UGBA 105 - Final Study Guide PDF

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Chapter 9: Functions of Group Behavior   ● Group = 2 or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come  together to achieve particular objectives   ● Formal group = a group defined by the organization’s structure with designated  work assignments establ...

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Chapter 9: Functions of Group Behavior Group = 2 or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives Formal group = a group defined by the organization’s structure with designated work assignments establishing tasks ○ Behaviors directed by organizational goals Informal group ○ Neither formally structured nor organizationally determined. Natural formation in the work environment that appear in response to the need for social contact  Social identity theory - our tendency to take personal pride or offence for the accomplishments of a group ○ People have emotional reactions to failure or success of their group because their self esteem is tied into group performance ○ Help people reduce uncertainty about who they are and what they should do Ingroup favoritism = we see members of our ingroup as better than other people, and people not in our group as all the same Social identity is important to a person because of : ○ Similarity - same values / characteristics ○ Distinctiveness - people are more likely to notice identities that show how they are different from other groups ○ Status - linked to building self esteem ○ Uncertainty reduction - membership in a group helps some people understand who they are and what they should do Five Stage Model of Group Formation ○ Forming - characterized by uncertainty about purpose, structure, and leadership, finished when ppl think they are a part of that group ○ Storming stage - one of intragroup conflict. Members accept constraints of groups but resist constraints on individuality. Finishes when there is a clear hierarchy of leadership ○ Norming stage - close relationships develop and group develops cohesiveness. Ends with assimilation of common set of expectations ○ Performing - fully functional and accepted, perform the task at hand ○ Adjourning stage - wrapping up activities and preparing to disband ○ Group becomes more effective as it progresses through the first four stages Temporary Deadline Groups - Punctuated Equilibrium Model ○ First meeting sets the group’s direction

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■ Behavioral assumptions ○ This first phase of group activity is one of inertia ○ A transition takes place wen theyve used half the time ○ Transition initiates major changes ○ Second phase of inertia follows the transition ○ The group’s last meeting is marked with accelerated activity ● Group Property 1: Roles ○ Role perception ■ Our view of how we’re supposed to act in a given situation ■ Role expectation - the way others believe you should act in a given context ■ Role conflict - when compliance with one role requirement may make it difficult to comply with another ■ Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment ● Created a prison in the basement of the psychology building ● The prisoners took a little time to accept the authority position of the guards ● Guards came to see the prisoners as a negative group ● Prisoners acted like they were powerless ○ Role Property 2: Norms ■ Norms = acceptable standards of behavior shared by their members that express what they ought and ought not to do under certain situations ■ Performance norm - provides explicit cues about how hard members should work ■ Appearance norms - dress code ■ Social arrangement norm - with whom to hang ■ Resource allocation norm - assignment of difficult jobs and what resources they require ■ The Hawthorne studies ● Examined relationship between physical environment and productivity ● Productivity increased as light levels decreased ● Isolating one group increased productivity - special ● People were concerned about community wages, and what they thought the value should be ■ Conformity = conform to group’s standards ■ Asch’s study =

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● Made groups of 7-8 people who were asked to compare 2 cards held by the experimenter - one card had one line and the other had three lines of varying length, one was identical to the line on the one line card. The difference in line length was quite obvious. If the members of the group gave wrong answers then the Unsuspecting Subject would be the one to say ■ Reference groups - groups that set a person’s norms ■ Deviant Workplace Behavior ● Voluntary behavior that threatens the well being of the organization or its members ○ Production ○ Property ○ Political ○ Personal aggression ○ Group Property 3: Status ■ Status = a socially defined position or rank given to groups or groups of members by others ■ What determines status ● The power one wields over another ● A person’s ability to contribute to a group’s goals ● An individual’s personal characteristics ■ Status and Norms ● High status individuals have more freedom to deviate from orms than other group members ● Better able to resist conformity pressures ■ Status and Group Interaction ● High status people tend to be more assertive group members ■ Status Inequity ● Important for group members to believe the status hierarchy is equitable. Perceived inequity creates disequilibrium ○ Group Property 4: Size ■ Social loafing - the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when alone ■ Ringelmann - compared results of individual and group performance on rope pulling task. ● One person pulling exerted a lot more weight than others

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■ Group performance increases with size, but the addition of new members has diminishing return on productivity ■ Social loafing caused by believing others in your group are not carrying their fair share ● Consistent with individualistic cultures ■ Ways to prevent social loafing ● Set group goals ● Increase intergroup competition ● Engage in peer evaluation ● Select members who have high motivation and like working in groups ● Base group rewards in part on each member’s unique contributions ○ Group Property 5: Cohesiveness ■ Cohesiveness = the degree to which members are attracted to each other and motivated to stay in the gorup ■ Affects group productivity ■ When cohesiveness is low but norms are high, output increases but not by as much ■ What can you do? ● Make group smaller ● Encourage agreement with group goals ● Increase the time members spend together ● Increase groups status or perceived difficulty ● Stimulate competition with other groups ● Give rewards to the group rather than to individuals ● Physically isolate the group  ○ Group Property 6: Diversity ■ Diversity = the degree to which members of the group are similar to or different from one another ■ Diversity increases with group conflict - lowers morale and drop out rates ■ As tenure diversity increased, performance dropped off ● Not when there were tea oriented human resources practices though ■ Diverse groups may perform better over time ■ May cue openmindedness ● Decision Making ○ Group versus the Individual

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■ Strengths of group decision making ● More complete information and knowledge ● Increased diversity of views ● Acceptance of a solution ■ Weaknesses of group decision making ● Groups typically take more time to reach a solution ● Conformity pressures ● Group discussion dominated by few people ● Effectiveness and Efficiency ○ More accurate group deicions ○ Lower speed ○ Groupthink and Groupshift ■ Groupthink - describes situations in which group pressures for conformity deter the group from critically appraising unusual, minority, or unpopular views ● Rationalize resistance to assumptions ● Members apply direct pressures on those who momentarily express doubts ● Members who have doubts avoid deviating from group consensus ● Illusion of unanimity ● Closely aligns with asch experiments ● Occurs most when people have strong group identity or the group is facing a threat ● Can fix by ○ Monitoring group size ○ Encourage project leaders to play an impartial role ○ Appoint people to play devil’s advocate ○ Use exercises that stimulate active discussion ■ Groupshift = the way group members tend to exaggerate the initial positions the hold when discussing a given set of alternatives and arriving at a situation ● Group polarization = group decisionmaking norm thats made early in the process ● Why polarization ○ People in the group are more comfortable ○ Group diffuses responsibility ○ Free any single member from responsibility

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● Group decisios exaggerate the initial position of the individual members ● Shift has been more often to be toward greater risk ○ Group Decision-Making Techniques ■ Interacting groups - members meet face to face ● Groupthink -- people may censor themselves ■ Brainstorming ● Encouraging all the alternatives while withholding criticism - not super efficient ■ Nominal group technique - restricts discussion or interpersonal communication during the decision making process, hence the term is nominal ■ Electronic meeting - type responses into their computers, individual but anonymous ■ And chit chat is eliminated Chapter 10: Teams ● Why have teams become so popular? ○ Group = 2 or more indiivduals interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives ○ Work group = a group that interacts primarily to share information and make decisions to help each member perform within their area of responsibility ○ Work team = generates a positive synergy through coordinated effort. The individual efforts result in a level of performance greater than the su of those individual inputs ■ Complementary skills ● Types of Teams ○ Problem solving teams - dont have authority to unilaterally implement any changes ○ Self-Managed Work Teams ■ Groups of employees who perform highly related or interdepedent jobs and take on many responsibilities of former supervisors ■ Not always positive research - don’t manage conflicts well, pwer struggles, they have more satisfaction but more absenteeism ○ Cross Functional Teams ■ Made up of employees from same hierarchial levevl but different work areas who come together to complete a task ○ Virtual Teams

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■ Use computer technology to unite physically despersed members and achieve a common goal. Collaborate online. ■ Challenges = they may suffer because there is less social rapport and direct interaction among members ● Not as much information sharing ● Creating Effective Teams ○ 1. Contextual influences that make teams effective ○ 2. Composition ○ 3. Process ○ Team effectiveness - objective measures of the team’s productivity, managers’ ratings of the team’s performance, and aggregate measures of member satisfaction ○ Context: What Factors Determine Whether Teams are Successful ■ Adequate resources ■ Leadership and structure ● Esp important in multiteam systems ○ In which different teams coordinate their efforts to produce a desired outcome ■ Climate of Trust ■ Performance Evaluation and Reward Systems ○ Team Composition ■ Abilities of members -- high ability teams perform better, more flexible, and smart leaders ■ Personality of members - ● Conscientious people are good at backing up other team members, sensing when ppl need support, open team members communicate better with one another and throw out more deas ● 20 teams of 4 ppl each - 40 conscientius and 40 low conscientious - make 10 tams of conscientious people and 10 teams of not . seeding is not effective ○ Allocation of Roles ■ Make sure all the necessary roles are filled ● Linker, creator, promoter, assessor, organizer, producer, controller, maintainer, adviser ○ Diversity of roles ■ Organizational demography - suggests tat attributes such as age or the date of joining should help us predict turover ● Turnover will be greater among dissimilar folks

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● Demographic diversity is not linked to team performance overall ● Gender diversity is negative effects ● Proper leadership helps diverse team ○ Size of teams ■ Keeping teams small is a key to improving group effectiveness. ● 5-9 is most effective ■ When too big social loafing increases, not held as accountable ○ Member preferences ■ When selecting a team, consider individual preferences, do they wanna work on that team ● Team Processes ○ Potential group effectiveness + process gains - process loseses = actual group effectiveness ○ Process variables - include member commitment to a common purpose, establishment of specific team goals, team efficacy, a managed level of conflict, and minimized social loafing ○ Common plan and purpose ■ - analyze team’s mission, develop goals to achieve that mission, and creating strategies for achieving those goals ■ Teams that consistently perform better have established a clear sense of what needs to be done and how ■ Reflexivity - they reflect on and adjust their master plan when needed ○ Specific goals - ■ Translate their common purpose into specific, measurable, and realistic performance goals ○ Team efficacy - being self confident teams - to think that you can succeed ○ Mental models ■ Organized mental models of the main components in a team’s environment that team members share ■ Shared mental models increases motivation in work ○ Conflict levels ■ Conflict could be good ■ Relationship conflicts are bad ■ Disagreements about how the task content stimulate discussion, and promote critical analysis ○ Social loafing

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■ Dont put in effort because they think their particular contributions cannot be identified ● Turning Individuals into Team Players ○ Selecting: hiring team players ■ Some people possess the interpersonal skills to be effective team players ■ Be sure candidates are team players when hiring ■ Assign individualists to work that doesn’t require team ■ Might mean resisting the urge to hire the best talent ○ Training: Creating Team Players ■ Worskshops, training specialists ○ Rewarding: Providing Incentives to be a good team player ■ Set a cooperative tone as soon as possible ■ Teams cannot succeed switching from competitive to coopertive mindset ■ Promotions rightly ■ Camaderie ● Teams aren’t always the answer ○ Teamwork takes more time and often more resources than individual work ○ More communication demands, conflicts to manage, and meetings to run ○ Apply 3 tests to see if teams are the right answer: ■ Can the work be done better by more than one person ● Tasks that don’t require diverse input ■ Does the work create a common purpose or set of goals for the people in the goup that is more than the aggregate of the individual goals? ■ Determine whether the members of the group are interdependent  Chapter 11: Communication ● Communication = the transfer and the understanding of meaning ● Functions of Communication ○ 4 major functions of communication ■ Control - formally and informally ■ Motivation - clarifying to employees what they must do and how well they are doing it ■ Emotional expression - feelings of fulfillment of social need ■ And information - facilitate decision making ● The Communication Process

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1) the sender - initiates message by encoding a thought 2) encoding 3) the message 4) the channel 5) decoding 6) the receiver 7) noise 8) feedback Sender encodes a thought into a message into a physical product. The medium is the channel through which the message travels ○ Formal channels - established by the organization to transmit a message ○ Informal channels - spontaneous and emerge as a response to individual choices ○ Receiver gets the message, translates the codes into understandable form. Noise represents communication barriers that distort the clarity of the message . feedback is the check on how successful the transfer was. ● Direction of Communication ○ Vertical or lateral ○ Downward communication ■ Communication that flows from one level of a group or org to a lower level -- assign goals, instructions, etc. ● Its one way one time yikes! ○ Upward Communication ■ Flows to a higher level in the group or organization. It is used to provide feedback to hier ups ■ Harder for managers nowadays - time ○ Lateral communication ■ When communication takes place among members of the same work group level ■ Saves time and facilitates coordination ● Interpersonal Communication ○ Oral Communication ■ Advantages: speed and quick feedback ■ Face to face communication on a consistent basis is best way to get info to and from employees ■ Major disadantage: possible distortion ○ Written Communication ■ Tangible and verfiable, everyone has a record of it ■ Good for complex and lengthy conversations ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

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■ People think twice about what they want to say ■ Time consuming , lack of built in feedback mechanism ○ Nonverbal communication ■ Body movements, intonations ■ 1) the extent to which we like another and are interested in their views and the perceived status between a sender and a receiver ■ Facial expressions, intonations, physical distane ● Organizational Communication ○ Formal small-group networks ■ Chain - rigidly follows the formal chain of command ■ Wheel relies on central figure to act as the conduit for all the group’s communication ■ All channel - permits all gorup members to actively communicate with eah other ○ The Grapevine ■ Informal communiation terwork in a group or organization ■ 75% of employees hear news first ■ Rumors emerge as a response to situations that are important to us, when there is ambiguity, and under conditions that arouse anxiety ■ Limit rumors by providing more info, explain the actions, refrain from shooting the messenger, and maintain open communication channels ○ Electronic Communications ■ 71 percent of communication today is electronic ■ Email ● Risk of misinterpreting the message ● Drawbacks for communicating negative messages - not easy ● Time consuming nature - 60% non spam emails everyday ○ Dont check email in the morning ○ Check email in batches ○ Unsubscribe ○ Stop sending email ○ Declare email bankruptcy ● Limited expression of emotions ● Privacy concerns ● IM and Texting ○ Easier to convey long messages via email

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○ in86% of meetings, some participants checked their messages ○ 20% of managers scolded for using their phones too much ○ Dont let informality of texting spill into business ○ 58% managers rate spelling and grammar as v important ● Social Networking ○ Many companies have developed their own in house social networks ● Blogs ○ Millions of ppl use them ○ Twitter is a hybrid social networking service that allows users to post microblog entries ● Video conferencing ■ Managing Information ● Dealing with Info Overload ○ When people are uniterrupted they can do more - block it off in chunks ● Threat to information security ● Choice of Communication Channel ○ Rich channels - handle multiple cues simultaneously, facilitate rapid feedback, and be very personal ○ Lean channels - lack this ○ Face to face communication - most channel rich ○ Routine messages are good for efficient lean channels, non routine communications are better for channel rich settings ● Pervasive Communications ○ Automatic and Controlled Processing ■ Automatic processing - relatively superficial consideration of evidence and info making use of heuristics like those we discussed earlier ■ Takes little time or effort ■ Lets us get fooled by a variety of tricks ○ Controlled Processing ■ Detailed consideration of evidence and info relying on facts, figures, and logic -- requires lots of effort and energy, but harder to fool anyone ○ Predictors of Processing technique

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■ Interest Level ■ Prior Knowledge - if they know a lot, more likely to use controlled processing ■ Personality - what kind of per...