An Introduction to Organisational Behaviour for Managers and Engineers

A Group and Multicultural Approach

Duncan Kitchin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134799350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

An Introduction to Organisational Behaviour for Managers and Engineers: A Group and Multicultural Approach gives a comprehensive overview of how organisations work, with a special focus on group and team working, and issues of diversity and intercultural management.

This second edition has been updated throughout, drawing on the latest literature, along with:

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• a new chapter on organisational change, a process which all managers and engineers will encounter on the job;

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• case studies and illustrations showing theories in action;

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• more cross-referencing between chapters, showing how topics are interlinked.

This concise textbook not only provides a practical introduction to organisational behaviour for management students, but is also specifically geared towards the needs of engineering students and professionals.

CHAPTER 1
Groups and Group Processes

Central to many organisations, and of increasing importance to others, is the existence and operation of groups. Project groups, task groups or teams are a normal feature of the working life of managers and engineers, whether students or fully qualified professionals. We shall use the terms “groups” and “teams”, and “task” and “project”, interchangeably.

In this chapter we are going to look at the definition of a team, how they form, how they work successfully and what causes them to be unsuccessful. As the main purpose of teams is to make decisions, there will be a discussion of decision-making and then an examination of the processes within teams when they are making decisions. What happens within teams is called group process, the interactions of individual members of a team that makes a team different than the sum of the individuals that make up the team. Understanding this idea of groups being different than the sum of the individuals is crucial to being a successful member of a team, and is crucial to knowing how to set up and manage teams so that they make a contribution to the organisation that is better than any single individual, or group of individuals who simply have their individual contributions summed. To understand water it is not enough to understand about oxygen and hydrogen, you have to understand how they interact as water. If you are a member of a task or project group or team it is important to understand what is happening in the group so that it does not go “awfully wrong”, and so that if it starts to go wrong you can recognise what is happening and correct the process in order to reach a successful outcome.

WHAT IS A GROUP?

There is a big literature defining what constitutes a group. We will look at a few of the obvious and attractive options before settling on a clear and acceptable definition.

Some people have tried defining groups as having a collective fate. Under this definition, the staff of Lehman Brothers would be a group, with their collective fate to be unemployed as the investment bank imploded in 2008. It has been suggested that the European Jews constituted a group, with the collective fate that awaited them in Germany and much of Europe between 1933 and 1945. When you think of your project group, “collective fate” hardly seems to define your sense of why you are a group.

A different way of defining has been to say that a group could be defined in terms of face-to-face interaction. Your project group certainly has face-to-face interaction, unless it is a virtual group that only meets electronically via the Internet. A football crowd also meets face-to-face, physically in the same place, but your reaction is probably to say that the crowd is very different to your project group, both in terms of the scale of the group (75,000 against 5 or 6) and the degree if intimacy in the meeting. The soccer crowd meets face-to-face, but there is no intimacy, no sense of knowing or getting to know the other members of the group.

So, what does your project group have that leads you to define it as a group? It is a small group of people who meet regularly (either face-to-face or electronically, or a mix of the two), and who know, or get to know, one another. (For a discussion of groups that only meet electronically, see the discussions on virtual organisations in Chapter 8: Organisational Structures and Chapter 9: Communications.) An added criteria might be that as the group evolves there is an emerging set of relationships that develop and people begin to adopt certain roles within the group; perhaps there is a chair, a secretary and a social worker who looks after the pattern of relating in order to prevent or resolve interpersonal conflicts. There may also be an element of a group existing because its members say that the group exists – this is self-categorisation – “a group exists because we all agree that it exists and that we are members of it”. The characteristics that we have mentioned help us to define a group, but is rather more of a list than a definition.

A neat definition of a group is given by Brown (2000, p. 3):

A group exists when two or more people define themselves as members of it and when its existence is recognized by at least one other.

Some of what we are going to write about in this chapter is the interaction of one group with another (specifically “in-groups and out-groups”), and the setting up of groups within an organisation, hence the need to include a reference to “… recognized by at least one other”.

The definition has a minimum size of two, but there is no reference to a maximum size. Reflection on our experience of groups suggests that as the size of membership grows, a crucial change tends to take place when the membership reaches about eight. Above that number the group tends to break up into subgroups as the difficulty of maintaining a face-to-face discussion with more than eight people grows. Once a group divides, then we have two groups, with the complications that that brings in terms of the relating of the two groups (see the Sherif and Sherif discussion of “in-groups and out-groups” later in this chapter).

A British anthropologist, Dunbar, came forward with the maximum size of a group with which any one individual can maintain stable social relationships (Dunbar, 1993). “Dunbar’s number”, as it became known, is 150. Even at that level, Dunbar estimated that 42% of the group’s time would be taken up with social grooming in order to maintain the group. Dunbar’s groups are not, however, groups that meet face-to-face and are more akin to the number of “friends” one might have in a Facebook list of friends. Later in the chapter we are going to write about Belbin’s ideas about the makeup of a winning decision-making team. Belbin concluded that there are eight or nine separate roles that need to be filled if a decision-making team is to be successful. This, interestingly, fits with the research about the maximum size of group that can sustain face-to-face interaction as a single unified group.

If we use an evolutionist’s approach to the size of groups, then we can observe that groups larger than eight or nine rarely seem to exist – they cannot survive in the interpersonal environment – they die or self destruct.

An economist’s perspective on groups would suggest that they exist because the benefits of groups outweigh the costs of groups, and that the value of the net output (total benefits less total costs) of groups is normally greater than the sum of the net outputs of the individuals if they were not members of the group. There are net benefits for organisations from combining individuals into groups.

FORMING GROUPS

Group development

We cannot expect that it is enough to put eight random people into a group and tell them to solve a problem. One of the problems that the author sees regularly with student engineering project groups is that after being put in a room together, they immediately start trying to solve the problem that they have been given.

Tuckman (1965) recognised that successful groups had gone through a number of stages before they could function successfully as a group.

Subsequently, Tuckman and Jensen (1977) added a further stage of ADJOURNING (Ending).

The four initial stages are much as the names suggest:

■Forming: groups need to form, that is, they need to get to know one another. Before a group of strangers can hope to work together they need to begin to develop relationships with, and a sense of trust in, the other group members. Developing relationship and trust requires them to talk and act together in an emotionally safe way. A sense of belonging to the group needs to develop, with the resulting sense of commitment and obligation; this takes time. If the members of the group are from different cultures, then the cultural assumptions that members bring about relating, sense-making, time-keeping and many other issues will differ very much from one member to another, and the time taken to form will be longer than when the members of the group are drawn from a single national culture. Forming is followed by storming.

FIGURE 1.1

Tuckman’s group development model

■Storming: this is the process that develops after forming, where group members begin to “fight” with one another over the roles within the group; who is going to chair, who is going to have power and influence. They also need to “fight” over how they will work together; for example, will they work virtually (meeting electronically) or will they be co-located, present in the same room. Storming is followed by norming.

■Norming: this is the resolution of the storming and is, in effect, agreements about individual’s roles, how they will work together, what are the time-keeping rules, how will the rules be enforced and so on. When the members of the group are drawn from diverse cultures, the process of forming, storming and norming is likely to be slower than for a group with a single national culture. Norming is followed by performing.

■Performing: only after the previous three stages have been completed can the group have any real hope of being able to work productively together. During performing there may be a return to storming.

■Storming: as the group performs they may discover that some of the norms that they developed together are not functional, and they will have to turn from performing to storm again so that they can renorm. Different national cultures deal with interpersonal disagreements and conflict in very differing ways and thus the storming may be very difficult to resolve for a culturally diverse group. Following this storming will be:

■Renorming: this is agreeing to the new norms that hopefully will be more appropriate and lead to better performing.

■Performing: the loop to storming and renorming may have to happen a number of times.

If the group is meeting as a virtual group, with all meeting taking place electronically, then it is clear that at least the forming stage is going to be different and slower than in a co-located group where people meet face-to-face. For a fuller discussion of virtual groups, consult Chapter 8: Organisational Structures and Chapter 9: Communications.

Psychotherapeutic writers have suggested that the sequence is actually:

Forming–norming–performing–storming–renorming–performing

with the possibility of a number of loops through storming to renorming and back to performing. Certainly this sequence is common in psychotherapy groups and is probably a reflection of the essential politeness of the British, who are reluctant to storm until they are sorely tried by the failure of the group to perform with its e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements to the First Edition
• Acknowledgements to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Case Studies
• List of Illustrations
• Chapter 1 Groups and Group Processes
• Chapter 2 Organisational Culture
• Chapter 3 International Cultural Differences
• Chapter 4 Motivation
• Chapter 5 Stress
• Chapter 6 Organisational Politics
• Chapter 7 Leadership
• Chapter 8 Organisational Structures
• Chapter 9 Communications
• Chapter 10 Managing Change in Organisations
• Appendix: McGregor’s Theories X and Y
• Index