11 2 Group Process: The Pluses and Minuses of Working Together Principles of Social Psychology

By addressing these causes, groups can take proactive measures to mitigate process losses. This includes promoting effective communication channels, encouraging diverse perspectives, fostering a supportive and accountable culture, providing clear guidance and leadership, and fostering a sense of purpose and motivation among group members. Groupthink occurs when group members prioritize consensus and harmony over critical thinking and independent decision-making. This can lead to a suppression of dissenting opinions, stifling creativity, and resulting in account balance definition suboptimal outcomes. Process loss is a phenomenon that occurs when a group working together fails to perform as well as the sum of their individual abilities would suggest.

Cognitive Process Losses: Ineffective Brainstorming

And it has been argued that terrorist groups develop their extreme positions and engage in violent behaviors as a result of the group polarization that occurs in their everyday interactions (Drummond, 2002; McCauley, 1989). As the group members, all of whom initially have some radical beliefs, meet and discuss their concerns and desires, their opinions polarize, allowing them to become progressively more extreme. Because they are also away from any other influences that might moderate their opinions, they may eventually become mass killers.

Generally, because we prefer to what is cash flow from operating activities remain in groups that we feel good about, the outcome of group membership is a positive social identity—our group memberships make us feel good. The focus of group process is on working groups as they perform their assigned functions and attempt to meet their goals. Basic principles underlie group process and these dimensions can be measured to characterize the current status of the group. Characteristics of working groups include similarity among the group members, interaction (communication) among the members, interdependence of the members in meeting goals, and a group structure that defines group function and performance. Group performance is another example of a case in which person and situation variables work together because it depends on both the skills of the people in the group and the way these resources are combined as the group members work together.

1. It has also been found that status matters—jury members with higher-status occupations and education, males rather than females, and those who talk first are more likely be chosen as the foreperson, and these individuals also contribute more to the jury discussion (Stasser et al., 1982).
2. Research has found group polarization on these types of decisions, such that the group recommendation is more risky (in this case, requiring a lower probability of success of the new company) than the average of the individual group members’ initial opinions.
3. This approach is particularly useful with intellective, judgmental tasks—those in which a decision has to be made, but in which there is no way to know whether the final decision was the correct one (Swaab, Galinsky, Medvec, & Diermeier, 2012).
4. On the other hand, process losses are more likely to be observed in tasks in which the individual’s inputs are perceived as nonidentifiable or nonessential, because in these cases motivation to perform the task generally decreases.

Process Losses Due to Difficulties in Coordination and Motivation

Triplett found something very interesting—the racers who were competing with other bicyclers on the same track rode significantly faster than bicyclers who were racing alone, against the clock. This led Triplett to hypothesize that people perform tasks better when the social context includes other people than when they do the tasks alone. The tendency to perform tasks better or faster in the presence of others is known as social facilitation.

Some examples would be finding solutions to mathematics or logic problems, such as the horse-trading problem. These computer systems, generally known as group support systems, are used in many businesses and other organizations. As he or she writes suggestions or ideas, they are passed to the other group members via the computer network, so that each individual can see the suggestions of all the group members, including one’s own. In one demonstration of the tendency for groups to preferentially discuss information that all the group members know about, Stasser and Titus (1985) used an experimental design based on the hidden profile task, as shown in the following table. The information about the candidates was arranged such that one of the candidates (Candidate A) had more positive qualities overall in comparison with the other (Candidate B). Individuals who were asked to shout as loudly as they could shouted much less so when they were in larger groups, and this process loss was the result of both motivation and coordination losses.

The group members begin to feel that they are superior and do not need to seek outside information. Contemporary advances in technology have created the ability for individuals to work together on creativity tasks via computer. These computer systems, generally known as group support systems, are used in many businesses and other organizations.

Groupthink

This approach is particularly useful with intellective, judgmental tasks—those in which a decision has to be made, but in which there is no way to know whether the final decision was the correct one (Swaab, Galinsky, Medvec, & Diermeier, 2012). As summarized in Table 4, there are many potential decision schemes that might serve as the basis of group decision-making, and which one is most predictive of the group decision depends on the specific task being performed. Free riding is to a type of social loafing that occurs when individuals rely on other group members to do the work for the group. Individuals free ride when it seems that their contribution doesn’t matter, even if their performance is being monitored (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). The sucker effect occurs when individuals perceive that they are contributing more to a task than others, which leads the individuals to withhold effort as a means of restoring equity and avoiding being taken advantage of (Kerr, 1983).

As you can see in the following figure, when there are a greater number of jury members who hold the majority position, it becomes more and more certain that their opinion will prevail during the discussion. This is not to say that minorities cannot ever be persuasive, but it is very difficult for them. The strong influence of the majority is probably due to both informational conformity (i.e., that there are more arguments supporting the favored position) and normative conformity (people are less likely to want to be seen as disagreeing with the majority opinion). The general idea of the persuasive arguments approach to explaining group polarization is cognitive in orientation.

Group polarization is also caused in part by diffusion of responsibility—when risky decisions are made by groups, the potential negative consequences are diffused throughout the group so that no one member may be seen to be responsible. Group members’ desires for social identity also can increase group polarization, particularly when the group wants to differentiate itself from other groups with other opinions (Hogg, Turner, & Davidson, 1990; Mackie, 1986). The members of groups who have experienced group polarization may be unaware that polarization has occurred (Keating, Van Boven, & Judd, 2016). One of the most important conclusions to be drawn from the literature that has studied brainstorming is that the technique is less effective than expected because group members are required to do other things in addition to being creative. Variations on brainstorming, such as those that allow group members develop their own ideas as individuals first, before they share them with the group, may be more effective.

Group Task Performance

An example of a group process that can lead to very poor group decisions is groupthink. Groupthink occurs when a group, which is made up of members who may actually be very competent and thus quite capable of making excellent decisions, nevertheless ends up making a poor decision as a result of a flawed group process and strong conformity pressures. And process losses occur because group members tend to discuss information that they all have access to while ignoring equally important information that is available to only a few of the members.

Einhorn, Hogarth, and Klempner (1977) asked groups of individuals to imagine themselves as a group of astronauts who are exploring the moon but who have become stranded from their base. The problem is to determine which of the available pieces of equipment (e.g., oxygen bottles, a rope, a knife) they should take with them as they attempt to reach the base. To assess group performance, experts on the difficulties of living in space made judgments about the quality of the group decisions. Non-Eureka tasks represent an interesting challenge for groups because even when they have found what they think is a good answer, they may still need to continue their discussion to convince themselves that their answer is the best they can do and that they can therefore stop their deliberation.

Ineffective communication channels, unequal participation, and task ambiguity can also contribute to process losses. Process losses can occur in a variety of contexts, including in academic and work settings, sports teams, and other group situations. One example of process loss is the “social loafing” phenomenon, where individuals in a group may not put forth their full effort due to a belief that their individual contribution will not be recognized or valued. They occur in part as a result of coordination losses that occur when people work together and in part because people do not work as hard in a group as they do when they are alone—social loafing.