Lecture 6: Teams II

Question 1

Group development stages (Tuckman’s model)

Answer 1

Forming
Storming 
Norming 
Performing 
Adjourning 
- in real life, the model, however, is not sequential

Question 2

Another perspective on team processes

Answer 2

• Transition phases: team focuses primarily on evaluation and/or planning activities to guide the accomplishment of a team goal or objective
• Action phases: team is engaged in acts that contribute directly to goal accomplishment (i.e., taskwork)

Question 3

Ringelmann effect

Answer 3

-People exert less effort when in a group than when alone. The bigger the group, the less effort…

Question 4

Köhler effect

Answer 4

People exert more effort when in a group than when alone

Question 5

Köhler effect vs Ringelmann effect

Answer 5

if people perform better in the groups depends on what kind of tasks they do

• Conjunctive tasks: Outcome = contribution of weakest member. Individual contributions indispensable
• Additive tasks: Outcome = sum of contributions. Individual contributions dispensable

Question 6

How to avoid free-riding?

Answer 6

• Increase intrinsic interest / importance / meaningfulness of the task
• Increase team-efficacy
• Fit team to task in a way that each person’s contributions are unique and indispensable
• Make individual contributions distinguishable
• Increase team cohesion

Question 7

Team cohesion benefits and how can we achieve it?

Answer 7

• benefits are less social loafing and more productivity depending on social norms.
  We can do it by
  1.Increase interaction
  2.Emphasize group identity

Question 8

What are the disadvantages of the group cohesion

Answer 8

• Cooperation with other groups more difficult (intergroup biases)
• More prone to conformity pressures

Question 9

Ash’s study

Answer 9

• effects of conformity in the group

Question 10

Motivated information processing in teams

Answer 10

There are two dimensions: social motivation and epistemic motivation
Epistemic motivation is: willingness to expend effort in order to thoroughly understand the issue
Social motivation: extent to which members care more about their individual or the collective outcomes

Question 11

What is the best type of motivation in teams (information processing perspective in teams)?

Answer 11

Best when both epistemic and pro-social motivations are high

Question 12

What type of conflict and under which conditions can be useful for groups?

Answer 12

Task conflict can be sometimes good ( relationship and process conflicts are never good)
- It can e useful only when it doesn’t overlap with relationship conflict (in practice thou there is .6 overlap) –> conflict management is the key

Question 13

False Consensus Bias

Answer 13

We assume that others share our views

Question 14

Fundamental attribution error

Answer 14

the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual’s observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior.