These emergent roles will often replace the assigned roles as individuals begin to express themselves and become more assertive. Group roles can then be classified into work roles, maintenance roles, and blocking roles. Work roles are task-oriented activities that involve accomplishing the group's goals. They involve a variety of specific roles such as initiator, informer, clarifier, summarizer, and reality tester. The initiator defines problems, proposes action, and suggests procedures.
The informer role involves finding facts and giving advice or opinions. Clarifiers will interpret ideas, define terms, and clarify issues for the group. Summarizers restate suggestions, offer decisions, and come to conclusions for the group. Finally, reality testers analyze ideas and test the ideas in real situations. Maintenance roles are social-emotional activities that help members maintain their involvement in the group and raise their personal commitment to the group.
The maintenance roles are harmonizer, gatekeeper, consensus tester, encourager, and compromiser. The harmonizer will reduce tension in the group, reconcile differences, and explore opportunities.
Gatekeepers often keep communication channels open and make suggestions that encourage participation. The consensus tester will ask if the group is nearing a decision and test possible conclusions. Encouragers are friendly, warm, and responsive to other group members. The last maintenance role is the compromiser. This role involves modifying decisions, offering compromises, and admitting errors.
Blocking roles are activities that disrupt the group. They make take the form of dominating discussions, verbally attacking other group members, and distracting the group with trivial information or unnecessary humor.
Often times the blocking behavior may not be intended as negative. Sometimes a member may share a joke in order to break the tension, or may question a decision in order to force group members to rethink the issue. The blocking roles are aggressor, blocker, dominator, comedian, and avoidance behavior. The aggressor criticizes members' values and makes jokes in a sarcastic or semi-concealed manner.
Blockers will stubbornly resist the group's ideas, disagree with group members for personal reasons, and will have hidden agendas. The dominator role attempts to control conversations by patronizing others. They often interrupt others and assert authority in order to manipulate members. Comedians often abandon the group even though they may physically still be a part. They are attention-getters in ways that are not relevant to the accomplishment of the group's objectives.
The last blocking role, avoidance behavior, involves pursuing goals not related to the group and changing the subject to avoid commitment to the group. Role ambiguity concerns the discrepancy between the sent role and the received role, as shown in Exhibit 1. Supervisors, directors, or other group leaders often send assign roles to group members in formal groups.
Group members receive roles by being ready and willing to undertake the tasks associated with that role. Ambiguity results when members are confused about the delegation of job responsibilities. This confusion may occur because the members do not have specific job descriptions or because the instructions regarding the task were not clear. Group members who experience ambiguity often have feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction, which ultimately lead to turnover.
Role conflict occurs when there is inconsistency between the perceived role and role behavior. There are several different forms of role conflict. Interrole conflict occurs when there is conflict between the different roles that people have. For example, work roles and family roles often compete with one another and cause conflict. Intrarole conflict occurs when individuals must handle conflicting demands from different sources while performing the tasks associated with the same role.
Norms are acceptable standards of behavior within a group that are shared by the members of the group. Norms define the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They are typically created in order to facilitate group survival, make behavior more predictable, avoid embarrassing situations, and express the values of the group.
Each group will establish its own set of norms that might determine anything from the appropriate dress to how many comments to make in a meeting. Groups exert pressure on members to force them to conform to the group's standards. The norms often reflect the level of commitment, motivation, and performance of the group. Performance norms determine how quickly members should work and how much they should produce. They are created in an effort to determine levels of individual effort.
They can be very frustrating to managers because they are not always in line with the organization's goals. Members of a group may have the skill and ability to perform at higher levels but they don't because of the group's performance norms. For example, workers may stop working a production machine at 20 minutes before quitting time in order to wash up, even though they produced fewer items that day than management intended. Reward-allocation norms determine how rewards are bestowed upon group members.
For example, the norm of equality dictates equal treatment of all members. Every member shares equally so rewards are distributed equally to everyone. Equity norms suggest that rewards are distributed according to the member's contribution. In other words, members who contribute the most receive the largest share of the rewards. Members may contribute through effort, skill, or ability.
Social responsibility norms reward on the basis of need. Members who have special needs therefore receive the largest share of the reward. The majority of the group must agree that the norms are appropriate in order for the behavior to be accepted.
There must also be a shared understanding Exhibit 1 Role Ambiguity and Role Conflict that the group supports the norms. It should be noted, however, that members might violate group norms from time to time. If the majority of members do not adhere to the norms, then they will eventually change and will no longer serve as a standard for evaluating behavior. Group members who do not conform to the norms will be punished by being excluded, ignored, or asked to leave the group.
Cohesiveness refers to the bonding of group members and their desire to remain part of the group. Furthermore, a group climate is an emotional setting of the group, that relies on participative spirit, coordination, trust and bonding among the members, open communication and other similar factors.
Apart from the two broad classifications of the group, they are also divided into the primary groups, secondary groups, membership groups, reference groups and interest groups. In general, groups are created out of individual need satisfaction, which can be personal, social or economical.
Interaction is particularly important when it is accompanied by interdependence — the extent to which the group members are mutually dependent upon each other to reach a goal. In some cases, and particularly in working groups, interdependence involves the need to work together to successfully accomplish a task. Individuals playing baseball are dependent upon each other to be able to play the game and also to play well. Each individual must do his or her job in order for the group to function.
We are also interdependent when we work together to write a research article or create a class project. When group members are interdependent, they report liking each other more, tend to cooperate and communicate with each other to a greater extent, and may be more productive Deutsch, The relevant social norms for groups include customs, traditions, standards, and rules, as well as the general values of the group. Particularly important here are injunctive norms , which specify how group members are expected to behave.
Some of these are prescriptive norms, which tell the group members what to do , whereas some are proscriptive norms, which tell them what not to do. In general, the more clearly defined and the widely agreed upon the norms in a group are, the more entitativity that the group members will feel.
Effective groups also develop and assign social roles the expected behaviors to group members. For instance, some groups may be structured such that they have a president, a secretary, and many different working committees. Different roles often come with different levels of status, or perceived power, and these hierarchies.
Also, if members have more than one role, for example, player and coach, it is important that these roles are compatible rather than contradictory. High-performing groups are thus able to avoid placing members under r ole stress. This occurs when individuals experience incompatible demands and expectations within or between the roles that they occupy , which often negatively impacts their ability to be successful in those roles Forsyth, Although cognitive factors such as perceived similarity, communication, interdependence, and structure are often important parts of what we mean by being a group, they do not seem to always be necessary.
In some situations, groups may be seen as groups even if they have little independence, communication, or structure. Partly because of this difficulty, an alternative approach to thinking about groups, and one that has been very important in social psychology, makes use of the affective feelings that we have toward the groups that we belong to. As we have read, social identity refers to the part of the self-concept that results from our membership in social groups Hogg, Generally, because we prefer to remain in groups that we feel good about, the outcome of group membership is a positive social identity—our group memberships make us feel good about ourselves.
According to the social identity approach, a group is a group when the members experience social identity—when they define themselves in part by the group that they belong to and feel good about their group membership Hogg, This identity might be seen as a tendency on the part of the individual to talk positively about the group to others, a general enjoyment of being part of the group, and a feeling of pride that comes from group membership.
Because identity is such an important part of group membership, we may attempt to create it to make ourselves feel good, both about our group and about ourselves. Perhaps you know some people—maybe you are one—who wear the clothes of their sports team to highlight their identity with the group because they want to be part of, and accepted by, the other group members. Although many groups are basically static, performing the same types of tasks day in and day out, other groups are more dynamic.
In fact, in almost all groups there is at least some change; members come and go, and the goals of the group may change. And even groups that have remained relatively stable for long periods of time may suddenly make dramatic changes; for instance, when they face a crisis, such as a change in task goals or the loss of a leader. Groups may also lose their meaning and identity as they successfully meet the goals they initially set out to accomplish.
One way to understand group development is to consider the potential stages that groups generally go through. One widely used approach here is the model developed by Tuckman and Jensen As you can see in Figure The forming stage occurs when the members of the group come together and begin their existence as a group. In other cases, however, the process of group formation occurs continually over a long period of time, such as when factory workers leave their jobs and are replaced by new employees.
The forming stage is important for the new members, as well as for the group itself. During this time, the group and the individual will exchange knowledge about appropriate norms, including any existing group structures, procedures, and routines. Each individual will need to learn about the group and determine how he or she is going to fit in.
This initial investigation process may end up with the individual rejecting the group or the group rejecting the individual. If the forming stage can be compared to childhood, there is no doubt that the next stage— storming —can be compared to adolescence. In the storming stage , members may attempt to make their own views known, expressing their independence and attempting to persuade the group to accept their ideas. In some cases, the conflict may be so strong that the group members decide that the group is not working at all and they disband.
Although storming can be harmful to group functioning and thus groups must work to keep it from escalating, some conflict among group members may in fact be helpful.
Groups that experience no conflict at all may be unproductive because the members are bored, uninvolved, and unmotivated, and because they do not think creatively or openly about the topics of relevance to them Tjosvold, In order to progress, the group needs to develop new ideas and approaches, and this requires that the members discuss their different opinions about the decisions that the group needs to make. Assuming that the storming does not escalate too far, the group will move into the norming stage , which is when the appropriate norms and roles for the group are developed.
Once these norms have been developed, they allow the group to enter the performing stage, which is when group members establish a routine and effectively work together. At this stage, the individual group members may report great satisfaction and identification with the group, as well as strong group identity. Groups that have effectively reached this stage have the ability to meet goals and survive challenges.
And at this point, the group becomes well tuned to its task and is able to perform the task efficiently. In one interesting observational study of the group development process in real groups, Gersick , observed a number of teams as they worked on different projects. The teams were selected so that they were all working within a specific time frame, but the time frame itself varied dramatically—from eight to 25 meetings held over periods ranging from 11 days to six months. Despite this variability, Gersick found that each of the teams followed a very similar pattern of norming and then performing.
In each case, the team established well-defined norms regarding its method of attacking its task in its very first meeting. And each team stayed with this approach, with very little deviation, during the first half of the time it had been allotted. However, midway through the time it had been given to complete the project and regardless of whether that was after four meetings or after 12 , the group suddenly had a meeting in which it decided to change its approach.
Then, each of the groups used this new method of performing the task during the rest of its allotted time. It was as if an alarm clock went off at the halfway point, which led each group to rethink its approach.
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