Chapter 9: Foundations of Group Behavior

Foundations of Group Behavior

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish between the different types of groups.
• Describe the punctuated-equilibrium model of group development.
• Show how role requirements change in different situations.
• Demonstrate how norms exert influence on an individual's behavior.
• Show how status and size differences affect group performance.
• Describe how cohesion is related to group effectiveness.
• Contrast the strengths and weaknesses of group decision-making.

Employability Skills

• Critical Thinking & Creativity
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Self-Management
• Social Responsibility
• Leadership
• Career Management

Confronting Deviant Norms

• Reports indicate a widespread pattern of discrimination, harassment, and abuse throughout McDonald's.
• A 2020 poll showed 76% of 782 female McDonald's workers experienced harassment, including inappropriate touching and lewd comments.
• 71% of employees reported facing punishment for reporting harassment.
• McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski announced the "Global Brand Standards" to ensure safe and respectful workplace behavior.
• Despite the #MeToo movement, harassment remains a problem in the restaurant industry, with 90% of women and 70% of men experiencing it.
• Power dynamics in the restaurant industry can lead to ignored, tolerated, or normalized sexual harassment.
• Employees often feel uncomfortable confronting individuals about their behavior when harassment becomes a norm.
• The restaurant industry's norm glorifying the customer can devalue and ignore the employee experience.
• Service employees often face harassment and mistreatment but do not report it.
• Managers may perceive customer harassment as less harmful than employee harassment.
• Reliance on tips can lead customers to justify harassment based on appearance.
• Bystander-intervention training helps witnesses become allies, teaches managers and employees how to recognize, address, and confront harassment, and emphasizes its seriousness.

Defining and Classifying Groups

• A group in organizational behavior consists of two or more individuals interacting and interdependent to achieve specific goals.
• A sales group selling insurance to local citizens is an example.

Types of Groups

• A formal group is defined by the organizational structure with assigned tasks.
• behaviors are stipulated and directed toward organizational goals in formal groups.
• Airline flight crews are examples of formal groups.
• An informal group is neither formally structured nor organizationally determined, fulfills social needs, and has common interests.
• Informal groups arise in response to social needs or common interests.
• Three employees from different departments who have lunch are an informal group.

Social Identity

• Shared experiences amplify perception and bond with others.
• Employees of a company identify with its history, successes, losses, and the local community.
• Tom's Marine Sales is an example of a business celebrating its 50th anniversary.
• Social identity theory says that people have emotional reactions to group success or failure because self-esteem is tied to the group.
• Employees might feel proud, angry, or schadenfreude, influenced by their group's fortunes.
• Wendy's social media group uses Twitter "roasting wars" to create feeling of belonging and pride.
• Job applicants and "gig workers" are more attracted to organizations that match their social identities.
• Multiple identities can cluster together (family and temple or coworkers and gym buddies).
• An expatriate working in Rome might be very aware of being from the United States.
• Various identifiers include: organization, city, profession, religion, ethnicity, gender.
• Relational identification explains connections with others based on roles.
• Collective identification explains connections based on the aggregate characteristics of groups.
• Identification with groups is often stronger than with organizations.
• Low identification with a group can lead to decreased satisfaction and fewer organizational citizenship behaviors.
• Immigrant workers may experience strained and threatened identities without supportive supervisors or community.
• Leader's word choice matters, where "we" or "us" are used instead of "I", signaling belonging.
• Social categorization can lead people to think of those who share their social identity as the ingroup and other groups as outgroups.
• This can cause prejudice and discrimination.
• Favoritism, and not hostility, might cause most discriminatory behaviors.
• Managers playing favorites with their own race/ethnicity, gender identity, can be complicit in discrimination.

Stages of Group Development

• Temporary groups pass through a unique sequencing of actions (or inaction) called the punctuated-equilibrium model.
• The group's last meeting is characterized by markedly accelerated activity.
• The first meeting sets the group's direction.
• The first phase of group activity encounters a period of inertia and thus makes slower progress.
• A transition takes place when the group has used up half its allotted time.
• This transition initiates major changes.
• A second phase of inertia follows the transition.
• The first meeting establishes the group's general purpose and direction automatically in the first few seconds.
• A transition occurs halfway between the first meeting and the deadline, heightening awareness and prompting change.
• The transition ends Phase 1 and includes dropping old patterns.

Alternative Models for Group Development

• Forming Stage
• Conflict Resolution (Storming) Stage
• Norming Stage
• Performing Stage

Group Properties

• Roles, norms, status, size, and cohesion.

Group Property 1: Roles

• A role is function assumed corresponding to a given position.
• Individuals take on diverse roles at work and in life, which can create conflicts.
• Individuals draw on role perceptions in order to learn expectations.
• Role perceptions are an individual's view of how to act in a given situation.
• Role expectations are how other believe others should act.

Role Perception

• Role perceptions are drawn from stimuli such as family, coworkers, and media.
• Working, married parents strongly identify with their family roles and positively translate these roles into work roles, such as their leadership expectations.
• Marine research has shown some role perceptions translate between contexts but stay limited.

Role Expectations

• A U.S. federal judge is viewed as having propriety and dignity.
• A football coach may be seen as aggressive, dynamic, and inspiring to the players.
• Role expectations influence role perceptions.
• Influence is shown with supervisors expecting their employees to innovate in their role.
• Voice and actions surrounding ethical issues influence the ethical role perceptions of followers.
• Role expectation influence can be emotionally and motivationally charged.
• The perspective of the psychological contract, an unwritten agreement between employees and employers with established expectations, also applies.
• Management is expected to treat employees fairly, give feedback, and communicate what is a fair day's work
• Employees are expected to demonstrate a good attitude, follow directions, and show loyalty.
• Management not fulfilling their bargain can lead to negative effects on employee performance, counterproductive work behavior (CWB), turnover, and dissatisfaction.
• Fulfilling the bargain leads to gratitude, identification, and willingness to go above and beyond in performing OCBs.
• Loss of resources, family issues, and workload can limit employees from fulfilling their part of the bargain.
• Perceptions of obligation can be tricky and complicate the situation.
• Overly supportive employees make other feel like they are obligated to do more in their role.
• Trust can be repaired if either party does not fulfill their part of the contract.
• Forgiveness can help relieve emotional exhaustion following a contract breach.
• Do not deny that the contract breach ever occurred, and take responsibility if you want to rebuild trust.
• One role making it difficult to comply with another results in role conflict.
• Professors are expected to be excellent teachers and researchers when they only have time for one role.
• When the expectations of different groups of people that people belong to are at opposition interrole conflict occurs.
• For example, holding multiple jobs can lead to interole conflict, as can family life.

Gossip and Exclusion

• Gossip is talking about other people, sharing rumors, and speculating about others' behaviors; gossip affects a person's reputation.
• Prosocial gossip can expose people and can have positive changes.
• Exclusion comes in the form of leaving someone out of a group.
• Ostracism is when people are overtly excluded from a group.
• Ostracized individuals often cooperate more to rejoin the group.
• Gossip combined with the ability to ostracize can increase cooperation.

Role Conflict

• Occurs when compliance with one role makes it difficult to comply with another.
• Professors are expected to be excellent teachers and researchers when they only have enough time to perform one of the roles well.

Interrole Conflict

• Occurs when the expectations of the different groups we belong to are in opposition.
• Holding multiple jobs can lead to interole conflict (such as mixing software engineer and guitarist).
• A common example is family conflicting with work roles.

Preventing Gossiping

• Confine gossip to truthful work-related discussions.
• Ensure that there is opportunity to rejoin the group with full standing.
• Ensure that group norms are positive.

Group Property 2: Norms

• Norms are acceptable standards of behavior shared by members that express what they ought to do and ought not to do under certain circumstances.
• Designed offices (with a “no shoes” policy) are a way to establish norms in the social setting.
• Different groups, communities, and societies have different norms.
• Norms are not just leader-established, opinion-driven policies.
• They need to be adopted in order to work.

Norms and Emotions

• Emotions of group members can amplify the power of norms.
• Coworkers may react negatively and uncivilly to you coming in sick for work.
• Norms can dictate the experience of emotions for the individuals and for their groups.
• For example, team members experience moral emotions that lead to different behavioral responses.

Norms and Conformity

• Conformity is the adjustment of one's behavior in order to align with the group standards.
• As a member of a group, you desire acceptance and stability.
• Considerable evidence suggests that groups place strong pressures to change to match the group's standards.
• The impact that group pressures for conformity can have on an individual member's judgment was demonstrated in studies by Solomon Asch.

Aspects of Asch's Study

• Asch formed groups of seven or eight people who were asked to compare two cards.
• One card had one line, and the other had three lines of varying length, one of which was identical to the line on the one-line card.
• The difference in line length was obvious; in fact, participants were incorrect less than 1 percent of the time in announcing which of the three lines matched the single line.
• The experiment began with two rounds of matching exercises, in which each participant was called upon to match the card to its identical counterpart.
• Everyone gave the right answers.
• On the third round, however, the first participant, who was part of the research team, gave an obviously wrong answer.
• For example, saying "C" in Exhibit 9-2.
• The next participant, also on the research team, gave the same wrong answer, and so forth.
• Now the dilemma confronting the participant, who did not know the others were on the research team, was this: publicly state a perception that differed from the position of the others or give an incorrect answer that agreed with the others.
• The results over many experiments showed 75 percent of subjects gave at least one answer that conformed (that they knew was wrong but was consistent with the replies of other group members), and the average conformer gave wrong answers 37 percent of the time.
• Those who participated in the experiment agreed independence was preferable.
• When they do conform, it is most likely to their reference groups.
• Important groups in which people are aware of other members and define themselves as members.
• Conformity effects are not always bad.
• For example, people can conform to prosocial norms, such as generosity in donating, and can even feel more empathy as a result.
• Reference groups are important.

Norms and Behavior

• Norms can cover any aspect of group behavior.
• Norms in the workplace significantly influence employee behavior.
• The influence of norms on worker behavior did not occur until the Hawthorne Studies conducted between 1924 and 1932 at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Chicago.
• The most important finding was that employees did not individually maximize their output.
• Rather, their role performance became controlled by a group norm.
• Members were afraid that if they significantly increased their output, the unit incentive rate might be cut
• so the group established its idea of a fair output, neither too much nor too little.
• The group enforced its norms with name calling, ridicule, and even punches to the upper arms of violators.
• It thus operated well below its capability, using norms that were tightly established and strongly enforced.

Positive Norms and Group Outcomes

• Positive group norms may well beget positive outcomes, but only if other factors are present.
• Overall, evolutionary explanations of norms suggest they were developed so that we can observe positive outcomes.
• For example, groups facing a high degree of threat develop strong interaction and cooperation as well as norms to punish deviants.
• One goal of every organization with corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives is for the organization's values (or the values of the CEO and executives) to hold normative sway over employees.
• Norms that would appear to be positive may lead to undiserable outcomes.
• Family friendly benefits can reduce family conflict but workers were less likely to use the benefits if they perceived that others at work did not.
• Raising awareness for the prevalence of stereotyping can backfire and can actually lead to more stereotype-consistent behavior.

Negative Norms and Group Outcomes

• Ethical standards can encourage maintain deviant behaviors.
• As some researchers suggest, 'bad apples' come from 'bad barrels'.
• Employees that are mistreated can lead to engage in unethical behaviors as a result.
• Misstressment is important to retaining efforts as nearly half the imployees incivility say they the have told to change jobs.
• And they have 12% actually quit as a result.

Norms and Cultures

• The organizational role-playing excericse could differ deperfing on one's culture and orientation for both being individual and collectivist.
• Cultural norms can affect many behaviors in the workplace, such as negotiation strategy to set.

Group Property 3: Status and Group Property 4: Size and Dynamics

• Groups tend to stratify into higher- and lower-status members.
• Groups can vary by size in ways that affect members' behaviors, dynamics, and group outcomes.

Group Property 3: Status

• Status permeates every society.
• It is a significant motivator and has major behavioral consequences when individuals perceive a disparity between what they believe their status is and what others perceive it to be.

Determinants of Status

• The power a person wields over others.
• A person's ability to contribute to a group's goals.
• An individual's personal characteristics (intelligence, etc.).

Status and Norms

• High-status individuals may deviate from norms more when they have low identification (social identity) with the group.
• They also eschew pressure from lower-ranking members of other groups.
• High-status people are better able to resist conformity pressures.
• An individual who is highly valued by a group but does not heed or care about the group's social rewards is particularly able to disregard conformity norms.
• Bringing high-status members into a group may improve performance, but only up to a point, perhaps because these members may introduce counterproductive norms.
• High-status employees may be more and justify unethical behaviors are also justtified.

Status and Group Interaction

• People tend to become more assertive when they seek to attain higher status in a group, especially when they are already of higher status in other groups.
• Those of high status tend to conceal it from others in order to promote harmony.
• Lower-status members tend to participate less actively in group discussions
• groups that do not fully utilize the participation of lower statuses reduce group performance.

Group Cohesion

• Important for group members to believe the status hierarchy is equitable.
• Perceived inequity creates disequilibrium, which inspires various types of corrective behaviors.
• Hierarchy can lead to resentment among those at the lower end of the status continuum.
• When gig workers and contractors perceive status parity between themselves and clients, they are less likely to be committed or likely to resign.
• In equity, power based for status tends to have negative effects than it drives to interpersonal conflict.
• Groups generally agree within themselves on status criteria; hence, there is usually high concurrence on group rankings of individuals.

Managing a Narcissist in the Group

• Narcissists can contribute to greater group cohesion within certain circumstances
• this usually occurs to a handful if admired.
• Cohesion with a narcissist is usually in place if the person likes there own group.
• Create cohesion within narcissist that promote norms of peer pressure.

Group Property 4: Size and Dynamics

• Size (as a group property) affects overall behavior, and can have varying results.
• Adding some number of high status people is more adventegous as their can be effects from middle status people.
• Leaders are important to command, if the group is not that way people can find and them selves and in the world.

Group Property 5: Cohesion

• For a group to be highly functioning, it must act cohesively as a unit.
• Groups differ in their cohesion (degree to which members hold a shared bond with one another).
• Research suggests that teams remain actibe even after a disband.
• High cohesion in the world to be and engage.

Group Decision Making

• The belief characterized by juries are better then one has been and accepted and basic.
• We will do scuss the addedvantqges for group descion making alone.

Groups Versus the Individual

• The answer relies in strength, weaknesses, efficiacy of group declion making.
• Groups may generate more complete information and knowledge during decision making.
• They are offer increased diversity of views, which creates of opportunity to.
• Finaly groups lead to and increased acceptance of a solution.
• Some weakness for group decision are very much more taking more time to.
• There are many conformity pressures that can be added to the group dynamics.
• If they information is unreliable the group will be affected as a wll.
• If they're more members, can be addressed and that.
• Finally the group decisions suffer from an AMB.
• In term of accuary and evaluate by general perspective or cohesion trust is a good thing.

Groupthink and Groupshift

• 2 by products of group decision can and affect
• The ability to uprise objectives.

Groupthink

• Describes situations in which the pressure of deters group 2.
• Is that the time they do not do a majority.
• It is that the pressure to surprised.

Groupshift

• Group polarization way which can.
• View decision.

Decision-Making Techniques

• There is a technique where the decision-making the action is taking place in both verbal and non verbal
• There is also is brainstorming (in that any members in the group and and can freely state ideas in open minded, non judgement ways) in order the the brainstorming prosses works .
• There is also Nominal Group Technique which is were ever member is aloud to state there ideas be for the final descion is made.

Group Technique Steps

• Everyone gets some ideas about the problem.
• Then each member sends 1 idea.
• Then that group discusses the ideas.

Group Dynamics

• There are very that can a great effect of the group it self.
• Overall depending on everyone's participation.