the authority to handle the problem
at hand.
• Meetings work simultaneously at two
different levels. One level is the official task of
the group, known as the surface agenda . The
other level involves members’ private
emotions and motives which they have
brought with them but keep hidden. These are
the hidden agendas of the meetings.
Sometimes, when a group reaches a crisis in
its surface agenda, these hidden agendas
come to life to complicate the situation.
Effective surface agendas are critical to the
success of a committee meeting. Agendas
should:
• Clearly specify the date, time and place of the
meeting
• Indicate a primary purpose for the meeting
• List presenters, the time allotted to them, and
the time available for discussion
• Help the group to focus on decisions, not just
discussions
• Have room for new items to be added
• Address items in priority order (highest to
lowest)
• Identify the date, time and place of the next
meeting
Leadership Roles. Groups tend to require not
one but two types of leadership roles: that of
the task leader and that of the social leader.
Task Roles
• Define a problem or goal for the group
• Request facts, ideas, or opinions from
members
• Provide facts, ideas, or opinions
• Clarify a confused situation; give examples;
provide structure.
• Summarize the discussion.
• Determine whether agreement has been
reached.
• Check for consensus.
• Test for ethicality.
Social Roles
• Support the contribution of others; encourage
them by recognition.
• Sense the mood of the group and help
members become aware of it.
• Reduce the tension and reconcile
disagreements.
• Modify your position; admit an error.
• Facilitate participation of all members.
• Evaluate the group’s effectiveness.
• Deal with team stress.

In addition to relying on both task and social roles,

effective meetings are also facilitated by the
application of the following practices:
• Carefully considering who should be present, and
for what parts of the meeting, and who does not
need to be there
• Selecting a good site for the meeting
• Using technology (e.g. computers hooked to
printers and oversized monitors) to help
capture ideas, allow for anonymous inputs,
organize and expand upon them, record
insights and criticisms, and create and edit
documents before the participants leave
• Giving appropriate credit to those who
participated and drawing out those who didn’t
• Using open questions to stimulate thought
and directed questions to encourage a focus
on a particular topic
• Balancing the serious discussions with time for
a bit of lighthearted fun
• Summarizing progress, identifying issues yet
unresolved and making necessary assignments
for the future
• Structured Approaches. Four important
alternative structures are brainstorming,
nominal groups, Delphi decision making and
dialectic inquiry.
• Brainstorming. This is a popular method for
encouraging creative thinking in groups of
about eight people. It is built around four
basic guidelines for participants:
1. Generate as many ideas as possible.
2. Be creative, freewheeling and imaginative.
3. Build upon (piggy bank), extend or combine
earlier ideas.
4. Withhold criticism of others’ideas.
• Nominal Group Technique. A nominal group
exists in name only, with members having
minimal interaction prior to producing a
decision. Here are the steps that nominal
groups often follow:
1. Individuals are brought together and
presented with a problem.
2. They develop solutions independently, often
writing them on cards.
3. Their ideas are shared with others in a structured
format (e.g. a roundrobin process that ensures all
members get the opportunity to present their
ideas).
4. Brief time is allotted so that questions can be
asked- but only for clarification.
5. Group members individually designate their
preferences for the best alternatives by secret
ballot.
6. The group decision is announced.
• Delphi Decision Making. In delphi decision
groups, a panel of relevant people is chosen to
address an issue. Members are selected
because they are experts or have relevant
information to share and the time available to
do so. A series of questionnaires are
sequentially distributed to the respondents,
who do not need to meet face-to-face. All
responses are in writing. Panelists may be
asked to identify future problems, project
market trends, or predict a future state of
affairs. Explanations for their conclusions can
also be shared. Replies are gathered from all
participants, summarized and fed back to the
members for their review. Then participants are
asked to make another decision on the basis of
new information. The process may be repeated
several times until the responses converge
satisfactorily and a final report is prepared.
Success of the Delphi decision depends on
adequate time, participant expertise,
communication skill, and the motivation of
members to immerse themselves in the task.
The major merits of the process include:
• Elimination of interpersonal problems among
panelists
• Efficient use of experts’time
• Adequate time for reflection and analysis by
respondents
• Diversity and quantity of ideas generated
• Accuracy of predictions and forecasts made
Dialectic Decision Method. This method traces its
roots to Plato and Aristotle. It begins with a clear
statement of a problem to be solved. Then two or
more compelling proposals are generated. A key
step follows in which participants identify the
explicit or implicit assumptions that underlie each
proposal. The group then breaks into advocacy
groups, which examine and argue the relative
merits of their positions. Then the entire group
makes a decision based on the competing
presentations. This decision may mean embracing
one of the alternatives, forging a compromise
from several ideas, or generating a new
proposal.
The merits of DDM include better understanding
of the proposals, their underlying premises and
their pros and cons by the participants.
Members are also likely to feel more confident
about the choice they made
• Disadvantages include the propensity to forge a
compromise in order to avoid choosing sides and
the tendency to focus more on who were the
better debaters than what the best decision
should be.
• Group Decision Support System. This is another
decision approach that uses computers, decision
models, and technological advances to remove
communication barriers,structure the decision
• process and generally direct the group’s
discussion. An example is the electronic
boardroom, featuring instant display of
members’ ideas on a large screen,
computerized vote solicitation and graphic
display of results and electronic transfer of
messages among individual participants.
Potential Outcomes of Formal Group Processes:
• Support for Decisions. Probably the most
important by-product of face to face group
meetings is that people who participate in
making a decision feel more strongly motivated
to accept it and carry it out.
• Quality of Decisions. Groups are also effective
problem-solving tools. In comparison with
individuals, groups usually have greater
information available to them, a variety of
experience to draw upon them and the capacity
to examine suggestions and reject the incorrect
ones. As a result, groups can frequently produce
more and better-quality solutions to some
problems than individuals can.
• Individual development. When working in
decision-making groups, some individuals are
naturally more passive than others and may
withhold their ideas. However, the group will
benefit most throughout widespread and fairly
even participation by all members. Participation
also increases the likelihood of each member’s
developing new interactive skills that can be
used later in other groups.
Reference:
Newstrom, John W. Organizational Behavior.
Human Behavior at Work.