Group Development
Group Development
Groups’ development dimensions
Purpose
Although groups typically formed around a purpose or an objective, by time group members looses focus and tend to have personal objectives.
Group primary and stated objective might not be the main reason for gathering by time. An example is a group founded to support a certain disease patients and then they socially gathered because of shared values.
Workgroups who loses focus of the main objective are most likely less productive.
Authority
It is very important and critical to any group to elect a leader or manager.
Some groups tend to have centralized control or authority in the form of the protector who is the most dominant member when it comes to protecting group objectives and shared values.
Other groups select multiple authorities according to the task and the skills required to do the task.
Managers who are in need of control and cannot manage decentralization lead to group failure to achieve its objectives especially with members who are learned in decentralized authority group.
Membership worthiness
Group members tend to reassess their worthiness in the group compared to other members.
Here is the authority issue arise again. If group members feel unworthy they most likely will not contribute and participate to the group objectives.
They will withdraw and such withdrawal can hinder group effectiveness.
Examples might include high employee turnover rates in one-man-show organizations.
Social standing
Most commonly to see social standing and status outside the group determine authority and worthiness inside the group.
It is important to have group members with shared values and common ground.
It is also important to know that humans tend to compare themselves with other group members.
Ground rule development
Groups tend to develop ground rules or norms. These ground rules are commonly accepted behaviors within groups.
In large groups, smaller groups might exist and constitute a different ground rule that will hinder large group performance.
Participation
Participation patterns depend greatly on the leader’s authority model.
Leaders’ focused groups all have participation that relates to leader in most cases. On the contrary distributed authority model leads to distributed patterns.
Pace
Each group determines and develops a certain pace towards taking decisions.
Work
Groups’ development stages
Stage
Most observable characteristics
Tasks
Problems
Management implications
Initiation
Frequent questions about objectives
Queries about authority of the leader
Participation pattern tend to relate to leader
Everyone is silent and cautious waiting to form leader authority and agree on common values and shared ground rules
Main task is to define the authority level and define the objectives and share the some ground rules
Pressure from group members towards moving to goals before resolving conflicts about objectives, authorities and common ground rules.
No process for decision making is yet there
Manager must press each member to discuss, clarify and focus on the purpose and goals.
Manager must assure that there is no doubt the objective and purpose of the group is clear and accepted by members
Exploration
Groups enter this stage with tentative set of goals, tentative authority structure and tentative operating procedures
Testing phase for leaders, objectives
Testing phase for tasks and procedures
Testing phase for worthiness
The group is very innovative
Group member devotes time