Major Objectives of the Course

1. Major Objectives of the Course • Discover  there is a long standing and valuable body of ideas and theory about effective teams that speak directly to the action skills of team leadership. • Gain some keen insights about the nature of the leadership challenges in teams. I hope you have come to realize, for example, that leadership in teams is learning to set the right conditions for effective team performance, that leadership does not have to reside in single individuals. Leadership in smart, self-managed teams is more about circuits of influence and patterns of skillful interactions among members than leadership" traits" that reside in a single, appointed “leader.”  • Realize a valid diagnosis about group problems and challenges requires knowing how to ask the right questions and design effective interventions. Bad questions lead to a faulty diagnoses. Faulty diagnoses and we try to fix the wrong things

2. A Helpful Distinction: between “Group Social Processes” and “Content of What a Group Does”

3. Groups operate on two levels • Content: an overt conscious level that  focuses on task, what a group does • Social Group Processes: a more implicit level, HOW the group is functioning. • Task processes—how groups accomplish their work • Maintenance processes—how groups meet psychological and relationship needs

4. Content: the "business at hand, " the subject matter, the concrete examples: • The literal or data/facts relevant to the problem being handled • The content of what folks say (what it “means” to others is part of the process) • Quantifiable measures of performance • Measurable outcome statements • Formal structure of authority

5. By contrast……PROCESS is: • Often dynamic and fluid, and for the untrained, sometimes difficult to follow.

6. The Creation of a Norm • We Seek Out Others for Social Comparison • Psychological reaction-arousal • Increase in affect (emotions) • Uncertainty • Need for information Establish a norm Comparison with others Ambiguous, confusing circumstance How should I act? WHEW! NOW I KNOW WHAT I SHOULD DO Social comparison: gaining information from other people’s reactions (Festinger, 1954)

7. Norms • a group's unspoken rules: generally agreed-on informal rules that guide all members' behavior in the group. Norms represent shared ways of viewing the world, and as a result, become terms for membership.

8. Norms come from groups • Fundamental human need to belong to social groups. • We learn that survival and prosperity is more likely if we live and work together. • To live together, we need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors that reduce in-group threats; act for the common good. • We thus learn to conform to rules of other people. • And the more we see others behaving in a certain way or making particular decisions, the more we feel obliged to follow suit. • This will happen even when we are in a group of complete strangers. We will go along with the others to avoid looking we don’t know what to do.

9. Norms, if codified • Become formal rules of proper conduct. However, in most instances, norms are adopted implicitly as people align their behaviors during the group formation process until consensus about appropriates actions emerges.

10. Examples of Process • Who talks to whom and who listens to whom? • Use of space • “Handshake" • How roles are filled or not filled? task vs. maintenance • How the patterns of influence evolve, their nature and how informal leadership responds to formal authority • Tacit norms • Groups sometimes are explicit about how they will decide; often a decision making methodology just evolves as a function of process.

11. Examples of Group Social Processes • Social facilitation • Group think • Loafing • Risk taking and polarization

12. The Very Presence of Others Effects Our Behavior • Social Facilitation When we have tasks which we find relatively easy, we find the presence of other people a positive stimulus such that we perform even better. However, when the tasks are difficult, we find the audience unnerving and we are more likely to put in a worse performance.

13. Michaels et al. (1982) 2 groups of subjects categorized as good or bad players Unobtrusive observation 2 conditions: play with vs without audience Results? Social Facilitation

14. Example of “Field Research” Watched pool players at the university union to observe social facilitation. • Good pool players, who made an average of 71% of their shots when playing alone, increased performance to 80% when a group of 4 people began watching them. • Average pool players, who made about 36% of their shots when playing alone, decreased to about 25% shots made when 4 people started watching them. Micheals, J. W., Blommel, J. M., Brocato, R. M., Linkous, R. A., & Rowe, J. S. (1982). Social facilitation and inhibition in a natural setting. Replications in Social Psychology, 2, 21-24.

15. Should you play pool in public? Good players % Shots Made Bad players No Audience Audience

16. Group Level of Analysis • Groups can “have a life of their own.” • Tuckman’s stages as example

17. Performing Task Norming Storming Adjourning Forming

18. What Methods Do Researchers Use to Measure Individual and Group Processes? • Observational measures: observing and recording events • Qualitative and quantitative (structured) measures • Bales's Interaction Process Analysis (IPA) classifies behaviors into two categories: task and relationship behaviors

19. What Methods Do Researchers Use to Measure Individual and Group Processes? • Self-report measures: group members describe their perceptions and experiences • Example: Moreno's sociometry method USING PATTERNS OF INFLUNCE TO DEFINE LEADERSHIPTwo “groups”; same members • Group A: Who influences the group the most? • Group B: Who influences you the most?

21. Patterns of interdependency • All relationships to some extent have interdependencies • Mutually beneficial

23. What Are Communication Networks? • Types: three, four, five person • Centralized vs. decentralized

25. Social LoafingWhy Do People Loaf in Groups? VS

26. Group Papers • “Hate ‘em” • “Hey prof, why should she get the same grade as I when she loafed her way thru.”

27. Social Loafing Theory: Modification of Social Facilitation Theory • The tendency for people to do worse on simple tasks but better on complex tasks when they are in the presence of others and their individual performance cannot be evaluated.

28. Social Loafing • Tendency to reduce effort when pooling effort toward a common goal and when group members are not individually accountable. • Decreases when tasks are challenging or appealing, and when fellow group members are friends (as opposed to strangers) and can be held accountable.

29. Social Loafing • Williams and Karan (1985): • Task Difficulty (easy or hard maze) • Type of evaluation (individual vs collective) • Time to solve maze

30. Social Loafing .6 .4 Individual Evaluation .2 Time to Complete Maze 0 Collective Evaluation -.2 -.4 -.6 Easy Difficult

31. Group Decision Making • Group Think: • The tendency for members of highly cohesive groups to assume that their decisions can’t be wrong, that all members must support the group’s decision strongly, and that contrary information should be ignored

32. Group Decision Making • Causes of Group Think: • Cohesiveness • Emergent group norms • Norms suggesting that the group is moral and infallible • Biased Processing of Information • Groups motivated to find reasons to support their views rather than seeking truth and accuracy • Groups Often Fail to Pool Information • Focus on Information all members already know • Devil’s Advocate Technique and Authentic Dissent ameliorate such tendencies

33. Group Polarization • Originally dubbed the “risky shift” • The risky shift is the tendency for group decisions to be riskier than the average decision of the individuals in the group.

34. Group Decision Making • Basic Nature of Group Polarization: • Group polarization is the tendency of group members to shift toward more extreme positions After Group Discussion Before Group Discussion + Neutral - Views Held by Group Members + Neutral - Views Held by Group Members

35. Group Polarization • Why? • Group discussion leads you to hear more information. • Active participation in a discussion leads you to “rehearse” your thoughts leading to more attitude change. • Safer to provide more extreme answers once the normative opinion of the group has been determined.

36. Social Group Processes • Observing and understanding process can lead to a more complete understanding of what is really going on.