Evaluating group behaviour models and their influence on employee work performance

Organizational Behavior

The Group Behavior Model is a framework for conceptualizing how various aspects of the external and internal environments of a work group influence the group's performance of its task(s) and the group members' level of satisfaction with the experience of group work. External conditions include an organization's authority structure, rules and regulations, corporate culture, resources, setting, and market competition. Internal factors include the individual skills, talents, and experiences each member brings to the work group; the nature of the group's structure; and the dynamics of the group's work processes. The model helps one understand how the interplay of these four components -- external conditions, group member resources, group structure, and group processes -- determine how the group performs its task and how much satisfaction the members of the group derive from the experience of doing performing the task and the outcome of their efforts (Henderson, n. d.).

This paper will apply the Group Behavior Model to an examination of a small work group charged with improving the organization of a collection of links to online research resources on a college library's web site. Each of the model's four components will be explained and examined in this particular context, and the effects of the components on the group's performance of the task and the group member's satisfaction with their work experience will be explored. Then recommendations for improving the group's performance and satisfaction will be discussed.

The work group under consideration here is composed of reference and instruction librarians employed in the main branch of an academic library system serving a liberal arts college. The college is located in the urban core of a small city known for its rich history, pleasant climate, and the friendly disposition of its citizens. The college serves a student population of about 11,500 -- 10,000 undergraduates and 1,500 graduate students -- and offers 47 bachelor's degree programs and 19 master's degree programs. The college faculty numbers more than 1,000, and the librarians have faculty status.

The college's library system holds a growing collection of more than 700,000 volumes and provides access to tens of thousands of electronic publications and millions of full-text digital documents through online subscription periodicals databases. Maintaining, developing, and growing these collections requires great collaborative effort between librarians and the teaching faculty, and collection development is also costly in financial terms. Therefore, student and faculty awareness, access, and use of these library resources are of great concern to the librarians. It is important that the college gets its money's worth of use out of these pricey resources. This concern motivated the creation of the work group that is the subject of this paper.

The work group was composed of three reference and instruction librarians selected by their supervisor, the head of reference and instruction services at the library. The supervisor tasked them with coming up with a new and improved way of arranging the online course guides -- library research guides that are customized to provide easy access to resources relevant to individual courses or course assignments -- other than the alphabetical order that was the default arrangement of the software they used for guide creation and maintenance. While at first alphabetical order seemed like a good system for organizing the course guides, different librarians named the guides they created in a variety of ways, and thus the course guides lists became more confusing and unruly as time went on. The supervisor felt that user access could be improved and course guide use increased if the arrangement of the guides were different.

External conditions relevant to this case study are primarily found at the level of the department of reference and instruction services. The department is composed of seven professional reference librarians, three full-time support staff, and two part-time support staff. All reference staffers provide customer assistance at the reference desk, but only professional reference librarians conduct library research instruction sessions and create and maintain library research guides. This dichotomy is part of the formal regulation of department work activities.

While the course guides work group was created with the above-mentioned goal in mind, it was created, along with a few other work groups, for another, larger reason. As the fall term was coming to a close, the supervisor called a meeting of the department members. In general, at that time in the academic year, student and faculty demand on library services declines. Similarly, the intensity of reference staff activity was dropping off as well. The short responses the librarians gave when the supervisor asked about current projects and plans prompted him to use his authority to spur staff activity out of the end of term lull.

Per his prerogative, the supervisor selected the membership of each work group. Task evaluation lay largely in his hands, as did immediate rewards regarding performance and task completion. The reference staff viewed the supervisor as a micromanager, and this impression affected the corporate culture of the department in a negative manner, usually lowering staff morale and stifling motivation.

The supervisor chose Alice Chang to head the course guides work group. He assigned Bernie Johnson and Cory Jackson to her group. The selection of Ms. Chang to run the work group was, in the supervisor's view, instrumental to the success of the mission. Alice was the department's China-educated science librarian and was highly skilled with computer technology. She was also the librarian most responsible for convincing the library's administration to acquire the research guides software and served as the staff administrator for that software. Alice knew more than anyone else about the software's parameters, limitations, and workflow processes. She was the natural pick for leading the work group. In addition, Alice was a creative person who dabbled in watercolor painting, pottery, and poetry.

Bernie Johnson was the most senior librarian in the work group. In addition to his reference and instruction duties, blond-haired, blue-eyed Bernie also ran the library's ever-growing and evermore popular media collection, located on an upper floor removed from the reference department office, where DVDs and videocassettes where collected and circulated. Johnson was person in the department for which the term "technology geek" was most apt. He was an avid gamer and very interested in digital photography and video. Because his daily duties necessitated that he be in a few different places during the typical workday, Bernie was often difficult to locate in the vast, relatively new library building.

Cory Jackson, an African-American, was the epitome of the generalist reference librarian. He was a jack of all academic subjects but not really a master of any of them. Cory took great pleasure in his ability to anticipate needs and see problems before others did. This talent informed his approach to creating the library research guides for which he was responsible. He had an easygoing personality that set him on good terms with all of his coworkers. In a group he had a knack for listening to the inputs of the other group members and synthesizing them in a way that helped unify the collective vision of the members. The department supervisor often put Cory and Alice on work groups together because the two department mates had a deep friendship and they liked working with each other. They had collaborated successfully on other projects, including instruction sessions and a conference presentation.

Right away Cory had a couple of ideas for reorganizing the course research guides and was eager for the group to meet and complete the task before the end of the fall term. Advocating a fast group process, he wanted to get it over with as soon as possible in order to minimize the amount of time the supervisor would have to continue asking the group members about the progress of the project. Cory found the supervisor's constant questioning about projects more nagging than encouraging, supportive, or motivational as the supervisor intended them to be. After the intensive activity of the beginning and middle of the busy fall term, Alice was more inclined to enjoy the end of term lull and put the course guides project off until the beginning of the spring semester. Alice knew from experience that the supervisor's deadlines for tasks like this one were soft and mobile, so she felt neither internal nor external motivation to quickly start the group work or hurry the process to completion. Bernie, as was often the case with him, was mostly absent and only peripherally involved in these deliberations, primarily through email correspondence. Cory capitulated to Alice's more relaxed approach to initiating the task; Bernie went along with the delayed start, too.

After the relaxing winter holiday break, the spring term began, and so did the work group's activity on the assigned task. Overall, this activity included some impromptu discussion in the reference office and three group meetings. During one of their first days back from the holiday, Cory and Alice discussed Cory's ideas for a new arrangement of the course guides. Alice didn't like one of them because it would result in her workload as software administrator to increase disproportionally. Cory understood her objection on this point and accepted Alice's requirement that any proposal should not overburden any one librarian since the point of having the software was to empower the reference librarians to more quickly and efficiently create customized guides for individual courses without production bottlenecks that would slow down customer access to these resources. She, however, did like the other two ideas Cory presented, and she scheduled a meeting of the work group to discuss these proposals in more detail and to assign specific member duties.

Alice and Cory attended the first meeting. Bernie was nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, Chang and Jackson further discussed the ideas they'd talked about a week earlier, decided on the features of the new course guide arrangement scheme, and divided up among the tow of them the tasks of creating a model to show their supervisor at a later meeting. The second meeting took place a week later, and it was mainly a means to share with Bernie what had been decided and done in his absence. Bernie was, as one might guess, impressed, pleased, and in full accord with Alice and Cory's intentions and efforts.

At the third meeting, all work group members were present and were joined by their department supervisor. Alice and Cory shared the work of the presentation, with both of them doing the talking while Cory navigated among the resources of concern on the library's web site. They discussed the rationale behind their decisions and demonstrated how the changes would improve the visual appeal, organizational logic, and customer access of the course on the library's web site. Also they pointed out how the new course guide-naming scheme would standardize the format of guide names and eliminate the confusion of the old, unregulated way of naming them. Bernie's role in the meeting was to nod enthusiastically, smile approvingly, and ask soft questions, largely for the benefit of his own understanding. Their supervisor asked his own questions and in the end was very impressed by the group's work. He decided to schedule a meeting of the entire department for the following week at which the work group would again make its presentation so that all the reference librarians could begin making the changes necessary to implement the new arrangement system-wide. The work group members were very pleased with this evaluation and the outcome of their effort.

When evaluating the interplay of the four components of the Group Behavior Model in regards to the work group's activities and experience at the college library, one finds some expectations fulfilled and some surprises as well.

The department supervisor did a good job in selecting the membership of the work group. Perhaps this success is to be expected given that he had been managing these three reference librarians for at least six years (Alice Chang, the newest librarian on the staff, was at the time in her sixth year of employment there). Given Cory's motivation to get the job done quickly and his to distill group members' convergent viewpoints into a single, clear statement, one might have expected the supervisor to appoint him head of the work group. However, Alice, with her more direct personality, was a better choice given Cory's preference for a wait-and-see approach to group interactions. Moreover, the supervisor wasn't aware of Cory's desire to get it over with rapidly or the reason why he felt this way. On the other hand, he knew that Alice had the specific technical expertise concerning the functionality of the software that enabled her to filter usable ideas from impractical ones, and that ability had a very positive influence on the efficiency of the group's work ( Nakata & Im, 2010)..

Again, in regards to external conditions related to the supervisor, his lack of micromanaging the group's affairs came as something of a surprise. Cory thought that the longer it took the group to complete its task, the more opportunity for micro-management it provided the supervisor. Alice disagreed or didn't care, and her viewpoint proved correct. Still, the group did get to work on the project very quickly once the spring semester began, and they did do a very thorough job of considering all the details and wider workflow and customer service implications of their proposed improvements, thus addressing the supervisor's minute concerns before meeting with him. Other factors may have diverted the supervisor's usually probing attention; for example, due to budget and bureaucratic reasons, he was being forced to retired at the end of the spring term, years before he had planned to do so.

As mentioned above, the group members brought excellent skills and talents to bear on the task before them. Chang knew the software inside and out and was able to judge the impact and practicality of certain proposed changes without needed to submit them to trial-and-error testing. Moreover, her creative, artistic side was a complement to Jackson's more logic-based ideas of online information organization. The pleasure Cory derived from creating online library resources that addressed anticipated customer needs provided him with innate motivation toward the mission of the work group. Because they were close work mates, Alice and Cory collaborated very well together, constructively criticizing each other's suggestions when needed, and unreservedly praising each other's good ideas. They were able to easily come up with a division of labor that fulfilled the work group's goals without bickering over territory or equality of task demands. In view of what is known of their personalities and work histories, their smoothly working partnership certainly was expected (Mason & Griffin, 2002).

What might have been unexpected was Chang and Jackson's unflinching acceptance of Bernie Johnson's lack of real participation in the group's work. One must assume that Alice and Cory knew from experience that Bernie's contribution might be slight. Also they were understanding of the great demand placed on Bernie's time due to inadequate student worker staffing of the media collection area. Because he had not as much help as he would have liked, Johnson had to staff the media room himself much of the workday, besides attending to his many other duties besides. Everyone in the small reference department wore many hats, so Alice and Cory understood and accepted of Bernie's absence. Bernie was really concerned about the charge of the work group, and he kept abreast the developments of its work in the best ways he could. His palpable concerned probably helped the other members of the group view his lack of full participation and equal contribution as something significantly less damning as social loafing (Bluhm, 2009).

Any evaluation of the work group performance would have to show high marks on the ultimate outcome of the group's efforts. They directly and comprehensively addressed the concerns that motivated their supervisor to create the work group. In improving the arrangement of the course guides, they situated their changes in the larger context of departmental workflows and customer access to resources. Their supervisor was impressed and pleased to extent that he wanted the rest of the reference librarians to begin implementing these improvements sooner rather than later, and in the meeting with the full department, the work group's proposals were well received.

Despite this overall success, one could criticize the work group's performance on a couple of points. There were no concrete reasons for delaying the start of the work group's activity until after the winter holiday break. Critics could argue that these accomplishments could have been achieved before the end of the fall semester, freeing up the work group members to address new business and new tasks in the spring term. Moreover, Chang and Jackson could be admonished for allowing Johnson to loaf as he did, no matter his other duties and responsibilities. He accepted the work group assignment, just as they did, and therefore he should have been present and contributing as much as they were. Perhaps his full participation could have made the work of the group even better. No one will ever know this for sure. What is certain is that the delay in starting the group's work and Bernie's loafing were not part of the public record of the group's endeavors. Only the group members themselves were truly privy to these aspects of the experience, and they were disinclined to disclose them. Nothing worthwhile would have been gained in doing so. Thus, these criticisms could not have been actual part of any evaluation of the work group's performance.