Home Page of Group and Team Communication
Few of us are truly independent. We rely upon the cooperation of others for the completion of tasks and for making decisions. In addition, interaction with others is crucial in the acquisition and maintenance of a self-concept. Through interacting with others, we satisfy our social needs and create a social reality. The completion of tasks, the making of decisions, the acquisition and maintenance of self-concept, and the creation of a social reality often occur in a group setting. It is the communication within this setting that is the focus of this book.
The study of small group and team communication is important because it is experienced by virtually everyone. In fact, every reader of this book has had a least some experience in the area and, therefore, has some degree of expertise. And, if the currently popular human relations expert, Tom Peters, is correct, all of us will have much more such experiences in the future:
Now, all the value-added in the economy is based on knowledge, and you do not do brain work in groups of thousands; you do it in duos and trios, quartets and quintets, maybe 25s and 50s. In 1900, 50% of Americans were self-employed; by 1970, only 7% of us were. That's going to turn out to have been the anomalous period. The only security in a world where job security is gone is that your skills are better and your network richer at the end of this year than they were at the beginning. Your ability to improve your skill base and make yourself more marketable, whether you are a teamster or a neurosurgeon, is the only thing you've got. What skills will be required for tomorrow? Nobody knows. The important thing is to keep acquiring new ones.
As Peters also reminds us, we will, in the future, continually need to sharpen our skills. One area of skill sharpening is communication and, specifically, small group and team communication. Therefore, it is hoped that reading this book will vastly increase your understanding of small group and team communication phenomena; will improve your small group communication skills; will help you to serve better as both leaders and followers in future small group and team situations; and will enable you to better understand the reasons for group successes and failures.
To get involved in issues of definition is to release all the mad dogs of philosophy.
Durant reminds us that defining a concept or term, which is an attempt at clarity, can lead to controversy. Only in a comparatively few cases is there universal agreement on the meaning of a term, inches, pounds, meters, and liters, for example. In most cases definitions are arguable. People disagree on the meaning of art, communication, jazz, leadership, group, and team, for instance. The bases for their disagreements are not necessarily nefarious. People have different experiences, needs, and points of view that can motivate them to adopt different definitions.
This preamble is provided to pave the way for the definitions presented below. Although all scholars in the field may not agree upon the definitions, commonalities with other published definitions certainly exist.
A small group consists of three to nine individuals who have a common goal or purpose and who meet and communicate in a given medium for a period of time to achieve that goal or purpose.
This characterization of a small group reveals the definitional criteria of number, goal or purpose, meeting, communication, duration, and achievement. The rationale for the criteria follow.
The number range for a small group is three to nine. This range is somewhat at variance with some scholars, notably Goffman, Fisher, and Peters. Goffman discusses a group of one, while Fisher and Peters put the upper limit at 20 and 25 respectively. The general reasoning for placing the number range from three to nine is that in this range the dynamics of small group communication are most manifest. More specific reasons for the three to nine number range will be presented below.
To be a group the members must share a common goal or purpose. The purpose may seem trivial or gravitas. For example, the purpose of the bowling group each Thursday night with your friends might simply be to have fun. Or, a medical review board might be meeting for the purpose of deciding which one of an array of critically-ill patients should be given the one available donor heart.
Meeting and communicating in a given medium is the next definitional requirement of a group. Meetings can be in the face-to-face medium or through electronic media. More and more small group meetings are being conducted via electronic media and even more will be so conducted in the future. Whatever the media, the sine qua non of small group communication is, of course, communication. Quite simply, no group purpose can be achieved without communication.
Duration is the final definitional criterion. A group needs a given period of time to achieve its purpose or goal. Indeed, the time period may be quite transient. A collection of strangers in an elevator may suddenly become a group when the elevator stalls and they are temporarily stranded. Broken from their frozen-forward and floor-number-directed gazes the elevator occupants begin to communicate. There may be the usual jokes, but talk eventually focuses on rescue. “Push the emergency call button,” “Release the emergency phone,” and so on. Most groups, of course, exist for much longer periods of time and some, like one's immediate family, for a lifetime.
A team is a special type of small group and, therefore, must meet all the definitional criteria of a small group listed above. The special requirements that make a small group a team are that team members must have complementary skills, they must be accountable for their actions, and they will disband when they have achieved their purpose or goal.
That team members must have complementary skills means that each must have a skill the others do not, but the skill possessed must complement the skills of other members. For example, if you want to purchase a house you might assemble a team of an attorney, a financial agent (usually someone from a bank), and a house inspector. Here each proposed member would bring something to the table not possessed by the others. The goal, of course, is to acquire the house on your terms. The attorney is to make sure that the deed to the house is free and clear of liens, encumbrances, etc., the financial agent is to secure the funds for the purchase, and the inspector's role is to report on the structural integrity and safety of the house and whether it harbors any infestations or toxins.
Team members are accountable. In the home purchasing example above, the team is legally liable for its actions. The home purchaser has the legal recourse to sue the team or any of its members if the team performance is inadequate. If, after the purchase, the home purchaser discovers that there were liens against the property, that the interest compounding on the loan was misrepresented, and that the house was infested with roaches, then legal action against the team would be justified. In short, a team is accountable for its actions.
Finally, a team disbands when it reaches its goal. When the team of the attorney, financial representative, and home inspector take their client, the purchaser, to a successful closing, they have reached their goal and they disband. The life span of a team, therefore, is much shorter than that of many other groups. The advantage to this shorter longevity is that the team does not suffer from the sclerotic processes that hamper other groups. One such process is groupthink wherein group cohesiveness becomes paramount and critical thinking suffers. Moreover, groups not refreshed with new members often suffer from a cognitive rigidity that prevents them from producing creative solutions even when the group has the best intentions. In longstanding groups, meetings often become predictable and boring. In contrast, in newly-constituted teams, meetings can be surprising and exciting. There of course can be a creative tension between teams and longstanding groups. The team can produce new, creative, and brash ideas that the longstanding group will see as unworkable. Contention between these two positions might lead to a third and perhaps superior position. Or it might lead to the weakening or demise of the parent organization.
"Team" as it is used here is a sports metaphor. It carries with it the notion that winning and losing are team concerns and the realization that every position or player and teamwork are important, for instance. And non-athletic teams often use locker room wall slogans to motivate and remind: There is no "I" in team. There is no "U" in team. Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing.
One common way of categorizing human communication is on the dimension of number. This categorization scheme produces five types of communication: self- or intrapersonal communication, interpersonal communication, small group and team communication, public communication, and mass communication.
Self- or intrapersonal communication is communication with one's self. One is both the sender and the receiver. When we think, worry, remember, dream, daydream, and fantasize we are self-communicating. Self-communication is virtually unstoppable. Even when we sleep the dream videotape is running. Even when vigilance to external stimuli is required, there are still lapses into self-communication, sometimes related to external stimuli and at other times divorced from those stimuli. Self-communication is important in planning and ordering our lives, in thinking about ideals, in creating, and in escaping into fantasyland when the demands of the world become too burdensome.
Interpersonal communication is communication in the two-person, usually face-to-face setting. Common interpersonal pairings are parent-child, best friends, spouses, colleagues, superior-subordinate, and so on. Interpersonal communication is very important in the establishment and maintenance of a positive self-concept. This has been referred to as the Looking Glass Self. Involved in the looking glass self is the fact that others in our environment are always giving us feedback. They are in a sense acting like a mirror reflecting their attitudes and feelings toward us. These reflections affect us. The reflections can make us feel worthy and valued, leading to a positive self-concept, or the reflections can be negative and and make us feel unworthy and not valued, leading to a negative self-concept.
Small group communication is communication among three to nine individuals. Something very dramatic happens when the number of interactants increases from two to three. First, coalitions can form. Two individuals can form a coalition against the third. This is the two-against-one phenomenon. At least three people are needed for this phenomenon to occur. With just two individuals no coalitions can form. Coalitions even in the three-person group can and do change. At one point Persons A and B can form a coalition against Person C, but later, Persons B and C can form a coalition against Person A. This tendency to form coalitions is a key dynamic characteristic of small groups.
Second, when number changes from two to three, there is a basic change in communication behavior. When Person A is talking to Person B in the presence of Person C it is no longer interpersonal communication. Why? Because Person C is there to hear the exchange. Therefore, in a group, speakers continually edit their messages for the group even though those messages may ostensibly be addressed to a given member of the group. At times Person A may seem to be talking to Person B but in reality the message may be intended for Person C. Freud reported an example of this when he was counselling one of his patients and realized that he was actually addressing the patient's husband who was eavesdropping at the door to Freud's therapy room.
Characteristic too of a small group is that the group is small enough so that every member has the opportunity to participate. With the addition of each new member participation opportunities decrease. This is why the upper limit for a small group is set at nine. When group size exceeds this number the group tends to break into smaller groups, i.e., little side discussions begin and a single group focus becomes tenuous. Moreover, the group tends to take on the characteristics of public communication.
In public communication there is usually one speaker and a group of listeners. A student giving a speech in a public speaking class is engaging in public communication. Other examples would be a citizen addressing a town council or a politician giving a stock stump speech. In public communication the interaction among participants is dramatically reduced in comparison with small group communication. Aside from a question and answer session at the end of the presentation, the audience, for the most part, is passive.
Even less real-time interaction is afforded the audience in mass communication. In mass communication one communication agent sends a message to a mass audience which has no opportunity to interact with the sending agent in real time. Mass communication messages are mediated electronically or by print and many of these mediated messages are prepared well in advance of the presentation. Examples of such communication are TV soap operas, sit-coms, TV re-runs, etc. In these cases interaction with audience members is totally impossible. For these reasons mass communication audiences, particularly TV audiences, have been described as passive, i.e., non-interactive.
It can be seen from the above that the small group allows certain interaction dynamics to occur that do not occur at the interpersonal level. And it is at the small group level that maximum opportunities for participation among group members can occur. When the number of participants exceeds nine those opportunities decrease and the group can then take on the appearance of a collection of smaller subgroups or a public communication situation.
Is a group superior to an individual? For some things at least the answer seems to be obvious, particularly if the task is a physical one. To carry a piano to a third-floor walk-up apartment is not a solitary task. Much help is needed. For non-physical tasks, the research finds generally that a group is superior to an individual in solving problems, making decisions, and completing tasks. For example, Lumsden and Lumsden, note that research going back more than 50 years has documented how effective groups can be. The same authors cite one study which found that groups outperformed their best member 97% of the time. And Beebe and Masterson ask, "Why are groups and teams such an often-used method of getting results? Because most of the time, groups do achieve higher quality results than do individuals working alone."
The apparent superiority of the group over the individual may be the result of a number of factors. In groups there is a pooling of information; this is particularly true of teams where members are selected on the basis of their having different but complementary skills. In solving a problem, an individual may tend to go down a “blind alley” and not know it; in a group at least one member is likely to check such an errant excursion. Groups can stimulate. Members can stimulate one another and there are times when the group gets "on a roll." These are exciting and very often creative times.
At the same time, groups are not always superior. Groups can become dysfunctional and nonproductive. Dysfunctionality can be a result of interpersonal animosities, lack of organizational support for the group and its mission, dominance of a single member, and members' animosity toward the group because they have to serve on it, for example. Moreover, the individual has been found to be superior to the group when the decision to be made must be made immediately or when the task is either very simple or very complex. In emergency situations, disasters, surgeries, and on the battlefield, for instance, decisions must be made immediately. There is no time for a meeting. Simple tasks like making photocopies also require no meetings. Complex tasks often are put in the domain of an individual because that individual is the only one competent enough to deal with the task. Here Einstein is often cited as an example. How many groups meeting for how long would come up with the Theory of Relativity?
Looking at the final score, therefore, in the duel between the group and the individual we can say that, on balance, the group has won. The group is generally superior to the individual in task performance, decision making, and problem solving. It is for this reason that the majority of decisions that affect our lives are made by groups.
It is important to study small group and team communication because of the pervasiveness of groups and the consequences of their actions, because virtually everyone is or will be a group participant, and because groups are important in the establishment and maintenance of self-concept.
As noted in the previous section, group actions are generally superior to individual actions and for this reason groups are used pervasively. As a consequence, everyone's life is directed and monitored by group decisions. Think, for example, of the control exercised by the committees, the subcommittees, the caucuses, etc., that advise lawmakers on legislative issues. These legislative groups have a tremendous influence on our lives and, of course, the government is only one agency in a web of agencies where groups are making decisions affecting our lives. Given this incredible influence of group actions on our lives it behooves us to understand the small group and team communication phenomena.
While group actions have a tremendous effect on the individual, most individuals are or will be members of task groups and teams, thereby shouldering the responsibility for the decisions that affect others. Here again it is important that the individual understand the workings of the group. Participation is not enough; if it were, every participant would be an expert. Thorough understanding and expertise are not attained simply through participation, but rather through study of group phenomena as well.
Finally, it is important to study small group and team communication because communication in this setting serves in the acquisition and maintenance of self-concept. There is a tendency to see group activity as purely task activity and devoid of psychodynamics. This is not the case though for, in group participation, group members receive feedback that tells them who they are; how valuable, cherished, and competent they are; and what role has been made available for them to fill.
The sociologist, Erving Goffman, has said, "Doing is being," meaning that one's being or sense of self is determined by what one does. Serving in a group is "doing" and such service, therefore, contributes to one's "being" or sense of self. A person who loses his job, for example, because of downsizing, mergers, takeovers, and so on, is understandably devastated by the loss. First, of course, is the loss of income, but sometimes almost equally devastating is the attendant loss of self. The person has no answer to the question, "What do you do?" Friends and family groups provide critical feedback that helps to sustain a positive self-concept, but for most adults this is not enough. We want to feel valuable in “outside” groups, outside our friends and family. The premiere outside group is the employment group. No group member is a robotic task worker, but, instead, is a worker with socioemotional and psychological needs. The study of small group and team communication will help, therefore, in the understanding and the satisfaction of these needs.
Addressing this same point, Erickson proposed a model of development from birth to death. Erickson's model is relevant to groups and self-concept because at each stage of development, Erickson says, there is an individual or group that has a significant impact on development and self-concept. Erickson's eight stages and the respective significant individual or group follows.
Noted in Erickson's model is a significant other or a group of significant others for each developmental stage. In the beginning of life significant others are the parents and the basic family. Next the radius of significant others expands to include schoolmates and neighbors; and with adolescence, peer groups take center stage. Later, partners and workmates enter the radius. And, at the end of life, significant others may include relatives, friends, and perhaps personal care workers, but also humanity in general. We want to think about what our life meant and whether we made a difference.
In the study of small groups and teams there are at least two paradoxes that will continually be revealed. The first was stated by Robert Bales, a pioneer and prolific researcher in the field. Bales said:
When attention is given to the task, strains are created in the social and emotional relations of the members of the group, and attention then turns to the solution of these problems. So long as the group devotes its activity simply to social emotional activity, however, the task is not getting done, and attention would be expected to turn again to the task area.
The quotation from Bales relates, of course, to the content of the previous section. Bales notes that although the group focuses on its task, the group will falter if its members' socioemotional needs are not satisfied. On the other side of the coin, the group will suffer as well if too much attention is paid to those needs; the task will not be accomplished. A balance between task and socioemotional needs is crucial if the group is to succeed.
The second paradox relates to individual freedom. We have a need for group affiliation. In the group, social needs are satisfied, most notably the need for maintenance of self-concept. At the same time, when we join a group we lose individual freedom because we eventually adopt the values of the group and identify with the group. Often, this is the reason for the anger and hostility expressed or suppressed by group members. They want to be in the group but they don't want to be in the group. Goffman described this paradox when he said, "To have a self one must fill a role, but to fill a role is to lose self." For example, a person gets married and starts a family. Once having entered this group (the family) the person has new roles to fill, roles defined by society, culture, religion, immediate family, and spouse's family. Past freedoms and persona are gone. The new roles redefine the person's self and to violate the rules of the new roles is to invite negative consequences.
In this chapter basic definitions important to the study of small group and team communication were provided, the context of small group and team communication was discussed, group performance was compared and contrasted with individual performance, the importance of studying small group and team communication was examined, and two paradoxes that we face when we participate in small group and team communication were presented and discussed.