Group Dynamics

Emmanuel Paciano M. Mabulay., MA

 Course Requirements
• Quizzes
• Major Exams
• SLEs
• Facilitation Skills
• What do you call a group of fish
swimming in synchronized unison?

• How about a pack of foraging

baboons?
• What about a threesome of crows
cawing their way through a meadow?

• A group of whales is called?

But what is a collection of human

beings called?
 What is a Group?
• To what group do you belong?
• Do you consider chatmates in internet a
group?
• How about those whom you send GM?
• How about your GF or BF, are the two of you a
group?
• What made you say that you are a group?
 What is a Group?
• two or more individuals who are connected by
and within social relationships.
 Two or More
A group can range in size from two
members to thousands of members.
Very small collectives, such as dyads
(two members) and triads (three
members) are groups, but so are very
large collections of people, such as
mobs, crowds, and congregations.
• Although groups come in all shapes and
sizes, they tend to “gravitate to the
smallest size, two”.
• The members of dyads are also
sometimes linked by a unique and
powerful type of relationship—love—
that makes their dynamics more intense
than those found in other groups.
 Who are Connected?
• The connections, or ties, may be based
on strong bonds, like the links between
the members of a family or a clique of
close friends.
• The links may also be relatively weak
ones that are easily broken with the
passage of time or the occurrence of
relationship-damaging events.
By and Within Social Relationships
• a group is a collection of individuals who
have relations to one another.
• a group is a social unit which consists of a
number of individuals who stand in
(more or less) definite status and role
relationships to one another.
• They share a social identity—creates a
sense of we and us, as well as a sense of
“we”.
 Qualities of a Group
1. Interaction
2. Goals
3. Interdependence
4. Structure
5. Unity
 Interaction

• exchanged information with each other,

through both verbal and nonverbal
communication;
• arguments, talked over issues, and made
decisions.
• upset each other, gave one another help and
support, and took advantage of each other’s
weaknesses.
• worked together to accomplish difficult
tasks, but they sometimes slacked off
when they thought others would not
notice.
• taught each other new things and they
touched each other literally and
emotionally.
 Goals
• Groups usually exist for a reason.
• A team strives to outperform other teams in
competitions.
• In groups, people solve problems, create
products, develop standards, communicate
knowledge, have fun, perform arts, create
institutions, and even ensure their safety from
attacks by other groups.
 McGrath’s Model of Group Goals
• Generating ideas or plans
• Choosing a solution
• Negotiating a solution to a conflict
• Executing (performing) a task.
 Interdependence
• members depend on one another; their
outcomes, actions, thoughts, feelings,
and experiences are determined in part
by others in the group.
• members are obligated or responsible to
other group members, for they provide
each other with support and assistance.
 Structure
• Depends on the complex of roles, norms, and
intermember relations that organizes the
group.
• The roles of leader and follower are
fundamental ones in many groups.
 Unity
• interpersonal forces bind the members
together in a single unit with boundaries
that mark who is in the group and who is
outside of it.
• This quality of “groupness,” or solidarity,
is determined, in part, by group
cohesion.
• Groupness is also related to entitativity.
 Entitativity
• Even though an aggregation of
individuals may not be very cohesive,
those who observe the group—and even
the members themselves—may believe
that the group is a single, unified entity.
Entitativity is influenced by

■ Common fate: Do the individuals

experience the same or interrelated
outcomes?
■ Similarity: Do the individuals perform
similar behaviors or resemble one another?
■ Proximity: How close together are the
individuals in the aggregation?
 Types of Groups
• Primary groups, such as family, friends,
or tight-knit peer groups, are relatively
small, personally meaningful groups that
are highly unified.
• Social groups are larger and more
formally organized than primary groups,
and memberships tend to be shorter in
duration and less emotionally involving.
• Collectives are larger groups whose
members act in similar and sometimes
unusual ways. It includes a street crowd
watching a building burn, an audience at
a movie, a line (queue) of people waiting
to purchase tickets, a mob of college
students protesting a government policy,
and a panicked group fleeing from
danger.
• Category is an aggregation of individuals who
are similar to one another in some way like
gender, ethnicity, religion, etc.
 What are Group Dynamics?
• Dynamic-comes from the Greek dynami- kós, which
means to be strong, powerful, and energetic.
• Dynamic implies the influence of forces that
combine, sometimes smoothly but sometimes in
opposition, to create continual motion and change.
• Group dynamics, then, are the influential inter-
personal processes that occur in and between
groups over time.
 The Nature of Group Dynamics
• Kurt Lewin (1951) described the way groups and
individuals act and react to changing
circumstances, he named these processes group
dynamics.
• Dorwin Cartwright and Alvin Zander supplied a
formal definition, calling it a “field of inquiry
dedicated to advancing knowledge about the
nature of groups, the laws of their development,
and their interrelations with individuals, other
groups, and larger institutions.
 Level of Analysis
• individual-level analysis-focused on the person
in the group.
• group-level analysis-assumes each person is
“an element in a larger system, a group,
organization, or society and what he does is
presumed to reflect the state of the larger
system and the events occurring in it
 Are Groups Dynamic?
• Groups are powerful and influential: they
change their members and society-at-large.

• In what way are you changing your group?

• Dynamic systems are also fluid rather than

static, for they develop and evolve over time.
Studying Groups
 Thoughts to Ponder
• Are humans truly social creatures?
• Is the key to controlling people controlling their
groups?
• What happens when an incompetent person—
one “bad apple”—joins a group?
• Why do groups that are initially unified
eventually fall into disarray?
• Why do groups and their members act, feel, and
think the way they do?
• William Foote Whyte (1943) used observation
in his classic ethnography of street corner
gangs in Italian American sections of Boston.
• Whyte observed and recorded these groups
for three and a half years, gradually
developing a detailed portrait of this
community and its groups.
 Measurement in Group Dynamics
1. observation - measurement method that involves
watching and recording individual and group
actions.
• overt observation-openly watching and recording
group behavior with no attempt to conceal one’s
research purposes.
• covert observation-watching and recording group
behavior without the participants’ knowledge.
• participant observation Watching and recording
group behavior while taking part in the social
process.
• Elton Mayo and his associates made a
research at the Hawthorne Plant of the
Western Electric Company. They studied
productivity in the workplace by systematically
varying a number of features while measuring
the workers’ output.
• The Hawthorne groups worked in smaller
teams, members could talk easily among
themselves, and their managers were usually
less autocratic.
• Hawthorne effect-a change in behavior that
occurs when individuals know they are being
studied by researchers.
Structured observational methods
Psychologists classify people into various
personality types. They decide which behaviors
to track. Then they develop unambiguous
descriptions of each type of behavior they will
code. Next, using these behavioral definitions as
a guide, they note the occurrence and frequency
of these targeted behaviors as they watch the
group.
• quantitative study-a research procedure
used to collect and analyze data in a
numeric form, such as frequencies,
proportions, or amounts.
• Interaction Process Analysis (IPA)-a
structured coding system developed by
Robert Bales used to classify group
behavior into task-oriented and
relationship-oriented categories.
 Qualitative study
• A research procedure used to collectand analyze
nonnumeric, unquantified types of data, such as
text, images, or objects.
• Such data are often textual rather than numeric,
and may include verbal descriptions of group
interactions developed by multiple observers,
interviews, responses to open-ended surveys
questions, notes from conversations with group
members, or in-depth case descriptions of one or
more groups.
• Systematic Multiple Level Observation of
Groups (SYMLOG)-a theoretical and
structured coding system developed by
Robert Bales which assumes that group
activities can be classified along three
dimensions: dominance versus
submissiveness, friendliness versus
unfriendliness, and acceptance of versus
opposition to authority.
 Self-report measures
If you want to know what a group member is
thinking, feeling, or planning, then just ask him
or her to report that information to you directly.
• Interviews- the researcher records the
respondent’s answer to various questions
• Questionnaires- done by asking respondents
to record their answers themselves.
• Sociometry-a research technique
developed by Jacob Moreno that
graphically and mathematically
summarizespatterns of intermember
relations.
• Sociogram-a graphic representation of the
patterns of intermember relations created
through sociometry. Yields information
about individual members, relationships
between pairs of members, and the group’s
overall structure.
• populars, or stars, are well-liked, very
popular group members with a high
choice status: they are picked by many
other group members
• unpopulars, or rejected members, are
identified as disliked by many members
and so their choice status is low
• isolates, or loners, are infrequently
chosen by any group members
• positives, or sociables, select many
others as their friends
• negatives select few others as their
friends
• pairs are two people who choose each
other,and so have reciprocal bonds
• clusters are individuals within the group
who make up a subgroup, or clique
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
IN GROUP DYNAMICS
 Motivational and Emotional
Perspectives
• Motivation-wants, needs, and other
psychological processes that energize behavior
and thereby determine its form, intensity, and
duration.
• Emotions often accompany these needs and
desires; feelings of happiness, sadness,
satisfaction, and sorrow are just a few of the
emotions that can influence how people act in
group situations.
 Behavioral Perspectives
• law of effect—that is, behaviors that are
followed by positive consequences, such as
rewards, will occur more frequently, whereas
behaviors that are followed by negative
consequences will become rarer.
• John Thibaut and Harold Kelley’s (1959)
social exchange theory extended
Skinner’s behaviorism to groups. They
agreed that individuals hedonistically
strive to maximize their rewards and
minimize their costs. However, when
individuals join groups, they forego
exclusive control over their outcomes.
 Systems Theory Perspectives
• Assumes groups are complex, adaptive,
dynamic systems of interacting individuals.
The members are the units of the system, who
are coupled one to another by relationships.
• groups are sometimes created for a purpose,
with procedures and standards that are
designed with the overall goal of the system in
mind.
 Cognitive Perspectives
• Allow members to gather information,
make sense of it, and then act on the
results of their mental appraisals.
• The identify rapidly those who are
outgoing, shy, and intelligent.
• They take note of the actions of others
and try to understand what caused the
other member to act in this way.
• self-categorization theory- a conceptual
approach developed by John Turner and
his colleagues that explains a range of
group behavior, including the
development of social identity and
intergroup relations, in terms of the
social cognitive categorization processes.
 Biological Perspectives
• Group members can solve complex problems,
communicate with one another using spoken
and written language, build and operate
massive machines, and plan their group’s
future. But group members are also living
creatures, whose responses are often shaped
by biological, biochemical, and genetic
characteristics.
• When conflict arises in the group, heart rates
escalate, and other body changes occur to
help members cope with the stress, they
become physiologically aroused, and this
arousal can interfere with their work.
• One biological perspective—evolutionary
psychology