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Interpersonal Communication: groups
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Interpersonal Communication: groups
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For an exploration of the relationship between inidividual and group, click here.
Groups fulfill a whole range of functions.
It's probably fairly clear that some groups exist primarily to achieve aims beyond the satisfaction of their members. The group of members of an environmental pressure group are attempting to stop pollution, encourage the development of sensible environmental policies and so on.
Other groups may be much more oriented towards the satisfaction of the group members' needs. The members of a French evening class, for example, are there for each of the individual members to learn French.
Groups may also have unstated functions, far less obvious than the two we have mentioned. A family group, for example, exists in order to provide shelter, education, emotional and material support etc. for its members. Little of that will be clearly formulated, though the expectations which the members have of one another and indeed society's expectations of the group members may be fairly clear. A group of friends who go down the pub together may satisfy a fairly vaguely understood need to be together with like-minded people.
It is equally possible that a group with clearly stated aims actually exists to fulfill a quite different function. I can recall being asked to stand in for the absent teacher of an evening class in Advanced Conversational French. I recorded the French radio news at lunch time, picked up a copy of a recent video tape of current affairs in France and went into the class prepared to discuss these. The class members seemed shocked and kept asking me to repeat what I'd said. They seemed quite interested in the current affairs video, but unwilling to consider any grammar or vocabulary that might arise from it. It wasn't until the break in the middle of the lesson that I understood that this class had virtually nothing to do with learning advanced conversational French The people were there to meet other people who, like them, owned property in France and enjoyed French wine and food. It seemed the class had been running for years and nobody was particularly good at French.
Where groups have a fairly definite aim to achieve something within a larger organization, then, according to Peters (1995 : 127), they are likely to be more effective if they can set their own goals than if targets are imposed on them.
Theorists of group interaction tend to focus their attention on social psychology, though it could be that biology throws much light on the reasons for our belonging to groups. Matt Ridley (1997) argues, on the basis of his survey of a variety of different strands of research in biology, anthropology, economics and games theory that we come together in groups and conform to the norms of those groups, out of a human need for reciprocity, i.e. collaborating and sharing with others. However, that need for reciprocity is not originally motivated by altruism. Rather, it dates back to the early days of humanity when the member of a savannah-dwelling group would have starved on joining a group of forest-dwellers, if she had insisted on continuing to grub in the ground for tubers rather than adopting their [ractice (their 'norm') of gathering berries and fruits. Over the millions of years of evolution, the groups which thrived by cooperation were the ones which were not rooted out by natural selection, with the result that the successful, surviving humans have a deeply ingrained urge to co-operate with others. This does not mean, however, that we put the group's interests before our own. Rather, our membership of the group is a means to the more efficient realization of our individual ends.
(For further information on needs and motivation, see the sections on motivation)
By and large, then, the functions of groups can be seen as either:
individual satisfaction from group membership
or
realization of aims external to the group
and of course also a mixture of the two.
Let's take a look at each of those in turn:
Some of the individual needs which may be met by group membership are:
(For further information on the above see the sections on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and on Motivation)
If you drive your car into a ditch, you're unlikely to be able to pull it out yourself. A group of passers-by gather round and help you to pull it out. Such a temporary group is a good example of the instrumental functions of groups. Essentially, groups exist to perform tasks which a single individual can't achieve: negotiating, liaising with others, gathering data, conducting research, making cars, pooling knowledge.
The aims may be explicitly stated, for example in the constitution of some quite formally established group or they may be quite loose, as for example in a family group.
There may also be a hidden agenda. In the example I gave above of the French evening class, the group members met ostensibly to satisfy the instrumental goal of learning French. In fact, however, the hidden agenda (unstated aim) was to swap information about France, with the group's emphasis being much more on the satisfaction of individuals' needs.
Thus, although groups offer the scope for completing tasks which individuals could complete alone only with difficulty, they are not necessarily particularly efficient in completing those tasks: the personal needs may come to predominate, with the instrumental goals being pushed into the background, and such factors as groupthink may also impede a group's performance.
For an exploration of the relationship between inidividual and group, click here.
Groups - introduction
Group cohesion
Group dynamics
Group leadership
Group norms and social influence
Management theory
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