Week 2 - TIO.docx

Chapter 3 A theoretical framework Bottom-up effects occur when characteristics at the individual level determine outcomes at the group level. One of the most fundamental issues in group research is the question of how individual inputs are transformed into group outputs. The framework for group perf...

Chapter 3 A theoretical framework Bottom-up effects occur when characteristics at the individual level determine outcomes at the group level. One of the most fundamental issues in group research is the question of how individual inputs are transformed into group outputs. The framework for group performance consists of group members, the group task, group interaction processes, group output, and group context. *Group members: members provide the necessary resources to complete the group task. A right combination of people might lead to a final product that is better than any of the individual group members could have created on their own. However, the individual goals of the group members might not always be compatible with the overall group goals. *Group tasks: it is always the combination of group members and group tasks that determine whether the group may perform well. Potential performance = ƒ (group member resources, task demands). Three dimensions. *Group processes: determine how individual inputs of group members are combined to lead to a group output. Actual performance = potential performance – process loss. Motivation loss occurs when members are not optimally motivated, coordination loss occurs when group members do not combine their contributions in an optimal way. *Group output: performance outcomes can be judged in terms of success with regard to task completion. Affective outcomes are reactions of entities toward other entities or toward the task. Learning is related to potential future task performance. The output can be evaluated against absolute or normative standards, relative standards, or to compare the group’s performance with individual performance. * Group context: if the group context influences the group, we talk about top-down effects. The context can influence group members, the context can determine the group task, the context can influence group processes, and other people or groups evaluate group outputs. Chapter 4 Audience and co-action effects The presence of others sometimes leads to improved performance (social facilitation) and sometimes to deteriorated performance (social inhibition). Zajonc’s drive theory proposes that the presence of others increase generalized drive or arousal and makes people work harder. This enhanced drive especially increases the speed, strength, and probability of the dominant response in a particular situation. However, it will lead to performance deterioration if the dominant response is incorrect or inappropriate. For new and complex tasks, the dominant response will generally be inappropriate, causing performance impairment. However, Zajonc’s ideas have not received unequivocal support. There are two problems. He proposed that the mere presence of others is a source of arousal, and that presence alone would be sufficient to induce arousal. Bond and Titus found that this effect was very small and only when one was working on difficult tasks and not on simple tasks. The term arousal is also too broad and unspecific. Another problem is that the mere presence does not always produce social facilitation. Cottrel et al. found that it appeared that the social facilitation effect only occurred when the audience could watch the participant. Social facilitation effects may only occur when the audience can actually evaluate the participants’ task performance. Distraction conflict theory suggest that social facilitation and inhibition result from an attentional conflict. It presumes that the presence of an audience or of co-actors attracts attention. However, at the same time attention is needed to perform the task. Trying to divide the attention leads to facilitation of simple responses and impairment of complex responses. The main difference between the two theories is that the presence of others has effects only when it is distracting and leads to an attentional conflict. Self-efficacy theory distinguishes two related expectancies: efficacy expectancy, which reflects a person’s belief that he is capable of performing a required behavior, and outcome expectancy, which reflects the belief of a person that behavior will result in certain outcomes. Sanna argued that the presence of others is associated with certain positive and negative outcomes, such as approval and disapproval. With high self-efficacy, one will generally expect to succeed at the task, and consequently the presence of others leads to the anticipation of positive outcomes. However, with low self-efficacy, one will generally expect to fail, and the presence of others will lead to negative outcome expectancies, which makes people less motivated to perform the task and will lead to performance decrements. The social comparison theory makes two assumptions. The first is that people are especially motivated to compare their performance with that of similar others. The reason is that comparisons with similar others are more informative. Second, the theory argues that people are motivated to perform upward social comparisons and compare themselves with others who are slightly better than we are. Thus, when a co-actor is performing slightly better than oneself, one will tend to compete with that co-actor, and try harder to perform as well or better. Chapter 5 Motivation and group performance: individual effort on collective tasks Ringelmann noticed that group performance was not simply the sum of individual performance of the group members. The effect represents a case of process loss: The actual performance of a group is below its potential performance. Motivation losses occur when group members exert less effort when they are in a group as compared to when they are working alone. Coordination losses occur when the input of different group members is not optimally transformed into group output. Both contribute to the Ringelmann effect. Social loafing is defined as a reduction of effort when one is working in a group as compared to when working alone. A lack of identifiability and the inability to evaluate individual contributions is an important factor underlying this motivation loss. Social loafing can be eliminated by making individual contributions identifiable. Also, evaluation requires that there is some standard against which performance is judged. However, even when contributions cannot be evaluated, social loafing does not always occur. Social loafing can be attenuated or eliminated when the task is attractive, involving, or interesting. With social loafing and social facilitation, it might not be working in the presence of others that matters, but rather whether or not one’s performance can be evaluated. Both can be explained with the self-efficacy theory, which predicts that people will be willing to work hard and perform well when they expect favorable outcomes, such as praise. They choke when they expect unfavorable outcomes, such as criticism. The outcome expectancies depend on the potential to be evaluated and self-efficacy. On a simple task, participants who could be evaluated perform better than participants who could not be evaluated. On a difficult task, participants who could be evaluated perform worse than those who could not be evaluated. Another type of motivation loss is called free riding, which occurs when group members work less hard because they perceive that their contribution is dispensable. In a common good dilemma, if enough people contribute, the common good will be provided to all members of the collective, regardless of whether they contributed or not. When a task is disjunctive, members who perceive themselves to be low on ability will believe that their contribution is not needed. When a task is conjunctive, members who are high on ability might believe that their performance is dispensable. In larger groups, it is more likely that members perceive their contribution to be dispensable. Sucker effect: a reduction of effort to prevent being exploited by free-riding fellow group members. This effect should only occur when another group member fails to contribute enough even though they are capable of contributing. Social compensation: occurs when people work hard on a task when they expect that other group members will perform poorly. Köhler effect: occurs when group members work harder because they fear that the group would otherwise fail because of them. The expectancy-value theory assumes that motivation is a multiplicative function of three factors: expectancy, instrumentality, and value. Expectancy refers to the belief that effort will result in performance, and is closely related to self-efficacy. Instrumentality refers to the belief that performance will result in certain outcomes. Value refers to the value attached to these outcomes on a positive-negative dimension. The theory assumes that motivation is high when (1) expectancy is high and (2) instrumentality is high and (3) value is positive. In a group, there are two extra steps: the relation between own performance and group performance, and between group outcomes and own outcomes. The expectancy-value account is hedonistic and individualistic: It assumes that people are motivated only to the extent that they receive valued outcomes. Bunderson: Recognizing and utilizing expertise in work groups: A status characteristics perspective. Given the heterogeneity of distributed knowledge and expertise, work groups find the challenge to identify their experts and give greater weight to their advice and suggestions. This will ultimately lead to higher-quality solutions and decisions. In recent research on group expertise, two key themes emerged: 1) groups perform better when they’re able to identify their expert members and allow those experts to influence the group process, and 2) identifying and utilizing members’ expertise is a non-trivial process complicated by several social and interpersonal processes. This past research was more about the consequences and the processes of identifying and utilizing expert members but leaves out how these experts are identified. This paper examines the cues group members rely on to identify their group’s experts and whether experts will have opportunities to influence group processes. Recognizing and utilizing expertise in groups Three main theories dominated the group expertise field until now: *Transactive memory approach: this approach states that a shared knowledge (transactive memory) of who knows what in a group enhances task performance because members’ expertise can be utilized efficiently. *Distributive knowledge approach: this theory focuses on under what conditions group members are able to pool unshared knowledge and information to make good decisions. When members have given cues of who might know what, the integration of everyone’s information becomes better and this leads to higher-quality decisions. In the absence of these cues, members rely on information they have in common, resulting in lower-quality decisions. *Expert influence approach: this approach focuses on the extent to which groups can recognize their expert members and whether those experts can influence group decisions. Findings show that groups are quite poor at identifying experts, since they think dominance is related to expertise (which it’s not). However, they become better at identifying experts when they receive feedback on members’ performance, and when they’ve been together longer. This study uses the status characteristics theory to explain group expertise processes. This theory states that members have certain performance expectations about the other members. If several members have shared high performance expectations about a particular person, then this person will be given more opportunities to influence group decisions. Through social interactions, people learn which personal characteristics (called status cues) are often associated with task competence or ability. The more status cues one has, the higher performance expectations he/she gets from others. There are two different status cues: 1) specific status cues, related to someone’s competence in clearly defined and specific tasks (e.g., neuroscientists know much the brain), and 2) diffuse status cues, related to someone’s general aptitude assumed to be related to general ability (e.g. attractive people are probably better in sales). Since the status characteristics theory states that performance and decision quality only increases when experts have more influence over group decisions, the following mediation hypotheses were formed: Three theoretical implications for this study are: First, this study demonstrates that the influence of job-related and social-category characteristics on status relations in groups can vary between groups, depending on group context characteristics. Second, this study shows that field studies are important because they can highlight the importance of group context factors and the influence this has on recognizing and utilizing expertise. Furthermore, this study provides a method on how to measure these context factors and the role it plays in expert recognition. Third, this study contradicts the dominance perspective on influence in groups (members who get the most influence in a group won the ‘struggle for dominance’). Instead, it offers a new view by linking intragroup influence to perceived expertise. Lam, Van der Vegt, Walter, & Huang: Harming high performers: A social comparison perspective on interpersonal harming in work teams. Interpersonal harming involves behaviour that goes against the interests of other individuals. Many research has been done on antecedents of interpersonal harming, mostly focusing on individual or situational determinants. However, recent research argues that interpersonal harming can be seen as a dyadic phenomenon, resulting from a relationship between two co- workers. The purpose of this study is to examine interpersonal harming in co-worker dyads, by looking at the role of interpersonal comparison processes. This research contributes in two ways: 1) they investigate why members direct their harmful behaviour more towards some specific teammates than towards the other teammates, 2) this study uses social comparison theory to examine workplace phenomena (which is rare), and 3) they outline an important boundary condition for the role of social comparison processes in interpersonal harming by taking team’s cooperative goals into account as a (cross-level) moderator. Social comparison can be upwards comparison (compare to others who perform better) or downwards comparison (compare to others who perform worse). The effects of social comparison depend on whether people contrast (one does not expect to be similar to the compared person in the future) or assimilate (one does expect to be similar to the compared person in the future). Positive effects arise with the combinations of downwards contrasting and upwards assimilating. Negative effects arise with the combinations of downwards assimilating and upwards contrasting. It is expected that only this last combination will result in interpersonal harming because it leads to a so-called identity threat. Harming a target that is superior to yourself may decrease his/her performance and so the difference in performance between you and the target will be compensated, thus decreasing the identity threat. Next to this, cooperative goals are included as a moderator. This can be defined as a team-level construct, reflecting members’ shared belief that their individual goals are positively interdependent. These cooperative goals may trigger identification between team members, thus leading to rather assimilative comparisons than to contrasting comparisons. Therefore, it is likely that highly cooperative team goals will ultimately lead to less interpersonal harming. To put it all in one hypothesis, it looks like this (see model for a more visual view): H1 = cooperative team goals and expectations of future performance similarity will jointly moderate the relationship between social comparison and interpersonal harming in team member dyads: An actor’s upward (rather than downward) performance comparison with a target will be associated with more harming of the target only if the team has fewer cooperative goals and the actor expects low future performance similarity to the target (i.e. contrasting). H2 = Interpersonally harmful team behaviour will be negatively related to team performance. Results All results were found in line with the hypotheses. However, one interesting result was that in teams with less cooperative goals, the relationship between upwards comparison and interpersonal harming even became negative when the actor expects high future performance similarity (i.e. assimilating). Discussion This study has several theoretical implications: The results showed that a big part of the variance (45%) in interpersonal harming behaviour is located in members’ dyadic relations (compared to individual or situational characteristics). This research gave new insights on the psychological processes that ultimately lead to interpersonal harming using social comparison theory. This study highlights the importance of gaining better understanding of the antecedents of employees’ harmful behaviour by showing it could lead to decreased team performance.