human development

Group and Group Processes

Central to many organizations, and of increasing importance to others, is the existence and operation of groups.  Project groups, task groups, task groups or teams are a normal feature of the working life of engineers, whether students or fully qualified professional engineers. We shall use the terms “groups” and “terms” and “task” and “project” interchangeably.

The definition of a team, how they form, how they work successfully and what causes them to be unsuccessful. As the main purpose of teams is to make decisions, there will be a discussion of decision-making and then an examination of the processes within teams when they are making decisions. What happens within  teams is called group process, the interactions of individuals that make up the team. Understand  this idea of groups being different than the sum of the individuals  is crucial to being a successful member of a team, and is crucial to knowing how to set up and manage teams so that they make a contribution on the organization that is better than any single individual, or group of individuals who simply have their individual contributions summed.

What is a group?

A different way of defining has been to say that a group could be defined in terms of face to face interaction. Yours project group certainly has face – to – face interaction, unless it is a virtual group that only  meets electronically via the Internet.

The project group that leads you to define it as a group? It is a small group of people  who meet regularly  and who know,  or get to know,  one another. An added criteria might be that as the group evolves there is an emerging setoff relationships that develop begin to adopt certain roles within the group; perhaps there is a chair, a secretary and a social worker who looks  after the pattern of relating in order to  prevent or resolve interpersonal conflicts. There may also be an element of a group existing because its members say  that  the group – exists and that we are members of it. 

A neat definition of a group is “ A group exists when two or more people define themselves as members of is and when its existence is recognized by at least  one other”.

The definition has a minimum size of two, but there is no reference to a maximum size. The group tends to break up into subgroups as the difficulty of maintaining a face – to – face discussion with more tha eight people grows. Once a group divides, then we have two groups, with the complications that brings in terms of the relating of the two groups. The size of groups that we can observe that the groups larger than eight or nine rarely seem to exist- they cannot survive in the interpersonal environment – they die or self destruct.

An economist’s perspective on group would suggest that they exist because the benefits of groups outweigh the  costs of groups, and that the value of the net output of groups is normally greater than the sum of the net outputs of the individuals if they were not members of the group. There are net benefits for the organization from combining individuals into groups.