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With credit to Francesco Marciuliano; drawn by Craig Macintosh March 25 2008
 

OVERVIEW
READINGS

EDP 5285 GROUP PROCESSES
GUIDE 1:  INTRODUCTION
GUIDE 2: METHODS FOR STUDYING GROUPS
GUIDE 3: GROUP STRUCTURE
GUIDE 4: ASPECTS OF GROUP STRUCTURE II
GUIDE 5: ATTRACTION TO GROUPS
GUIDE 6: COHESIVENESS II
GUIDE 7: INFLUENCE PROCESSES
GUIDE 8: PERFORMANCE & DECISION-MAKING
GUIDE 9: LEADERSHIP
GUIDE 10: GROUP COOPERATION & CONFLICT

COURSE PROJECT
PRESENTATION

EDP5285-01  SPRING 2018
PROFESSOR SUSAN CAROL LOSH

GROUP PROCESSES
GUIDE TO THE MATERIAL: EIGHT
GROUP PERFORMANCE AND DECISION MAKING

 
 

KEY TAKEAWAYS:
  • Recall that the "mere presence" of others can be motivating and/or arousing (social facilitation).
  • Group members can transfer skills from other groups they belong to.
    • For example "Roberts Rules of Order" on running a meeting.
  • The type of group task can determine how group decision-making proceeds.
  • Structural safeguards can prevent "the social loafer"!
  • Group discussion can contribute to group decisions that become more extreme than the initial average of member decision preferences.
    • More conservative OR more risky
    • Having discussion is critical for polarized shifts
  • Dangerous decision-making: GROUPTHINK
    • Group cohesion, strong social identity and over directive leadership contribute
    • So does group isolation and "yes men"
    • Revolving leadership may help prevent Groupthink
    • So may inviting outside consutants


TOPICS
SOCIAL FACILITATION REVISITED
SITUATIONAL EFFECTS
SOCIAL MOTIVATION
MAKING DECISIONS
GROUPTHINK



In this guide, we examine first, the influence of other people, the situation (especially task characteristics), and group motivation on group performance. I have experienced this topic first hand. I have mentioned that I encourage students to work in teams on course projects and use Team Based Learning in the Research Methods course. So much of our lives are spent in groups that team projects can provide a valuable rehearsal for "life after school." Second, many types of employers stress working in teams* ; employers and supervisors like new recruits to have had "team experience." Finally, my experience has been that team projects can be higher quality than individual ones.

*More recently some employers now want "independent experience" too.

While it is self affirming to see that my personal experiences actually have some validation in the research literature, it is difficult to get students (particularly undergraduates) to do team projects. Most are concerned about "free riders" or "social loafing"  and being exploited, i.e., that they will be the only group member to do the job and that the entire rest of the (free-riding) group will receive credit for one's individual labors.  Other students are unsure about how to coordinate team efforts. When work on a team project is postponed due to other priorities, social loafers are less likely to be held accountable and loafing occurs more frequently.

Yet, when team members work together, the results can be spectacular! I am thinking of the two Social Psychology students who collected attitude data from nearly 1100 summoned jurors that resulted in three publications! Or the five person team who studied the effects of challenging authority on conformity to an aerobics instructor's (an experimental team member) attempts to teach new steps. Or the group that studied whether "pregnancy" made a difference in helping behavior at Governor's Square Mall during the holiday shopping season. Or the group that made over 1000 observations to study conformity in "looking up." None of these projects could have been accomplished by a lone individual.

Of course, these salutary projects are not an inevitable outcome of working in groups. Sometimes groups do worse than the average member working alone, even spectacularly worse. The issue becomes under which circumstances working in groups produces a superior--or an inferior--product.

SOCIAL FACILITATION REVISITED

 
THE EFFECTS OF OTHERS ON INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE

How does the mere presence of other people affect the performance of individuals? Is performance improved, worse, or about the same?

For a brief review of social facilitation material in Guide One, click HERE.

The basic idea is that the presence of others creates at least some physiological arousal. Arousal heightens the probability of performing dominant responses. When a dominant response is correct, the presence of others improves performance. If the dominant response is incorrect, performance can suffer.

Many "work groups" do, in fact, consist of co-actors. Sewers in a clothing factory, students taking an exam, or counter workers at the post office are all co-actors, doing pretty much the same job at the same time in the same place. Although they are not "groups" in the sense of coordinated roles or interdependence, their coworkers' presence may still influence their performance just the same.

More detailed research finds that one key to the physiological arousal that occurs with compresence or the presence of others is evaluation apprehension, i.e., a social anxiety that occurs when we believe that our behavior is under scrutiny and faces normative evaluation. Although some arousal may occur with the mere presence of others, it is heightened if some type of evaluation situation is involved. And, with groups of friends, a relaxation response may occur instead. The latter finding suggests one mechanism whereby more interpersonally cohesive groups are less productive: if relationships are too friendly, group members are more relaxed, less motivated to produce (according to the norms of the larger organization), and possibly produce at a lower quantity and quality.

The presence of others thus can improve performance through motivation and when improvement is easy to do. This would include quantity (when it is easy to increase output) on simple or well structured tasks.

However, what if the situation is new, the task unstructured or complex, requiring a sequence of steps to complete? In that case, both theory and empirical results suggest that individual performance in acquisition tends to suffer in the presence of others (especially on novel tasks). The recommendation is to study, practice, or rehearse alone, then perform in the presence of either co-acting others or an audience, wherein the presence of others will increase arousal, thereby facilitating the performance of well learned responses.

Social facilitation stresses arousal, motivation, or drive. Other theorists in this area suspect more cognitive processes are at work when people perform in the presence of others, such as heightened self-awareness or increased self monitoring. The increased attention paid to one's performance thus can actually distract individuals from exclusive attention to the task.

Ivan Steiner's social combination theory, in contrast, focuses more on group, rather than individual, productivity. In his view, group performance depends more on whether groups have the resources to succeed (schools which lack trained teachers, updated computers, sufficient textbooks, or laboratory equipment, for example, face gigantic hurdles in becoming Florida "A-level" schools) and whether groups can combine these resources productively.
 

THE EFFECTS OF THE SITUATION

 
ON TRANSFERRING SKILLS AND GROUP DIVERSITY

Factors such as co-actors or audience effects interact with situational variables such as task complexity, group diversity, group size, or the nature of the task to influence task performance. KSAs is short for "knowledge, skills, and abilities" that members bring with them to a group situation. Similar to other types of knowledge, skills, and abilities that people possess, group skills learned in one situation may generalize to others.

William Sewell's theory of "structuation" (“A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology, 1992, 98 (1): 1-29.) described how group members can transfer skills from one setting to another. In my study of churches and synagogues, I found that middle-class congregations easily created interlocking, often elaborate, structures of support groups, almost certainly using skills for running groups that members had learned in educational or organizational settings, while working class congregations created far fewer support groups. In my research on citizen responses to a jury summons, it was clear that middle class white collar workers had the bureaucratic skills to easily request a postponement or an excuse from jury duty. Less educated blue collar workers (who held attitudes toward jury duty similar to those of white collar workers) simply failed to show up as opposed to filing a postponement or excuse. Political scientists (e.g., Warren Miller, et al. in The American Voter) report that less educated African-Americans who are church members (Black churches tend to fill more community functions, such as educational or political than White churches do on the average) have higher levels of political engagement, effects that do not hold for European-Americans. The lone working class President of the local Sheltie club was coached continually by other [largely middle class] members on how to hold a semi-formal meeting.

The weight of the evidence indicates that group members DO transfer knowledge and skills from other settings to new groups. This means that group diversity of membership, whether by gender, ethnicity, or social class, can benefit groups because a diverse membership brings different skills and attitudes to the group. If so, this is particularly important for the modern era in countries such as the United States which have begun to stress the importance of diverse work and civic group membership.

Diversity of group membership is a plus--if handled carefully. Group members may bring different points of view and supplement each other's information. A diverse group is likely to have a larger collective memory that encompasses the individual memories of all members. However, it is often difficult to get people to join or work in diverse groups.

On the other hand, different cultural groups can bring different interactional styles to a group setting. "Mars Meets Venus" is not just the orientation of a popular series of books; women and men, for example, tend to have different interaction styles in groups (e.g., men interrupt women at extremely high ratios and women appear more interested in consensus-building) that should be considered if all group members are to participate effectively. Differences that come from statuses outside the group (diffuse status characteristics) should be leveled or else members with junior or subordinate statuses will have their contributions neglected and be afraid to speak up. Further, similarity among members is a primary source of group cohesion. Extra effort may be needed to create a cohesive group of members who arrive with diverse backgrounds and experiences. 


THE GOALS

Group goals not only provide a vision to motivate members and charge them with idealism. The type of goals a group adopts may facilitate group performance. Johnson and Johnson endorse the "START" model. Goals should be:

Cooperative goal structures require members to fill interlocking (interdependent) roles if the group is to achieve success.
 
THE TASK

Group tasks can be:

The type of task becomes important when group productivity is considered. Group productivity typically outstrips that of the average individual, particularly for additive, compensatory, or disjunctive tasks. The type of task can also be important in how a group decides to structure a solution or how to create, divide or coordinate roles.

Of course, many times, the group itself does not decide on the task or group goals. Volunteer groups often decide on their own tasks as do smaller work groups, which may decide on how to implement a task. On the other hand, in hierarchical organizations, the group task may be assigned or delegated. Members can only decide how to implement the task, not what the task will be in the first place. Employees are told they must increase production. Members of a local political group are told to raise votes and funding for state and national candidates. That is why, when larger organizations delegate decision-making or implementation to work groups, delegation must be sincere, so that group members really feel that they "own the task."
  


A SIDE NOTE ON "BRAINSTORMING"

Groups have been accused of stifling creativity. "Brainstorming" was a technique "officially" created in the 1970s and once widely applied in areas such as marketing to overcome this perceived limitation. The general notion was to have a group generate as many creative ideas as possible. Then the group would refine these ideas and adopt a decision, a new marketing scheme, or a new program (e.g., I worked with the U.S. Navy on racial integration programs several years ago when brainstorming was popular).

Because group members might be shy in proclaiming their ideas or sensitive to criticism, or because diffuse status characteristics might lead some member's contributions to be valued more highly, "brainstorming groups" adopted rules to maximize the generation of creative ideas. Any idea, no matter how initially ridiculous it seemed, was to be considered. Evaluation of ideas was reserved toward the end of a brainstorming session and members were expected to add to the ideas generated during the session.

However, one problem is that brainstorming can lead to information overload; so many ideas become generated that people begin to try to block too much information. The arousal overload makes some people anxious. Other members begin to feel conspicuous because they believe they are over or under contributing. At that point, group members "clam up," and, as a result, fewer creative ideas get expressed. Ironically, silence and time may be needed for members to assimilate information and generate ideas individually. Individual output may then be combined later into a group project.

The failure of "simple-minded brainstorming" to work effectively and the reluctance of organizations to put more complex rules in place for more effective brainstorming sessions led this technique to an early demise as a routine event. It still occasionally resurfaces. Of course, brainstorming may be superior to a group not considering a topic at all.

Perhaps a review of the focus group materials might be helpful to those who wish to try brainstorming. Focus groups, too, emphasize generation of ideas and tolerance of the expression of ideas. However, focus group do have a "semi" structure and that might be just the format to help brainstorming groups become more productive. I suspect just a little more structure could make brainstorming the effective tool its creators envisioned it to be.
 
 

SOCIAL MOTIVATION

 
ON THE SOCIAL LOAFER

Some of the benefits and problems that I have encountered while encouraging students to work in teams are neatly summarized by this literature on situational effects such as group size. For example, the tendency for individual effort and  productivity to drop as group size increases (the Ringelmann effect) was originally tested over a century ago in a clever series of experiments.

When tasks are simple and additive, or disjunctive, group productivity typically exceeds individual productivity. However, social loafing also increases with group size and this is a prime source of process loss wherein members work below their potential. Social loafing refers to the tendency for many members to work below capacity when in a group. Typical complaints are "I am the only one who does any work" or "I hate to be the one who did all the work and these loafers get the same grade!" To be charitable, social loafing may also reflect a lack of group structure so that members are not exactly sure what they are supposed to do or when tasks should be completed. Obviously, even suspicions of social loafing damage group cohesion and group productivity.

Here are some factors that increase social loafing:

Here are some factors that decrease social loafing: Group cohesion decreases social loafing--on goals that are the group's goals. Thus if group norms favor productivity, nearly all members will be more motivated and work harder. However, if group norms favor sociability, that is what will increase instead.
 

MAKING DECISIONS

Groups tend to make decisions in stages. Forsyth delineates orientation, discussion, decision, and implementation stages.

In making decisions, groups call upon a variety of decision rules (information processing schemas) and decision schemes. For example,  the "truth wins" (or "Eureka" situation) rule is invoked when a proposal or solution seems so intuitively obvious to most members, once it is explained, that it is almost immediately adopted. Members experience an "aha!" crystallization so that the proposal or solution appears "instinctively true." "Truth supported wins"  answers are less obvious and more ambiguous. As a result, diffuse status characteristics may provide the additional incentive to adopt the proposal or solution.

Groups suffer from some of the same information processing impediments that individuals face. The group may be overly influenced by vivid information but left unimpressed by statistical summaries. Members may act as "agenda scholars," i.e., they are use confirmatory bias in hypothesis "testing" rather than evidence driven decisions. As a result, the group may selectively gather and "cherry pick" data to support its conclusions instead of objectively weighing evidence. In their haste to reach a decision, group members may form conclusions too quickly. Thus, instead of trying to reason through alternatives, the group may force a premature vote or spend time trying to "convert deviants."

Groups also utilize a variety of decision schemes. Some examples include:

Group members do more than simply share information during discussion. They evaluate information, make plans, encourage one another, and reward contributions. Of course, members may also try to influence others to their own point of view. Members may possess hidden agendas, often private plans for individual as opposed to group, benefit. In turn, members may form coalitions to either ward off influence or create support for their own position.
 
STOP, LOOK, AND LISTEN

More ethnographic research conducted in groups indicates that interpersonal skills through the group decision making process need to be sharpened:

Gosh, I know these seem almost intuitively obvious. But it is astounding how many of these counter-productive behaviors occur in groups--even among groups of college professors! 


 
THE 'RISKY SHIFT"
OOPS...THE CONSERVATIVE SHIFT
AH...GROUP POLARIZATION!

The old cliché was that groups were conservative. Group discussion was supposed to moderate extreme viewpoints, and opinions or courses of action would reflect horse trading and compromises among members. Therefore, you can imagine the surprise among researchers in the mid 1960s when a series of studies (the "Stoner dilemmas") reported that, as a result of group discussion, not only was the group's final choice more risky than the average of members' choices before deliberation, but individual members' post test scores also moved in a "risky" direction. These studies were called research on the "risky shift."

Within the next 10 years of research, it became apparent that (1) groups could experience "conservative shifts" too and (2) it was something about the group discussion that could move members in a direction more extreme (risky or conservative) than the average of group member's individual viewpoints. Discussion appears to intensify attitudes, beliefs, values, judgments and perceptions. The entire phenomenon was then renamed "group polarization" or "group polarized decision making."

The phenomenon may occur because those holding extreme views usually try to be persuasive and may talk so much that other members may conclude that this is the group's position, creating "pluralistic ignorance"  or misperception of the group's ' true position.

Pressures toward unanimity (such as occur in juries) or social comparison processes (the new information  presented stimulates members to compare their own opinions with the group) may also be important. Group discussion may also provide a forum for members to learn the group's values. The direction of the shift (risky or conservative) seems to follow the general direction of initial group values. Polarized decisions are a dramatic reminder that groups can taken on a "life of their own," divergent from the sum or average of individual members.
 


IT ALL COMES TOGETHER: GROUPTHINK
(or...did group cohesion run amuck?)
(maybe...maybe not...maybe in combination with other factors)

Not only can group decisions be different from the average of co-acting individuals in a simulated group, but, in real life they also can be disastrous! "Groupthink" is the term that Irving Janis coined to describe a rigid, narrow, ethnocentric style of decision making that can lead groups to make absolutely terrible decisions. The group's decisions are problematic because the group considers only a narrow range of information that supports its own agenda. The problem may be exacerbated by a directive leader who states her or his own direction early in the group session. (See more recent--and creative--research by Phillip Tetlock.)

Janis felt that group cohesiveness was a prime factor in creating Groupthink situations. Because members want to belong and because cohesive groups are better at enforcing norms and rejecting deviants, cohesive groups are more likely to impose homogeneity and uniformity upon their membership. This suggests that interpersonal cohesion or possibly the attractiveness of a highly prestigious group may increase "Groupthink" while stressing task cohesion or group structure may ameliorate it.
 
GROUPTHINK SYMPTOMS OR MANIFESTATIONS:

WHY IT HAPPENS:
HOW CAN WE PREVENT OR AMELIORATE "GROUPTHINK"?

I have presented material first on cohesion and group influence because these two sets of processes can dramatically influence group decision making and performance. Descriptions of the types of decision making and performance prepare us for our next topic, which is leadership. The effectiveness of different styles of leadership often depends on the type of group situation: the goals, the tasks, the structure.
 
 
 
OVERVIEW
READINGS

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Susan Carol Losh
March 21 2018


In memory, Columbia