Groups Flashcards
Entitactivity
The property of a group that makes it seem like a coherent, distinct and unitary entity
Common-Bond group
groups based upon attachment among members
> Maximising their rewards and minimising their costs with respect to their own contributions
personal goal > Group goal
Common-identity groups
groups based on direct attachment to the group
> altruistic principle of maximising the group’s rewards and minimising its cost
Group goal > personal goal
Group cohesiveness
The property of a group that effectively binds people, as group members, to one another and to the group as a whole, giving the group a sense of solidarity and oneness
by:
- attractiveness of group/group members
- ind. goals requiring social interaction / social interaction per se
personal attraction
liking for someone based on idiosyncratic preferences and interpersonal relationships
social attraction
liking for someone based on common group membership and determined by the person’s prototypicality of the group
Group socialisation
dynamic relationship between the group and its members that describes the passage of members through a group in terms of commitment and of changing roles
three basic processes
1. Evaluation: continuous comparison of the past, present and future of rewards of the group
2. Commitment
3. role transition: a sharp change in the type of role a member occupies in a group
initiation rite: often painful or embarrassing public procedure to mark group members’ movement from one role to another
Five stage developmental sequence
- Forming: an orientation and familiarisation stage
- storming: a conflict stage, where members know each other well enough to start working through disagreements about goals and practices
- norming: having survived the storming stage, consensus, cohesion and a sense of common identity and purpose emerge
- performing: a period in which group works smoothly as a unit that has shared norms and goals, and good morale and atmosphere
- adjourning: the group dissolves because it has accomplished its goals, or because members lose interest and motivation and move on
Ethnomethodology
Method involving the violation of hero norms to reveal their presence
Frame of reference
complete range of subjectively conceivable positions on some attitudinal or behavioural dimension, which relevant people can occupy in a particular context
> to act ‘appropriately’
coordinate the actions of members towards fulfilment of group goals
constitute moral conduct: behavioural activation (approach) and behavioural inhibition (avoidance)
Roles
> A division of labour
furnish clear-cut social expectations within the group and provide information about how members relate to one another > furnish members with a self-definition and a place within the group
role identity theory
Status
consensual evaluation of the prestige of a role or role occupancy in a group, or of the prestige of a group and its members as a whole
expectation state theory
theory of the emergence of roles as a consequence of people‘s status-based expectations about others‘ performance
specific status characteristics
information about those abilities of a person that are directly relevant to the group‘s task
Diffuse status characteristics
information about a person’s abilities that are only obliquely relevant to the group’s task, and derive mainly from large-scale category memberships outside the group
Communication network
set of rules governing the possibility or ease of communication between different roles in a group
> greater centralisation improves group performance
> degree of autonomy felt by group members > satisfaction
Subgroup
> competition
> Schism: division of the group into subgroups that differ in their attitudes, values or ideaology
deviants and marginal members
deviation
Subjective group dynamics
a process where normative deviants who deviate towards an outgroup (anti—norm deviants) are more harshly treated than those who deviate away from the outgroup (pro-norm deviants)
reasons for joining groups
> Share goals that require behavioural interdependence for the achievement > for mutual positive support and the mere pleasure of affiliatio
motivation for affiliation and group formation
> terror management theory: the notion that the most fundamental human motivation is to reduce terror of the inevitability of death
reduce fear of death
uncertainty-identity theory: to reduce uncertainty and to feel more comfortable about who they are, people choose to identify with groups that are distinctive, and clearly defined and have consensual norms
motivated to join groups that are consensually positively evaluated and furnish a positive social identity
reasons for not joining group
> social ostracism: exclusion from a group by common consent can be particularly painful and have widespread effect
Coacting groups
Mere presence of others
Mere presence of others
an entirely passive and unresponsive audience that is only physically present
fishing reel experiment
Social facilitation effect
Individuals perform better in the presence ofothers than alone
an improvement in the performance of well-learnt/easy tasks and a deterioration in the performance of poorly learnt/difficult tasks in the mere presence of members of the same species
Drive theory
The physical presence of members of the same species instinctively causes arousal that motivates performance of habitual behaviour patterns
audience effects
Impact of the presence of others on individual task performance
self-presentation
to make the best possible impression of themselves to others
Social inhibition effect
Individuals perform worse in the presence of others
destruction-conflict theory
The physical presence of members of the same species is distracting and produces conflict between attending to the task and attending to the audience > distraction impairs task performance
> attentional conflict produces strife that facilitate dominant responses
> manage easy task but not difficult task
self-awareness theory
> Focus their attention on themselves as an object
compare actual self and ideal self > Self-discrepancy theory
increases motivation and effort on easy task
give up trying on difficult task
Arousal theory
A reconciliation of social facilitation and social inhibition effects
mere presence of others > arousing
dominant response is the correct response: social facilitation
dominant response is the incorrect response: social inhibition
the cockroach experiment
Initial arousal changes with task difficulty Easy task : lower initial arousal
Difficult task : higher initial arousal
The correlation between performance and arousal: inverted U shape
affected by two factors: difficulty of the task and arousal
evaluation apprehension model
The argument that the physical presence of members of the same species causes drive because people have learnt to be apprehensive about being evaluated
> approval and disapproval > social pressure > acquired arousal
Leadership
getting group members to achieve the group‘s goals
Autocratic leaders: leaders who use a style based on giving orders to followers
Democratic leaders: leaders who use a style based on consultation and obtaining agreement and consent from followers
Laissez-faire leaders: leaders who use a style based on disinterest in followers, generally intervened minimally
Leaders behaviour description questionnaire:
Scale devised by the Ohio State leadership researchers to measure leadership behaviour and distinguish between “initiating structure” (task-oriented) and “consideration” (relationship-oriented) dimensions > high on both: effective leader
Great person theory
perspective on leadership that attributes effective leadership to innate or acquired individual characteristics (instead of the context or process of leadership)
Situational perspectives
The view that anyone can lead effectively if the situation is right
Contingency theories
Theories of leadership that consider the leadership effectiveness of particular behaviours or behavioural styles to be contingent on the nature of the leadership situation
Least-preferred co-worker (LPC) scale
Fiedler’s scale for measuring leadership style in terms of favourability of attitude towards one’s least-preferred coworker
> high: relationship-oriented
> low: Task-oriented
Situational control
classification of the task characteristics in terms of how much control effective task performance requires
