CHAPTER 7

Groups and Teamwork

For Today…
■ What is a group?
■ Group Development
■ Group Structure and its consequences
– Diversity of group membership
– Group norms
– Group roles
– Status
■ Group cohesiveness and its consequences
■ Social loafing
■ Types of teams
What is a Group?

■ 2 or more people
interacting
interdependently to
achieve a common goal
– Formal
– Informal
Factors That Contribute to
Group Formation
■ Opportunity for interaction

■ Potential for goal accomplishment

■ Members’ personal characteristics

Models of Group Development

■ Stages of group development

■ Punctuated equilibrium
 Punctuated
Equilibrium
■ Phase 1:
■ Develop
agenda and
approaches
■ Punctuated Equilibrium:
■ Midpoint
transition
■ Crystallizes the
group activities
■ Phase 2:
■ Implementation
of decisions
made at
midpoint
Group Structure

■ Formal
■ Group size
■ Diversity of group membership
■ Informal
■ Norms
■ Roles
■ Cohesiveness
Process Losses

■ Potential performance > actual performance

■ Group performance difficulties due to problems from motivating
and coordinating larger groups
Group Size and Its Consequences
Outcomes Description As group size
increases

Satisfaction

Potential for
performance

On additive tasks

On disjunctive tasks

On conjunctive tasks
Diversity of Group Membership

■ Speed of group development

■ Creativity
Norms

Expectations that team members have regarding each other’s

behavior
■ Define appropriate behavior
■ Obvious when a norm is judged to be important
■ Enforced by group
■ Acceptability of deviation may vary
Roles

Positions in a group that have a set of expected behaviors attached

to them
■ Related to task behavior
■ Impersonal
■ Learned quickly
■ Differ with perspective
■ Differ from job requirements
Role Ambiguity

■ Role ambiguity exists when the goals of one’s job or the

methods of performing it are unclear.
■ There are a variety of elements that can lead to role ambiguity:
– Organizational factors
– The role sender
– The focal person
Role Ambiguity
■ The most frequent outcomes are job stress, dissatisfaction,
reduced organizational commitment, lowered performance, and
intentions to quit.
■ Managers can reduce role ambiguity by providing clear
performance expectations and performance feedback, especially
for new employees and for those in more intrinsically
ambiguous jobs.
Role Conflict
■ Role conflict exists when an individual is faced with
incompatible role expectations.
■ There are four types of role conflict:
– Intrasender role conflict
– Intersender role conflict
– Interrole conflict
– Person-role conflict
Status

■ Status in the rank, social position, or prestige accorded to group

members in terms of prominence, prestige, and respect.
■ It represents the group’s evaluation of a member.
■ What is evaluated depends on the status system in question.
■ All organizations have both formal and informal status systems.
 Cohesiveness

Factors that
Consequences of
Predict Cohesiveness
Cohesiveness
Cohesiveness

•Threat and
Competition
•Participation
•Success
•Conformity
•Member Diversity (-) Cohesiveness
•Success
•Size (-)
•Initiation Toughness
Social Loafing

■ The tendency to withhold physical or intellectual effort

when performing a group task
– Free-riding
– Sucker effect
– Felt dispensability
Counteracting Social Loafing

■ Put equal emphasis on individual and group

performance
■ Interesting work
■ Feelings of indispensability
■ Performance feedback
■ Reward group performance
Self-Managed Work Teams

■ Work groups that have the opportunity to do challenging work

under reduced supervision.
■ The groups regulate much of their own members’ behaviour.
■ Critical success factors of self-managed teams include:
– The nature of the task.
– The composition of the group.
– Support.
Cross-Functional Teams

■ Work groups that bring people with different functional

specialties together to better invent, design, or deliver a product
or service.
■ Members have to be experts in their own area but able to
cooperate with others.
■ Cross-functional teams are best known for their success in
product development.
■ The general goals of using cross-functional teams include some
combination of innovation, speed, and quality that come from
early coordination among the various specialties.
Virtual Teams
■ With globalization and the advent of high-tech communication, virtual teams
have emerged as critical for organizational success.
■ Virtual teams are work groups that use technology to communicate and
collaborate across time, space, and organizational boundaries.
– Not to be confused with regular teams that use technology
■ Virtual teams advantages:
– Around-the-clock work
– Reduced travel time and cost
– Larger talent pool
■ Virtual teams challenges:
– Trust
– Miscommunication
– Isolation
– Management issues