HOW GROUPS GET THINGS DONE
Most groups exist to get things done, including making decisions and collaborating on group projects. Working in groups has some obvious attractions – more hands are involved, the human resource pool is enlarged, and there are social benefits. Yet group performance is often worse than you might expect.
Potential group gains in effectiveness and creativity seem to be offset by negative characteristics of group performance, including the tendency to let others do the work, sub-optimal decision making, and becoming more extreme as a group than as individual members. As we shall see, some of these drawbacks are due to problems of coordination, and others are due to reduced individual motivation (Steiner, 1972).
Social loafing
Individual motivation can suffer in groups, particularly where the task is relatively meaningless and uninvolving, the group is large and unimportant, and each individual’s contribution to the group is not personally identifiable (Williams, Harkins & Latané, 1981). This phenomenon has been termed social loafing (Latané, Williams & Harkins, 1979).
Latané and colleagues asked experimental participants (who were blindfolded and wearing headsets that played loud noise) to shout as loudly as they could under three conditions: as a single individual, as a member of a dyad or as a member of a six-person group. In a further twist, this experiment also manipulated whether participants actually did shout either alone or in the presence of one or five other group members (‘real groups’), or were merely led to believe that they were cheering with one or five others (while, in fact, they were shouting alone; so-called ‘pseudo-groups’). The blindfolds and the headphones made this deception possible.
Although groups obviously produced more noise in total than single individuals, group productivity failed to reach its full potential, since it was found that individual productivity decreased as group size increased. In figure 18.12, the dashed line along the top represents the potential performance we would expect if there were no losses or gains as individuals were combined into groups.
The line marked ‘real groups’ shows actual group performance. By creating both real and pseudo groups, Latané et al. were able to estimate how much performance loss was due to coordination and motivation losses (about 50 per cent was in fact due to each). Any productivity loss observed in the pseudo groups could only be attributed to reduced motivation, not faulty coordination, since there were no ‘co-workers’ engaged in the shouting. In the real groups, however, coordination loss could occur due to the physical phenomenon of ‘sound cancellation’ – when multiple sources produce sound, some of it is cancelled out by other sound.
Subsequent research using this and similar paradigms has shown that social loafing is minimized when groups work on challenging and involving tasks, and when group members believe that their own inputs can be fully identified and evaluated through comparison with fellow members (Harkins & Jackson, 1985) or with another group (Harkins & Szymanski, 1989). In fact, when people work either on important tasks or in groups which are important to them, they may even work harder collectively than alone – so, in these circumstances, ‘social loafing’ turns into ‘social striving’ (Gabrenya, Wang & Latané, 1985; Williams, Karau & Bourgeois, 1993; Zaccaro, 1984).
Group decision making
An important group function is to reach a collective decision, through discussion, from an initial diversity of views. Researchon social decision schemes identifies a number of implicit or explicit decision-making rules that groups can adopt to transform diversity into a group decision (Stasser, Kerr & Davis, 1989). These include:
unanimity – discussion puts pressure on deviants to conform;
majority wins – discussion confirms the majority position, which becomes the group decision;
truth wins – discussion reveals the position that is demonstrably correct; and
two-thirds majority – discussion establishes a two-thirds majority, which becomes the group decision.
The type of rule that is adopted can affect both the group atmosphere and the decision-making process (Miller, 1989). Forexample, unanimity often creates a pleasant atmosphere but can make decision making painfully slow, whereas ‘majority wins’ can make many group members feel dissatisfied but speeds up decision making.
Juries provide an ideal context for research on decision schemes. Not only are they socially relevant in their own right, but they can be simulated under controlled laboratory conditions. For example, Stasser, Kerr and Bray (1982) found that a two-thirds majority rule prevails in many juries. Furthermore, they discovered that it was possible to predict accurately the outcome of jury deliberations from knowledge of the initial distribution of verdict preferences (‘initial’ here means before any discussion has taken place). If two thirds or more initially favoured guilt, then that was the final verdict, but if there was initially no two-hirds majority, then the outcome was a hung jury.
Group polarization and ‘groupthink’
Popular opinion and research on conformity both suggest that groups are conservative and cautious entities, and that they exclude extremes by a process of averaging. But two phenomena that challenge this view are group polarization and groupthink. Group polarization is the tendency for groups to make decisions that are more extreme than the average of pre-discussion opinions in the group, in the direction towards the position originally favoured by the average (Lamm & Myers, 1978; Myers, 1982). For example, four students whose averaged individual attitudes are mildly against abortion are likely to form an attitude as a group that is more extremely against abortion. Group polarization therefore makes group decisions moreextreme. Furthermore, it can ometimes shift individual members’ enduring attitudes towards the more polarized group position.
The explanation for this lies partly in the same processes of informational and normative social influence we discussed earlier (Isenberg, 1986). Group members learn from other group members’ arguments, and engage in mutual persuasion, but they are also influenced by where others stand on the issue, even if they do not hear each other’s arguments. This polarization is particularly likely to occur when an important group to which an individual belongs (i.e. an ingroup) confronts a salient group to which she does not belong (i.e. an outgroup) that holds an opposing view. Here, group members seem to conform to what they see as the prototypical view held by other ingroup members (i.e. the view or position that is most similar to that of all the other ingroup members, but most different from that of the outgroup members). It is thought that conformity to the prototypical view helps to differentiate the ingroup from the outgroup (Hogg, Turner & Davidson, 1990).
Finally, mere repetition of arguments, which also tends to occur within groups (especially when the discussion lasts a long time, and all group members wish to express their views) can also produce polarization (Brauer & Judd, 1996).
Groupthink is a more extreme phenomenon. Janis (1972) argued that highly cohesive groups that are under stress, insulated from external influence, and which lack impartial leadership and norms for proper decisionmaking procedures, adopt a mode of thinking (groupthink) in which the desire for unanimity overrides all else. The members of such groups apparently feel invulnerable, unanimous and absolutely correct. They also discredit contradictory information, pressurize deviants and stereotype outgroups.
The consequences can be disastrous – particularly if the decisionmaking group is a government body. A dramatic example attributed to groupthink is the decision of NASA officials to press ahead with the launch of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, despite warnings from engineers (see Esser & Lindoerfer, 1989). The shuttle crashed seconds into its flight.
Brainstorming
A popular method of harnessing group potential is brainstorming – the uninhibited generation of as many ideas as possible, regardless of quality, in an interactive group (e.g. Stroebe & Diehl, 1994). Although it is commonly thought that rainstorming enhances individual creativity, research shows convincingly that this is not the case.Stroebe and Diehl considered arious possible explanations for this finding. They hypothesized that ‘process loss’ in brainstorming groups is due to an informal coordination rule of such groups which specifies that only one group member may speak at a time. During this time, other group members have to keep silent, and they may be distracted by the content of the group discussion, or forget their own ideas. Stroebe and Diehl termed this phenomenon ‘production blocking’, because the waiting time before speaking and the distracting influence of others’ ideas could potentially block individuals from coming up with their own ideas. Stroebe and Diehl tested their hypothesis by creating five different conditions. In one condition, participants brainstormed in real interacting four-person groups (‘interactive group’ condition). Participants in four other conditions were physically separated from one another in different cubicles. Even though participants in these conditions were seated alone, they expressed their ideas via a clip-on microphone so that they could be tape-recorded. In an ‘alone, individual, no communication’ condition participants brainstormed individually. In the three remaining ‘alone’ conditions, each cubicle contained an intercom and a display withlights, each light representing one specific group member. These lights functioned like a set of traffic lights. As soon as one member of the four-person group started to speak, a voice-activated sensor switched her light to green in all of the other three cubicles. Meanwhile the other three lights on the display were red.
Each individual could only speak when his or her light was green, and all the other lights were red. This technology allowed the researchers to create three different ‘alone’ conditions. In the ‘alone, blocking, communication’ condition participants took their turns following the lights, and were able to hear via the earphones what was being said by the other participants. In the ‘alone, blocking, no communication’ condition participants also had to wait for their turn before expressing their ideas, but could not hear each other’s ideas via the intercom. In the ‘alone, no blocking, no communication’ condition participants were instructed to disregard the lights and the intercom and to express their ideas whenever they wanted to.
To compare the productivity of participants working under these different conditions afterwards, Diehl and Stroebe pooled the ideas expressed by the four individuals who brainstormedalone and without ommunication, to make a ‘nominal group’ product. Since the same idea might be suggested several times by four people working alone, without communication, whereas such repetition would not be allowed in case of free communication, redundant ideas were eliminated from the pooled set of ideas that constituted the ‘nominal group’ product. The results of this clever study were clear-cut. Participants generated approximately twice as many ideas when they were allowed to express their ideas as they occurred (i.e. in the two non-blocking conditions) than when they had to wait their turn (i.e. in the three blocking conditions). These results suggest that ‘production blocking’ is indeed an important factor explaining the inferiority of interactive brainstorming groups. This suggests that it may be more effective to ask group members to develop their ideas separately, and only then have these ideas expressed, discussed and evaluated in a subsequent joint meeting (see Delbecq, van de Ven & Gustafson, 1975).
Of interest, electronic brainstorming (via computers linked on a network) can be very effective, because the lack of face-to-face interaction minimizes production blocking (Valachich, Dennis & Connolly, 1994).
