Interaction and performance in groups - summary of chapter 11 of Social Psychology by Smith, E, R (fourth edition)

Social psychology
Chapter 11
Interaction and performance in groups

Interdependence: each group member’s throughts, emotions, and behaviors influence the others’.

Social facilitation: effects on minimal interdependence

Social facilitation: improvement and impairment

Even when interdependence is minimal, the mere presence of others can produce arousal, either because the other people are highly evaluative or because they are distracting.

• Arousal improves performance of easy, well-learned behaviors
• Arousal often interferes with performance of novel or complex tasks.

Social facilitation: an increase in the likelihood of hihgly accessible responses, and a decrease in the likelihood of less accessible responses, due to the persence of others.

Even the virtual presence of virutal others can cause these effects.

Evaluation apprehension

When we focus on what other people think about us, it creates arousal, with sometimes postive and sometimes negative effects on performance.

Most of the time, we want other people to value, include, and like us. Ou self-esteem is greatly affected by what others think of us.
The presence of others who are in a posititon to judge us produces evaluation apprehension, which changes our performance in the way predicted by social facilitation theory.

Distraction

The presence of others can also disctract us from our task, also creating arousal and impacting performance. However, with specific types of tasks, distraction can focus us on taks-relevant cues, potentially improving performance.

Others can distract us.
Their mere presence causes us to think about them, to react to them, or to monitor what they are doing, and thereby deflects attention from the task at hand.

Our impulses to do two different things at once, conentrate on the task and to react to others, start to conflict wich each other, we become agitated and aroused.
This arousal will typically improve performance on simple tasks and interfere with it on difficult tasks.
The presence of others also requires people to split their attention between the other people and the task at hand.

Being crowded is arousing because crowds create many opportunities for evaluation and distraction.

Performance in face-to-face groups: interaction and interdependence

Task interdependence: reliance on other members of a group for mastery of material outcomes that arise from the group’s task.

Social interependence: relieance on other members of the group for feelings of connectedenss, social and emotional rewards, and a positive social identity.

How groups change: stages of group development

Face-to-face groups usually go through different stages of relationship with their members.

• Groups socialization, groups and individuals can become comitted to each other, trough processes that guide members’ entry, socialization, role maintenance, and sometimes exit, from the group.

At the same time, groups to through formation, conflict, development of norms, performance, and dissolution as they try to maximize social en task interdependence to develop an identity and reach their groals. Time pressure can affect how groups solve these problems.

Group socialization: mutual evaluation by members and groups

Group socialization: the cognitive, affective, and behavioral changes that occur as individuals join and leave groups.
An ongoing process of mutual evaluation from both the individual member’s and the group’s perspectives.

When the individual feels that the group offers a better chance of meeting his or her needs than alternative group memberships, the individual becomes commited to the group.
When the group feels that the individual offers a better chance of fulfilling group goals than other potential members, the group is also committed to the individual.
These processes of evaluation and mutual commitment define the various stages of relationship that members can have with their groups.

Initialy, groups try to size up potential members who might contribute to the group good and help the group succeed, whilde individuals at the same time assess the extent to which groups help satisfy personal needs for mastery and connectedness.
If this initual evaluation leads to the individual to commit to the group and vice versa, the individual becomes a new member of the group.

Entry to the group triggers socialization.
The group triees to mold the individual into a ‘team player’ who can help achieve goals.
The individual tries to shape the group so that it meets as many of his or her needs as possible, both for task mastery and for social connections.
To the extent that individuals and groups like what they see in each other at this stage, their mutual commitment may rise again. Such commitment to the group makes individuals adopt group values, feel good about fellow members, and work hard to achieve group goals and maintain membership in the group.
Commitment to the individual makes the group value, like, and seek to keep the individual as a member.

Sometimes groups might be reluctant to commit to a new group member, especially if they know that the newcomer isn’t pernament.

Once the individual is a fully commited member, the relationship enters the maintenance phase.
The group tries to find a specific role for the individual that maximizes his or her contribution. The individual tries to find a role that maximizes the satisfaction he or she can obtain from the group.
If this role negotiation succeeds, mutual commitment remains hihg and membership works will from both perspectives.

Because the group and its members must be mutually commited to one another, those who want to join and remain in the goup must be careful not to upset the group n ways that might lead to hteir ousting.

Group development: coming together, falling apart

The overall interaction patterns among all the members of the group go through different stages as they try to coordinate task interdependence and enchance social interdependence.
Although some groups go through all five of the stages, many others skip steps, repeat steps, recycle through many of the steps, or dissolve before they ever reach the later stages.

Five stages:

1. Forming
   Initual processes of evaluation and mutal selection are occuring.
   Members attempt to understand where other individuals stand in the group and what the group as a whole stands for .
   There is usually an intense focuss on the group’s leader.
2. Storming
   Conflict is often evident in the second stage.
   The group and individual members are attempting to shape and negotiate specific roles.
   Conflict can be problematic for groups, but certain types of conflict under some conditions may be beneficial.
3. Norming
   If the group survivies the storming stage, harmony and unity usually emerge as consensus, cohesion, and a positiver group identity develop.
   In this stage most members tend to be highly satisfied with the group and to agree about the group’s purpose and the role and responsibilities of individual members. Group commitment is high, with group members who more strongly identify with their group being more likely to remain an active part of it.
4. Performing
   With norms established, the group moves into the performance stage.
   Members cooperate to solve problems, make decisions, and generate output. They exchange information freely, handle disagreements productively, and maintain mutual allegiance to the group goals.
5. Adjouring
   The end of the groups life span.
   At a group’s endpoint, members often gather to evaluate their work, give feedback to each other, and express their feelings about the group.
   The dissolution of a cohesive group can be stressful for members if group identification has taken place, loss of the group entails a schange in social identity.

Time and group development

Times has other effects on the ways groups interact and deal with their tasks.
Time growing short may trigger a radically different approach to the group’s task, shift in strategies, and a greater emphasis on productive work.

Groups that spend part of their early planning on timing issues will perform better.

Time pressure alteres the way groups approach their tasks. Groups under time pressure devote more of their interaction to clearly task-focused matters and differ from less pressured groups in the ways they share information and seek to influence each other. Increased task focus.
Time pressure also has it costs. Less creative and original and groups under time pressure tend to find worse solutions in decision-making.

Being pushed out of groups: rejection and ostracism

When existing group members decide to actively remove someone from the group, social rejection has occurred.
Ostracism: being ignored and excluded from a group.
Being rejected or ostracized from groups can have profound effecs on a person.

Compared to being included, ostracizedd in Cyberball leads people to report lower levels of belonging, self-esteem, control and a sense of a meaningful existence.
Even ostracism by others we deplore can have the same effect.
Areas of the brain that are active in response of physical pain are activated during ostracism and their sensitivity to physical pain changes.

Ostracism and rejection have potent effect on people’s perceptions, motivations, and behaviors.
People who are rejected or ostracized want to recapure affiliation with other people.

Getting the job done: group performance

To achieve their performance goals, groups must maintain their motivation and avoid problems of coordination. Proccesses including communication within the group and shared emotions can influence group performance. Training and accountability can improve performance, but perhaps the most important is developing a common social identity, which helps avoid performance problems by attracting and keeping valuable group members and by enouraging acceptance of group goals and normative cooperation.

Forms of task interdependence

Groups differ in terms of the type of interdependence they require.

• With additive tasks, the potential performance of the group is approximately equal to the sum of the performances of the individual members and is generally better than any one member’s performance.
  Coordination is important.
• In disjunctive tasks, a group’s performance is expected to be as good as the performance of its best indiviudal member.
  In this case, interdependence means that the outcome will be a function of the individual skills and talents of the gorup members.
  Coordination is important because other members have to be careful not to get in the way of any individual member who can complete the task.
• Conjunctive tasks depend on every member playing his or her part.
  The group’s performance is as good as the performance of tis worst member.
  Coordination is important so the group has to organize it’s members activities.
• Compensatory tasks involve each group member contributing a judgment or estimate, which are averaged to produce the group’s product.
  Under the right circumstances, the result is often a good final judgment that reflects the collective wisdom of the group as a whole.

Most tasks are complex tasks, which consists of subtasks that involve all forms of interdependence.
The more complicated the task, the greater the need for planning and coordination to ensure that member’s skills and efforts are appropriately allocated. And the greater the opportunity will be for the group’s performance to multiply and surpass any possible effort by a single individual.
Also many opporutinities for things to go wrong.

Gains and losses in group performance

Groups do perform many tasks better than an individual could.

• Groups can multiply individual effort.
• Provide a variety of skills that no one person possesses
• Work together to complete tasks in parallel, rather than serial, fashion.
• Collective memory is better than individual memory
• Members can observe each other’s levels of confidence

But

• Groups do not always have more acurate memory
• Members can observe each other’s levels of confidence

Losses from decreased motivation: social loafing

Social loafing: the tendency to exert less effort on a task when an individual’s efforts are an unidentifiable part of a group than when the same task is performed alone.

Sharing responsibility can reduce effort no matter the task.
People may even ‘preloaf’ by preparing less for an upcoming group task then they do for an upcoming individual one.

Why do people loaf in group tasks?

• The nature of the task
  social loafing occurs less often when tasks are interesting and involving.
• The perceived features of one’s group partners
  when a person’s partner in a group task seems stereotypically well suited for the task, the person is more likely to loaf, believing that the partner is perfectly capable for doing the work well without much help.
• Interdependence
  social loafing is reduced when individual contributions are essential for success or when group members know that their individual controbutions are monitored.
• Motivation
• People’s orientation toward the group
  strong group identification decreases social loafing

To loaf or not to loaf seems to depend on motivation.
When individual performance is important for task mastery, social loafing declines.
The same when an individual’s performance has implications for connectedness to the group.

Social compensation: one group member working especially hard to compensate for another’s low level of effort or performance.
Sometimees the wakes or least capable group members work harder in groups than they do alone, possible because social comparison with other, better-performing group members inspires more effort.

Lossess from poor coordination

The group needs to be organized if it is to do the best possible work.
Members need assigned roles and a clear sense of their resources.
They also need to be aware of one another’s strenghts and weaknesses, how their actions contribute to group goals, and of who has a right to command and who has a duty to obey.

Coordination in groups is often achieved via explicit communication, when group members directly spell out who should do what tasks.
Coordination can slo be tacit, occuring without explicit communication.

Shared social knowledge is especially important for tacit coordination.

Processes that affect performance: group communication

Groups have one primary weapon in the struggle to achieve high task efficiency while maintaining cohesion: communication.
A high level of open communication does contribute to overall group performance.
The balance between task-focused and socially-focused communications is crucial if a group is to be effective.

• If a group’s performance suffers because of ineffective strategies or inadequate skills, the group must seek task-focused remedies.
• By low cohesion, remedies must have a social focus aimed at increasing positive interpersonal relationships and group identification.

The optimal type and amound of communication depend on several factors.

Technology and communication

Groups often interact through technology instead of in person.
These new technologies influence both how tasks are completed and how group members feel as they complete them.

Computer-mediated group decision making may be less vulnerable to problems like the premature consensus of groupthink and biases that polarize majority views.
And more equal participation among members.

Overall, technology-mediated groups took longer to reach a decision, made poorer quality decisions, and group members were less satisfied with their decisions compared to groups who communicated face-to-face.
It may not feel very good to interact in technology-mediated groups either. It may damage group commitment and reduce positive emotions in groups.
Different types of computer-mediated communication may have unique problems.

Face-to-face communication is still preferre in many instances.

The emotional ties that develop from actual interaction seem essential for the growth of interpersonal trust and commitment, as well as group solidarity.
Physical proximity seems to be essential for this type of frequent, informal interaction.

Processes that affect performance: emotions and mood in groups

The emotional ties that form between group members can force for good, helping to develop trust and commitment.
A group’s emotional climate or mood can affect performance in many ways.
These group moods may arise trough contagion, with the moods of one or more members spreading to many other group members.

• Other members exposed to a negative mood showing decreases in cooperation and perceived task performance

These consequences are evident to outside observers as well as to the group members themselves.

Both the content of group emotions and the consistency of emotions across members shape observers’ impressions.

Cures for group performance losses

Communication and shared emotions do not always do the trick.

• Group training can imporve performance
• Making groups feel accountable for their process can help
• Making group membership a positive part of members’ social identity.

Building positive social interdependence often helps solve some of the problems of task interdependence.
There is a positive correlation between group cohesion and better performance.

• Cohesive groups encourage cooperation
  Cohesive groups foster cooperation in the service of group goals, rather than competition for individual ones.
  Cooperation leads to psostive fleelings among group memers and helps them work together to achieve group goals.
• Cohesive groups follow norms
• Cohesive groups attract and keep valued members

Social identity can be such a powerful tool that it sometimes holds groups together when no material benefits are forthcoming.

Leadership and power

Effective leaders enhance task performance and maintain social interdependence. The ways they do this must differ from situation to situation. Sometimes, however, stereotypical thinking prevents the most effective leaders from emering in groups. Some types of leadership are particularly likely to help align individual and group goals and these leaders may help groups be particularly successful. Of course, such extraordinary influence can be used in destructive as well as constructive wasy. Formal group leaders as well as others (such as parents) usually can control other people’s outcomes, such as power has a numer of psychological effects.

Leadership: a process in which one or more group members are permitted to influence and motivate others to help attain group goals.

What do leaders do?

The exercise of leadership generally involves two distinct types of behavior:

• Those focused on decision kaing and task performance
• Those aimed at enhancing cohesion and liking among group members

Task-related leader behaviors include:

• Telling group members what to do
• Criticizing poor performance
• Coordinating others’ activities

Relationship-oriented leadership involves:

• Being open
• Friendly
• Approachable
• Treating group members as equals
• Listening to group members’ opinions

Relation-oriented leadership appears to be especially important when work groups are diverse rather than homogeneous.
In general, diversity can have both positive and negative effects on groups.

• Diversity can reduce interpersonal liking and trust and increase conflict within the group.
• A diverse group can aslo bring to bear multiple perspectivesm viewing work problems form many angles, and increasing performance and satisfaction.

Leader behavior strongly influences whether group diversity will hurt or help in these ways.
A match between leader mood and follower characteristics may be important.

Leadership effectiveness: Person or situation?

Studies have revealed that the same person could be an effective leader in one context, but ineffective in another.
Group success depends less on who the leader is than on what kind of leadership is needed in a particular situation.

Contingency theories of leadership: theories holding that leader behaviors can differ and that different behaviors are most effective in specific leadership situations.
The leader’s style should match the type of leadership demanded by the situation.

Althoug some specific tasks may be best matched by a task-focused or relationship-oriented leader, most complex tasks require both leadership styles.
The essence of good leadership may be the flexibility to adjust the mix of social and task motivation that a group needs in a particular situation.
Leadership is about the flexible exercise of social influence.

Who becomes leader?

People seem to have ideas about who is ‘leader material’ regardless of the task at hand.

• One clue they use is how much group members talk. Much → leader
  The quality of what group members say also can play a significant role in judging who is leader material. In some cases, quality of remaks can trump their quantity.
• Nonverbal signs of dominance
• Groups seem to prefer who embody the group’s stereotypes, norms, or central defining attributes.

Stereotypes and leadership

Common stereotypes influence people’s perceptions of leadership.
People are seen as leaders when their appearance fits stereotyipcally with what they say.

Putting group first: transformational leadership

Whereas most leaders help followers reach existing goals, charismatic leaders may actually change their followers’ goals.

Transformational leadership: leaders who inspire extreme devotion and emotional identification on the part of their followers, allowing them to have profound effects on their followers.
To have these profound effects, transformational leaders must be self-confident and determined, as well as skilled and inspiring communicators.
They take clear an strong stands that empathize commitment to goals, optimistically express an attractive vision of the future, question old assumptions and traditions, and are highly carign toward group members.

Studies of leaders who exhibit these kinds of behaviors suggest that they are successful in promoting not only organizational commitment and work satisfaction, but also group performance.
Transformational practices ten to empower followers, creating a sense of control that thelps explain the succes of such leadership.

Transformational leaders are effective for exactly the same reasons as other leaders: they nurture cohesion among group members and inspire them to adopt the group’s goals as their own. These factors in turn inspire group members to look beyond themselves and adopt new collective goals for the group, eliminating potential coordination and motivation losses in the process.

The dark side of leadership

Groups and group memebers can pay high cost for poor leadership.
When leaders lead the wrong way, group members who can do so will withdraw from the group, hurting their own, group’s, and the leader’s changes of achieving the goal that brought the group together in the first place.
Under bad leaders, task motivation abbs away and group members not only fail to perform, but can actively attempt to undermine the leader’s agenda and the group’s goals.
Even the life-changing potential of charismatic or transformational leadership can have a dark side.

Power

Power: the ability to provide or withold rewards or punishments from others.

Not only do powerful people seem to pursue goals differently, but they prefer to pursue certain types of goals more than others, especially those focused on rewards and those that thelp maintain their power.

Either too much power or too little power within a group can harm performance.