Group Roles

What Are Roles?

1. The concept of roles applies to all employees in organizations and to their life outside the organization as well.
2. A role refers to a set of expected behavior patterns attributed to someone who occupies a given position in a social unit.
3. Individuals play multiple roles.
4. Employees attempt to determine what behaviors are expected of them.
5. An individual who is confronted by divergent role expectations experiences role conflict.
6. Employees in organizations often face such role conflicts.


Following are the different types of group roles:

1. Task-oriented roles
2. Relationship-oriented roles
3. Individual roles

      Task-oriented roles
             • Initiator-Contributors
             • Information seekers/providers
   
     Relationship-oriented roles
             • Encouragers
             • Harmonizers
   
     Individual roles
             • Blockers
             • Jokers

Characteristics of a well-functioning, effective group

A group is considered effective if it is having following characteristics.
    • Relaxed, comfortable, informal atmosphere
    • Task to be performed are well understood & accepted
    • Members listen well & participate in given assignments
    • Clear assignments made & accepted
    • Group aware of its operation & function
    • People express feelings & ideas
    • Consensus decision making
    • Conflict & disagreement center around ideas or method

Group

A group is defined as two or more interacting and interdependent individuals who come together to achieve
particular objectives.

Types of Groups

a. Formal groups are work groups established by the organization and have designated work assignments
and established tasks. The behaviors in which one should engage are stipulated by and directed toward
organizational goals.
b. Informal groups are of a social nature and are natural formations. They tend to form around friendships and common interests.


Why Do People Join Groups?

There is no single reason why individuals join groups.
1. Security reflects strength in numbers.
    • The group helps the individual to feel stronger, have fewer self-doubts, and be more resistant to threats.
2. Status indicates a prestige that comes from belonging to a particular group.
    • Inclusion in a group viewed as important provides recognition and status.
3. Self-esteem conveys people's feelings of self-worth.
    • Membership can raise feelings of self-esteem--being accepted into a highly valued group.
4. Affiliation with groups can fulfill one's social needs.
    • Work groups significantly contribute to fulfilling the need for friendships and social relations.
5. One of the appealing aspects of groups is that they represent power.
    • What often cannot be achieved individually becomes possible through group action.
    • Power might be desired to protect themselves from unreasonable demands.
    • Informal groups additionally provide opportunities for individuals to exercise power.
6. Finally, people may join a group for goal achievement.
    • There are times when it takes more than one person to accomplish a particular task.
    • There is a need to pool talents, knowledge, or power in order to get a job completed.

Individual

Why to Focus on Individuals?


Individuals are important units of any organization. If we understand the behavior of individuals, we can predict
the outcomes; it will become easy to manage the behaviors of individuals in desirable directions. We have to look at three individual variables—biographical characteristics, ability, and learning. Biographical characteristics are readily available to managers. Generally, they include data that are contained in an employee’s personal file. The most important conclusions are that, age seems to have no relationship to productivity; older workers and those with longer tenure are less likely to resign; and married employees have fewer absences, less turnover, and report higher job satisfaction than do unmarried employees. But what value can this information have for managers? The obvious answer is that it can help in making choices among job applicants.



Ability directly influences an employee’s level of performance and satisfaction through the ability-job fit. Given management’s desire to get a compatible fit, what can be done?


First, an effective selection process will improve the fit. A job analysis will provide information about jobs currently being done and the abilities that individuals need to perform the jobs
adequately. Applicants can then be tested, interviewed, and evaluated on the degree to which they possess the necessary abilities.
Second, promotion and transfer decisions affecting individuals already in the organization’s employ should reflect the abilities of candidates. With new employees, care should be taken to assess critical abilities that incumbents will need in the job and to match these requirements with the organization’s human resources.
Third, the fit can be improved by fine-tuning the job to better match an incumbent’s abilities. Often
modifications can be made in the job that while not having a significant impact on the job’s basic activities,
better adapts it to the specific talents of a given employee. Examples would be to change some of the equipment used or to reorganize tasks within a group of employees.

A final alternative is to provide training for employees. This is applicable to both new workers and present job incumbents. Training can keep the abilities of incumbents current or provide new skills as times and conditions change.

Any observable change in behavior is prima facie evidence that learning has taken place. What we want to do, of course, is ascertain if learning concepts provide us with any insights that would allow us to explain and predict behavior. Positive reinforcement is a powerful tool for modifying behavior. By identifying and rewarding performance-enhancing behaviors, management increases the likelihood that they will be repeated. Our knowledge about learning further suggests that reinforcement is a more effective tool than punishment. Although punishment eliminates undesired behavior more quickly than negative reinforcement does, but punished behavior tends to be only temporarily suppressed rather than permanently changed. Punishment may produce unpleasant side effects such as lower morale and higher absenteeism or turnover. In addition, the recipients of punishment tend to become resentful of the punisher. Managers, therefore, are advised to use reinforcement rather than punishment.
Finally, managers should expect that employees would look to them as models. Managers who are constantly late to work, or take two hours for lunch, or help themselves to company office supplies for personal use should expect employees to read the message they are sending and model their behavior accordingly. Individual differences do not dictate people’s behavior. Instead, they limit a person’s behavioral range, making some behavior easier than others.

The Basic OB Model

The basic OB model suggests study of the organization at following three levels:

1. Organization
2. Group
3. Individual

The purpose of understanding organizations from all three levels (individual, group, and organization) is to develop a well-rounded view that will prepare us for the challenges that managers face in today's business environment. Focusing on the individual level allows us to understand individual differences, perception, motivation, and learning. Focusing on the group level shows us how more than two people can
work together in groups or teams within an organization. Focusing on the organization level allows us to see the effects of the organizational environment, technology, strategy, structure, and culture.

The Environment Of Organization

• Work group
• Job
• Personal life

Inside the organization, the work group or the relationship between the group members can affect the individual behavior. Organizational culture can also have impact on the individual behavior.
Cultural values indicate what a cultural group considers important, worthwhile, and desirable. People share the
values of their culture, which form the basis for individual value systems composed of terminal values and
instrumental values. A key work-related value is a person's ethics. Value systems affect ethical behavior in
organizations. Managers must be most concerned with interpersonal and person-organization value conflicts.
Interpersonal value conflicts occur when two or more people have opposing values, which can prevent coworkers from working together effectively. Person-organization value conflicts occur when someone's values
conflict with the organization's culture, causing frustration and possibly disrupting personal performance.
The factors that influence job satisfaction are pay; the job itself; promotion opportunities; supervisors; and coworkers. The link between job satisfaction and work performance is complex and influenced by multiple
organizational and personal factors. The link appears to be stronger for professionals than for employees at
higher organizational levels.

Organizations and human behavior

Variables Influencing the Individual Human Behaviors:
In simple word behavior is the function of Person and Environment in which he/she is working.
The following two factors mainly influence the individual behaviors…

1. The Persons
2. The Environment of the Organization


The Persons No single measure of individual differences can provide a complete understanding of an individual or predict all the behaviors of an individual. It is therefore more useful to consider a variety of differences that explain aspects of employee behavior. These can be

• Skills & Abilities
• Personality
• Perceptions
• Attitudes
• Values
• Ethics


Skills & Abilities:
Mental and physical capacities to perform various tasks. This comes from knowledge, learning, and experiences.


Personality:
Research has shown five major dimensions to be consistent components of personality. The Big Five
personality dimensions are conscientiousness, extroversion/introversion, and openness to experience, emotional stability, and agreeableness. Conscientiousness - defined as being reliable and dependable, being careful and organized, and being a person who plans - is the dimension most strongly correlated to job performance. Extroversion/introversion refers to the degree to which a person is sociable, talkative, assertive, active, and ambitious. Openness to experience is the degree to which someone is imaginative, broad-minded, curious, and seeks new experiences. Emotional stability is the degree to which someone is anxious, depressed, angry, and insecure. Agreeableness refers to the degree to which a person is courteous, likable, good-natured, and flexible. Managers must remember that the relevance of any personality dimension depends on the situation, the type of job, and the level at which a person is working.

Four personality traits that have been consistently related to work-related behavior are locus of control, Type-A behavior, self-monitoring, and Machiavellian-ism. Locus of control indicates an individual's sense of control over his/her life, the environment, and external events. Those with an internal locus of control believe that their actions affect what happens to them, while those with an external locus of control believe that outside factors affect what happens to them. People who exhibit Type-A behavior try to do more in less and less time in an apparently tireless pursuit of everything. Type-A people feel great time urgency, are very competitive, try to do many things at once, and are hostile.
Self-monitoring, the fourth personality trait is the degree to which people are capable of reading and using cues from the environment to determine their own behavior. Strong self-monitoring skills can help managers and employees read environmental and individual cues quickly and accurately and adjust behavior accordingly. People with elements of a Machiavellian personality put self-interest above the group's interests and manipulate others for personal gain.



Perceptions:
We use the mental process of perception to pay attention selectively to some stimuli and cues in our environment. There are two types of perception. Social perception process is the process of gathering, selecting, and interpreting information about how we view themselves and others. In contrast, physical perception focuses on gathering and interpreting information about physical objects rather than people. Closure permits us to interpret a stimulus by filling in missing information based on our experiences and assumption.

Attitudes:
Attitudes are comprised of feelings, beliefs, and behaviors. One important work-related attitude is job
satisfaction, the general attitude that people have toward their jobs. Main five factors contribute to job
satisfaction: pay; the job itself; promotion opportunities; the supervisor; and relations with co-workers. The
relationship between job satisfaction and work performance is complex and influenced by multiple
organizational and personal factors. Managers have more influence over job satisfaction than any other
individual difference discussed in this chapter.

Values:
Values are long-lasting beliefs about what is important, worthwhile, and desirable. A person's value system is the way he/she organizes and prioritizes values. Terminal values are goals for behavior or for a certain result that someone wants to achieve. Instrumental values are the means—the instruments—that people believe they should use to attain their goals. Cultural values can affect personal values

ETHICS:
A key work-related value is the employee's ethics. Those who hold a relativist's view of ethics believe
that what is right or wrong depends on the situation or culture. Those with a Universalist’s view believe that
ethical standards should be applied consistently in all situations and cultures. Value conflict occurs when there is disagreement among values that an individual holds or between individual and organizational values. To avoid value conflict, managers should work toward integrating and fitting the values of different employees with the values of the organization.

Contribution of OB to effectiveness of Organization

Wouldn't a Manager’s job be easier if he or she could explain and predict behavior? This is the focus of
organizational behavior (OB), the study of the actions of people at work. The goal of OB is to explain and predict behavior of employees at work. OB focuses on both individual behavior and group behavior. Managers must understand behavior in both the formal and informal components of an organization. Managers are particularly concerned with three types of employee behaviors: productivity, absenteeism, and turnover. A fourth type of behavior, organizational citizenship, is emerging as a vital concern. Managers must also be attentive to employee attitudes.
Attitudes are value statements, either favorable or unfavorable, concerning people, events, or objects.
Attitudes of special interest to managers pertain to those related to job satisfaction, job involvement, and
organizational commitment. Can you think of ways in which your personal attitudes (values) have impact on your behavior at work? Sometimes an individual experiences an inconsistency between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. Are happy workers productive workers? The answer to this question is not as simple as it might appear. Review the relationship between employee happiness and productivity and see what you think. Many researchers now believe that managers should direct their attention primarily to what might help employees become more productive.
Five specific personality traits have proven most powerful in explaining individual behavior in organizations.
These are locus of control, Machiavellians, self-esteem, self-monitoring, and risk propensity. Review these traits so you can be prepared to predict practical work-related behaviors.
Sometimes different people will hear or witnesses the same situations yet interpret them differently. This
happens because of differences in perception. Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory impressions in order to give meaning to the environment. Managers need to recognize that employees react to perceptions, not to reality (if there is such a thing as “reality”). Thus, managers must pay close attention to how employees perceive both their jobs and management practices.

We constantly learn from our experiences. Sometimes we learn from rewards and punishments that are a
consequence of our behavior. We learn to behave in order to get something we want or to avoid something we do not want. This is called operative conditioning. An extension of apparent conditioning is social learning
theory. Social learning theory emphasizes that we can learn through observation as well as direct experience.
Managers can influence an employees learning through the rewards they allocate and the examples they set.
Does this advice seem equally applicable to parenting? The behavior of individuals in groups is not the same as the sum total of all of the individuals’ behavior.
Individuals often act differently in groups than when they are alone. This means that managers must also
understand the elements of group behavior. This chapter describes the basic concepts of group behavior.
It is clear that the ability to understand and predict employee behavior is a powerful tool for managers. To
illustrate, a movie director must often “get into the mindset” of characters in a script. Understanding a
character’s perceptions and motivation can help the director guide actors toward an award-winning
performance. Managers, too, can serve as a guide and coach, helping employees meet organizational goals.