Organizational Psychology Group Dynamics

Organizational Behavior

An Examination of Group Dynamics

Group work is often times the most honest and productive type of work because of the challenges, the exchange of ideas and the creativity-promoting environment it inherently contains. Group work, however, is most productive when group dynamics function smoothly. It is for this reason that organizational behavior is important to study in order to see what, in fact, achieves the kind of productive behavior expected of good group dynamics. The paragraphs below will describe both theory and give practical examples of a selected group that can demonstrate the kinds of structures and dynamics that are most useful.

The group selected for these purposes is one that deals with customer service requests at a said company, the name of which is withheld in this examination for privacy purposes. This group's sole purpose is to ensure the complete satisfaction of customers who either call or e-mail with questions or service requests for the said company's various services, which are offered to the customer on a subscription basis.

The group thus has a common goal, but its various members are paid based on their individual performance as well. However, in order to satisfy various requirements relating to their positions, these individuals must always interact with their team-members, especially in order to achieve these individual and thereby common goals, or vice-versa. Just as in any company, one individual does not always simply work for himself or herself, but contributes to the general well-being of the company and this is precisely the case in this example.

The group's goals therefore rotate around ensuring and achieving realistic customer satisfaction quotas, but also enabling customers to be able to receive working services and even increase the use of services, which is done by transferring questions to the sales department. This department also made of a group can then advise the customer and try and sell even more products, thereby increasing the success of the company in the said market to an even greater share.

Again, all this is done through teamwork. In the smaller group, however, individuals are mostly males, with two females who are recently hired also partaking in the tasks. Because of the technological nature of this work, males have been hired due to the belief that they had more expertise. The two females thus strive to prove that they are just as qualified and as experienced, and can do just as much work and contribute just as much to group, and their individual, success.

Once again, because of the technical nature of the group, most individuals are college educated in the information technology department, with two of the four males holding various technical certificates as well as Masters degrees in business technology.

Now that the group has been presented in all its aspects, one can describe the stages of development that it has undergone. These started with the need for the company to hire IT persons in order to oversee its technological needs as it grew. Two men were hired who have since been replaced due to lack of satisfactory performance. Yet out of the six person-team that is now in place, all four males started at around the same time and have worked together in a very efficient manner, thereby also allowing for observation of their stages of development.

As described by social scientific theory, the stages of development are

1) Chaos or Fire-Fighting Mentality, where the group is focused on the short-term, lacks clear direction, has shifting priorities, and is basically unstable;

2) Stability or a back to basics approach, where there is some consistency and well-defined management, as well as where roles are clearly defined, yet the team does not truly perform to the best of its abilities;

3) This stage is the High Performance stage, where the team performs to achieve outstanding, sustainable results, while also basing its work on stage 2.

In the team described above, the four males have achieved stage 3 previously, yet due to the need to hire more staff, they are back at stage 2 while training the two newcomers. However, it is predicted that because of the stability that stage 2 offers, this team will once again reach the most optimal, stable, high performance stage in a matter of months.

Having now examined the various stages of development, as well as their predicted trajectory for the future, it is also important to study the structure of the group and the effect that structure has on the effectiveness of the group. This is always a facet that must be understood in order to be improved, for an efficient organization means good, fluid, and smooth business.

The group in this case study is, as aforementioned, composed of six people, four males and two females. The group is an optimal size, where everyone can have a voice and newcomers feel understood and listened to. This is very important, for the group structure was well thought out beforehand in order to ensure its effectiveness. For this reason, there is little to be done in order to promote it, but what warrants analysis is the fact that if the company was to have added to more males that it had considered hiring in the interviews, the group psychological dynamics and power-play dynamics might have been shifted, leading the group to actually be less effective while containing more qualified individuals. It is thus always important to ascertain that individual personalities of a group in order to see how it could best function overall, as a group.

Due to the fact that this group is quite unique in its make-up, its size, and its tasks, group polarization, conformity and groupthink had various effects upon the said team. To review, group polarization is the tendency to make extreme decisions, conformity is following rules as a group, and groupthink is "when groups are highly cohesive and when they are under considerable pressure to make a quality decision."