Understanding Group Dynamics and Leadership in Organizations
Group Decision Making and Team Dynamics
Studies of Group Decision Making
Bavelas’ Studies:
- Number of roles and their impact on decision making in conflict situations.
- Influence of encouraging a specific viewpoint on perceptions of leadership and foolishness.
Recent Studies at Waterloo:
- Emergence of expertise and its perception by group members.
- Conflict in group decision making: Comparing the effects of discussing before or after individual decisions.
Observations at Bell Collaborative Centre
- Process of information reduction and the norm of agreement.
- Passive participation and potential solutions: Devil’s advocate role and selecting a reporter.
Teams in Organizations
- Positive connotations and alternative terms (committee, group, gang).
- Conceptual analysis using the role model: Expectations, interpretations, and behaviors.
- Role conflict, ambiguity, and overload leading to stress.
- Expected, perceived, and enacted role problems.
- Task-related social structure and its comparison to the role model.
Team Implementation Studies
- Training analogies to sports coaching.
- Union’s approach and findings on meeting vs. working teams.
- Impact on workers and supervisors, including a successful working team case study.
- Fundamental problem: Input-output error and emergence of other teams.
Working Relationships Between Teams
Study Background and Role Model
- Initial study of professionals in Japan and the notion of consistency.
- Focus on conflict and degree of consistency in expectations.
- Comparison of Nortel and TRW.
Bell Study: Teams as a Network of Interactions
- Interviews with professionals from various functions.
- Data analysis and categorization of comments.
Measurement of Effectiveness and Relation to Echo Method
- Ratio of helpful to unhelpful comments as a measure of effectiveness.
- Node and link level analysis.
Two-Way Interaction Between Nodes
- Summary of interactions and examples of helpful and unhelpful behaviors.
- Impact of unhelpful behaviors on individuals and projects.
Recommendations for Improvement
- Balancing variety and its handling: Reducing variety at the source or increasing handling mechanisms.
- Continuous improvement through iterative balancing and raising effectiveness criteria.
- Setting up processes for variety balancing and measuring effectiveness.
- Specific recommendations for the Bell study case.
Communication in Organizations
Information Theory: Shannon’s Basic Model
- Information source, transmitter, channel, receiver, and destination.
- Information as a means to reduce uncertainty.
- Redundancy and channel capacity.
Application of Information Theory
- Measuring form complexity and job situation complexity.
- Information retrieval examples.
Evaluation of Information Theory and Studies of Human Communication
- Historical context and requirements for applicability to human communication.
- Specifying items in set structures and the impact of similarity.
- Waterloo research on communication between individuals with different categorical knowledge.
Network Studies
- Bavelas’s network of connectivity and centrality measurements.
- Experimental setup and comparison of wheel and circle networks.
Hierarchical Communication
- Downward and upward communication patterns.
- Selective reporting and flexibility in categorization.
- Research on image maintenance and hypothesis confirmation.
E-Communication
- Virtual organizations and the role of informal communication.
- Studies on chat rooms, negotiation, and task performance in telecommunication vs. face-to-face settings.
Information Processing and Theory Construction
- Dealing with true/accurate information and war tactics examples.
- Bavelas’s studies on group target hitting and concept formation with feedback.
Information Centre for Engineers
- Bavelas’s study at General Dynamics on improving engineer productivity.
Leadership in Organizations
Definition Problem
- Attribution and definition challenges.
- Influence, coercion, and the manager vs. leader distinction.
- Direct experience vs. stories and the idea of “vision.”
Trait Theories
- Personal characteristics and stable traits.
- Leaders’ ability to sense situational requirements.
Style Theories
- Lewin’s study on autocratic and democratic leadership.
- Management Grid: Concern for production and concern for people.
Contingency Theories (Fiedler)
- Matching leadership style to situational favorableness.
- Leader-member relations, task structure, and position power.
- Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) measurement.
Criticisms of Leadership Theories
- Oversimplification of leader behavior and situational factors.
- Questionable style measurement and the leadership vs. management debate.
Transactional vs. Transformational (Charismatic) Leadership
- Transactional leadership for stable environments.
- Transformational leadership for significant change, emphasizing charisma, vision, intellectual stimulation, and consideration.
Main Difficulties in Thinking About Leadership
- Leadership acts vs. broad roles.
- Ideal vs. actual leadership.
- Decentralized vs. centralized functions.
- Attributional tendencies and the impact of different leadership styles.