OB Notes (Foundation of Group Behavior) PDF

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Organizational Behavior, Eman Karam...

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Lecture 12 + Part of Lecture 11 Date: November 25th, 2020. Chapter 9&10: Foundation of Group Behavior.

 Group: A combination of more than 2 ppl who have the same interest. Ex: if there are some ppl in the market they can’t be described as a ‘group’ because each one has dif interest.  Formal Group: An intended group that brought together and structured by the organization to achieve a certain goal. They have a hierarchy among them.  Informal Group: A group with no specific structure, that isn’t brough together by the organization, like a group of friends. Social Identity Theory: tries to give an explanation why we like to identify ourselves to certain groups. Ex: I’m Fepsian, or I’m Ahlawy. Because here we’re interdependent, interactive and we want to achieve a goal together, like: all ahlawya want to see their team successful.  Ingroup Favoritism: we believe that all ppl who belong to the same group are more favored than the rest or than the outsiders. Like: Alzamalek fan w le3b w handasa (‫مثال‬ ‫ الدكتور‬:’D(  Outgroup Favoritism: is the opposite of ingroup, meaning to favor those who don’t belong to a certain group. Ex: in school, teachers prefer pupils who don’t belong to ( ‫)المشاغبين‬.  Social Identity Threat: sometimes we might try to identify ourselves to a group just because we’re afraid to be devalued by the rest. Ex: I’m ahlawy because al-ahly always wins. Ex: I don’t like to talk with ppl of certain group in order not be counted one of them.

Group properties 1- Role: any group (formal or informal) has a specific role to play. Ex: working on a project. Role is a specific set of behavior that is expected from all those belonging to this same group. Here we’re not talking about their goal, we’re talking about they are going t achieve this goal.  Role Perception: how ppl view or regard their own role (can they identify their role in the group or not?). Formal groups can easily define their roles, but informal

groups’ roles are a little bit vague. Here, we talk about how ppl themselves perceive their roles.  Role Expectations: what other ppl believe that those ppl of the group would behave. Ex: managers expect certain roles from a group.  Psychological Contract: an inwritten informal agreement between the managers and the employees that tells exactly what the manager expects from the members of the group and vice versa.  Role Conflict: when we put in a position where role demands or expectations are imposed on us. Ex: when your mother asks you to organize your room and to help her at kitchen at the same time (contradictory tasks that happen in the same role).  Interrole Conflict: contradictory tasks but across dif roles (not inside the group). Ex: being a student, a daughter and an activist in animal rights, here you have dif roles that demand dif tasks from you. It’s a situation in which an individual is facing dif expectations from dif groups to which he belongs. (It’s not intra, not inside the same group). 2- Norms: specific standards of behavior that determine what’s acceptable and not acceptable. Ex: we should be friendly and respect others and so on.  Conformity: The degree to which you agree and align with these norms.  Deviant Work Behavior: we talked about it before, when someone violates certain norms voluntarily. If you don’t agree to the norms, you’ll have deviant behaviors. 3- Status: it’s related to ingroup and outgroup favoritism. Any group would have a specific recognition inside the organization. Ex: those are English section students who study in English, or this group is successful in a certain aspect and so on. Usually status is granted based upon power or contribution or positive characteristics of the individuals themselves. Ex: those ppl are good at mathematics for example, or these countries are powerful and so on. 4- Size and Dynamics: a group can be small or large in number. In small groups, ppl can cooperate better. But in big groups, your absence may not be noticed, this creates the problem of social loafing. (being free-riders). 5- Cohesiveness: tendency of a group to be in unity and harmony. The extent to which we’re attracted and motivated by the same things.

6- Diversity: we’re diferent but we can still work in unity even though we are motivated with dif things.

Group Decision Making Strengths: Here, we are talking about the strengths of making decisions in a group rather than one person. The group together can bring new ideas, but here we don’t just focus on the ‘creative ideas or outcomes’ only, but we focus also on the way ppl think to generate alternatives. Meaning that group decision making is important in improving the ‘process’ as well as the ‘outcomes’. Weaknesses: it’s time consuming, also it creates conflicts and dissonance. Ppl also usually don’t reach a compromise in their discussions. Sometimes, ppl are shy to express their opinion, especially to someone who is older than them for example because they respect him and so on. Also, the problem of free-riders and lazy ppl, this makes active ppl are the ones who do most of the work. Groupthink: trying to reach a decision and avoid any opposition as much as possible. Groupthink describes a situation in which group pressures for conformity prevent the group from critically appraising unusual, minority, or unpopular views. Groupthink attacks many groups and can dramatically hinder their performance. Here, they may depend on the idea of having ‘The devil’s advocate’ (A person who tries to find an opposing point of view in order to make sure that the decision is taking by the majority is well-thought of and well-discussed). Even though, he ‘s acting as a devil’s advocate, he doesn’t actually intend to oppose them, rather, he works as their alarm. Ex: he would say that take care that this point is a weakness or take care that we don’t have enough info about this issue and so on. Group-shift: happens when a certain person is able to shift the entire opinion of a group and shift it to diferent opinion. Ex: a group was thinking of building a bridge, then a person who is powerful and charismatic shifted their opinion to build a road rather. But this shift doesn’t have to be from the extreme to the other extreme like the book says. Ex: someone might impose his opinion on the group because he has a loud voice and the others can’t go against him. The other members of the group may let this person shifts the situation just to be able to finish their work, it usually depends on the situation itself (somethings are worthy to fight for, and somethings are not), so try to compromise if the consequences aren’t bad.

Differences between Groups and Teams: Workgroup: A group would work with each other to solve a problem related to their task. Consider a group as friends, while team is something official. So, in group ppl help each other doing dif jobs, that may be not related or otherwise they would be a team. So, workgroup can come from the same department or from dif ones and they aren’t connected in an official task together. They can advice each other and share info. The group’s performance is merely the summation of each member’s individual contribution. Naturally, they help each other in solving problems not in doing their jobs, because they are not that free for you, rather, they help you when you face a problem. That’s why we call them neutral (or negative) because they don’t create new ideas, they only help you in problems. Work-team: They complement each other to perform a certain task or project, they work or perform collectively because they are brought together to do a specific task. Their synergy would be positive, because they have to think of ways to perform their job. Usually, each one of them separately as well as all of them as a team would be responsible for their job. Here, the individual eforts result in a level of performance greater than the sum of the individual inputs.

Types of Teams:

1- Problem-solving: From the exhibit, you can see that they are brought together to solve a specific problem (not necessarily a project but it can be any problem). Usually they are from the same department.

2- Self-managed: They also usually belong to the same department, but they would take over the responsibilities of their previous supervisor. Ex: A supervisor in a specific

department tells them you need to do a specific job, they would regulate themselves the way they want to achieve this job. Ex: our team-projects in the faculty. 3- Cross-functional: They usually come from dif departments, so they have dif skills and knowledge to perform a specific task. Ex: to produce a specific car, we need an expert in tires, someone for the windows, someone for the electricity and so on. 4- Virtual: recently we started to have virtual teams. Some departments do virtual seminars and meetings. They don’t co-exist in the same place. 5- Multi-team system: it’s also called the team of teams. It’s like a team above dif teams, and each team has a representative for it. Ex: The prime ministry, we can consider each ministry as a team.

Team Effectiveness: The efectiveness of the team depends on many characteristics, as follows:

1- Context: The factors that aren’t related to the members of the team themselves, but they exist in the environment surrounding them. These factors afect the way those members are going to work. 

Adequate resources: that allow the team to do their job, like: time, energy, money and so on.

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Leadership and structure: as we talked before, having a good supervisor or an abusive one. So, the more efective and friendly the leader is with his team, the more successful the team would be. The structure here depends upon assigning dif tasks and where this team exists and are the responsibilities clear for everyone or not.

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Climate of Trust: Is this team working in a climate where the entire organization has trust and respect or not. Having a distrusted organization makes ppl not as efective as expected.

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Performance evaluation and rewards system: as we talked before about equity and equality. If ppl’s performance isn’t fairly evaluated, they wouldn’t be efective. But if they know that they would be rewarded or punished based on their performance, they would be more efective.

2- Composition: Here, we are talking about the characteristics of the team members themselves. 

Abilities of members: (their abilities and skills), cognitive, physical and emotional abilities. Can they analyze situations? Do they have the physical abilities to stay longer hours or to perform hard work and so on? Do they have emotional stability to handle conflicts or not? ex: pilots require very well eye sight and strong nerves.

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Personality: The set of behaviors of the individuals. Are they openminded? Introverted? Extroverted? The sum of these traits afects the team efectiveness.

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Allocating roles: What kind of roles do they have and how do they perform them and Is there role conflict in what they do?

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Diversity: Is it surface-level or deep level diversity? The degree to which members of a work unit (group, team, or department) share a common demographic attribute, such as age, sex, race, educational level, or length of service in the organization, is the subject of organizational demography.

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Cultural differences: It’s also a kind of diversity, but here we’re talking about norms, values and so on.

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Size of teams: Is the team big or small? The book says that most experts agree that keeping teams small (5-9 members) is key to improving group efectiveness.

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Member preferences: It’s more than just what they prefer, but also how they think and solve problems? Ex: the way we study difers from one person to another. So, we try to make sure that the team members are homogenous in their mental models (to have the same perspective of things).

3- Process: These will be especially important in larger teams and in teams that are highly interdependent. Teams should create outputs greater than the sum of their inputs. 

Common Plan and Purpose (mission): The general objective that the team is trying to achieve. It’s the reason why this team exists. Ex: If the mission is producing a new car, then the specific goals would be producing an electric inexpensive car that is also small in size and light in weight and so on. The mission has to be clear to know why they exist, and the specific goals have to be

clear to know what is expected from them (their tasks). Efective teams show reflexivity, meaning they reflect on and adjust their purpose when necessary. 

Team Efficacy: is about what they can do. It’s defined in the book as “A team’s collective belief that they can succeed at their tasks”.

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Team Identity: It’s how we identify ourselves. When people connect emotionally with the group they’re in, they are more likely to invest in their relationship with those groups. It’s the same with teams.

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Team Cohesion: To which extent are the team members attracted to each other and motivated by the same things.

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Mental Models: How they do their work, how they think about somethings. In the book, it’s “Team members’ knowledge and beliefs about how the work gets done by the team.”

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Conflict Levels: Any group would have dif in opinions, but it’s important to distinguish between (Is this relationship conflict?) so this conflict would last and might hinder team efectiveness. Or (Is this a task conflict?) so that it would end after doing the task. Task conflict isn’t that critical as the relationship one. If relationship-conflicts aren’t solved, it’s better to dismiss one of the members.

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Social Loafing: The degree to which the members are lazy and are not willing to participate and so on. (Like: free-riders).

Key Roles of Teams:

Not all members would perform all these roles. These roles are divided between dif team members.

1- Creator: he usually the first one who creates initiative new ideas and then the rest start to think like him and bring new ideas. 2- Promoter: who champions or promotes these ideas that are already initiated. He would say (yes, it’s a good idea and we shall work on it). 3- Assessor: ofers insightful analysis of options. Once these ideas are created, he would start analyze the dif options. Ex: this idea is positive, but it’s expensive for example. 4- Organizer: from the very beginning, he would provide structure inside the team. He might assign dif tasks to dif members. He doesn’t have to be the leader here, but he is

the one who divides the tasks. Ex: Maha would do the intro, Mai would do the presentation and so on. 5- Producer: He’s dif from the creator. He would provide directions and follow through. Meaning that, he would tell them (okay, now we have agreed on these ideas, let’s stat working in this way) and he will give feedback about everything. He’s the one who ‘produce’ the project. 6- Controller: He would supervise and monitor the performance and evaluate. He would examine details and enforce rules. We’re working as expected or we’re late and so on.

7- Maintainer: He’s defending the team. Ex: if the top manager says that the team is not that efective, the maintainer would be the advocate of the team and explain why they aren’t on the expected plan and so on. He fights external battles. (outside the team) 8- Adviser: He encourages the search for more info. He may give opinions and suggestions, but he will never give you a ‘decision’. He tells you that you’re good at this and you need to improve this and so on. He helps you to analyze your situation, but he would never give you a concrete decision. 9- Linker: He would coordinate and integrate. Note that: Even though teams are something, the book tells us they are not always the answer, because:  It requires much time to reach a decision.  Sometimes, there’s poor communication because the personalities of the members don’t match with each other or because working online provides less communication.  The team requires more resources, like: money and time not just to take a decision but they may leave their departments to attend a meeting or something like this which means extra time for the team itself at the expense of achieving the other work.  They have to manage conflicts, otherwise the team would be a disaster. Before creating a team, test:  If the task can be achieved by one person or not. If yes, so don’t create the team.  If there’s a common purpose & if the mission is clear or not. If not, don’t create a team because they would only waste time and wouldn’t achieve anything because their goals are vague.  If the members are interdependent and can work and rely on each other or not. If yes, create a team....