ORGANIZATIONAL
BEHAVIOR
AND
HUMAN
DECISION
PROCESSES
Habitual Routines in Task-Performing
CONNIE
University
47,
65-97 (1990)
Groups
J. G. GERSICK
of California,
Los Angeles
AND
J. RICHARD
Harvard
HACKMAN
University
Groups, like individuals, often develop habitual routines for dealing with
frequently encountered stimuli. Although such routines are consequential for
group life and work, little is known about them. This paper reconnoiters the
territory of habitual behavior in groups that perform work within organizations. We offer a definition of group habits, identify their functions and dysfunctions, suggest how they develop and are maintained, and identify the
circumstances when they are likely to be altered or abandoned. Throughout,
we give special attention to the social nature of habitual routines in groups, to
the interaction between habitual behavior and group life cycle phenomena, and
to the role of the organizational context in prompting, shaping, and terminating
habitual routines. 0 1990 Academic Press, Inc.
On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737-222 (N62AF) was a
scheduled flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from Washington National Airport,
Washington, D.C. There were 74 passengers, including 3 infants, and 5 crewmembers on board. The flight’s scheduled departure time was delayed about 1 hour 45
minutes due to a moderate to heavy snowfall which necessitated the temporary
closing of the airport.
Following takeoff from Runway 36, which was made with snow and/or ice adhering
to the aircraft, the aircraft crashed at 1601 e.s.t. into the barrier wall of the northbound span of the 14th Street Bridge, which connects the District of Columbia with
Arlington County, Virginia, and plunged into the ice-covered Potomac River. . . .
The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of
this accident was the flight crew’s failure to use the engine anti-ice during ground
operation and take-off, and their decision to take off with snow/ice on the airfoil
surfaces of the aircraft, and the captain’s failure to reject the takeoff during the
early stage when his attention was called to anomalous engine instrument readings.
Excerpt from Synopsis of Aircraft Accident Report
National Transportation Safety Board (1982)
The work of the second author on this paper was supported in part by Cooperative
Agreement NCC 2-324 between NASA and Harvard University. Because the paper is an
equal collaboration, order of authorship is alphabetical. Reprint requests should be addressed to Connie J. G. Gersick at Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA, 405
Hilgard, Los Angeles, CA 90024.
65
0749-5978&O $3.00
Copyright 0 1990 by Academic Press. Inc.
All rights of reproduction
in any form reserved.
66
GERSICK
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HACKMAN
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report, based on
extensive analysis by aviation safety experts, is the official determination
of the probable cause of the accident described above. Yet it can be
informative to speculate further about why the two-person crew did not
use the anti-ice capability of the aircraft, and why they did not abort the
takeoff when anomalous engine readings were noted.
Consider, for example, the following excerpt from the cockpit voice
recorder transcript for the period just after the aircraft engines had been
started. The captain had called for the after-start checklist, a standard
procedure to ensure that the aircraft is set up properly for taxi. As is
typical, the first offtcer read each checklist item and the captain responded after checking the appropriate indicator in the cockpit.
First Officer:
Captain:
First Oflicer:
Captain:
First Officer:
Captain:
First Oflicer:
Captain:
First Officer:
Captain:
First Officer:
Captain:
Electrical.
Generators.
Pitot heat.
On.
Anti-ice.
Off.
Air-conditioning pressurization.
Packs on flight.
APU.
Running.
Start levers.
Idle.
The checklist is a routine, run every time engines are started. It becomes second nature to experienced crews. The usual response to the
query “Anti-ice?” is indeed “Off,” especially in the summer and for
crews that typically operate in warm or dry climates. The NTSB noted
that the captain had flown only eight takeoffs or landings in wet, freezing
weather since becoming a Boeing 737 captain with Air Florida; the first
officer had flown only two takeoffs or landings in such conditions during
his entire employment with the company, Could the checklist have become so routine for these crewmembers that they were not even aware
that the present flight required a nonroutine response to the anti-ice
query?
The crew had a second chance to save the flight several minutes later,
as the takeoff roll began. Here is the NTSB summary of that portion of the
transcript:
At 1559:46, the sound of engine spoolup was recorded, and the captain stated,
“Holler if you need the wipers . . .” At 1559:56, the captain commented, “Real
cold, real cold,” and at 1559:58 the first officer remarked, “God, look at that thing,
that don’t seem right, does it?”
Between 1600:05 and 1600:10, the first officer stated, “. . , that’s not right . . . ,”
to which the captain responded, “Yes it is, there’s eighty.” The first officer reit-
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
67
erated, “Naw, I don’t think that’s right.” About 9 seconds later the fust ofEcer
added, I’. . . maybe it is,” but then 2 seconds later, after the captain called “hundred and twenty,” the first officer said “I don’t know.”
Less than a minute later, the aircraft crashed into the bridge.
The first officer was the pilot actually flying the aircraft. When he first
noted that something seemed wrong (“God, look at that thing, that don’t
seem right, does it?“) the captain did not respond. When he repeated his
concern, the captain reassured him (“Yes it is, there’s eighty”). Even
though the first officer was not convinced (“Naw, I don’t think that’s
right”) he continued with the takeoff. The routine was not broken, despite
the data indicating that the roll was not proceeding normally. Could the
takeoff procedure have become so routine for the crewmembers that they
could not respond to indications that an extraordinary response (such as
aborting the takeoff) was needed?
The Air Florida tragedy is an extreme example, but it does illustrate
how powerfully a group can be governed by its routines, and how critical
they can be for a group’s performance. Yet it is in the nature of routines
that they go unnoticed; group members talk far less about things they do
routinely than about extraordinary actions they have taken, and researchers have done relatively little systematic research on group routines. We
contend, nonetheless, that a high percentage of what groups do is governed by routines, and that any robust understanding of how (and how
well) groups work will have to deal with this pervasive but oftenoverlooked aspect of group behavior.
BACKGROUND
Despite the lack of research specifically on habitual behavior in groups,
work at other levels of analysis provides good reason to believe that the
phenomenon is pervasive. Most empirical studies of habitual behavior
have been done at the individual level of analysis. What has been learned
from that research is summarized elsewhere (Weiss & Ilgen, 1985) and
will not be repeated here. It is worth noting, however, that even as the
body of empirical findings is expanding, so are the conceptual tools available for interpreting and extending those findings. Especially promising,
in our view, is the empirical and conceptual work by Langer (1989) on the
manifestations and consequences of “mindful” vs “mindless” cognitive
processing, the theoretical work by Louis and Sutton (in press) on the
conditions under which people switch from schema-guided automatic processing to conscious engagement, and Weiss and Ilgen’s (1985) analyses
of the antecedents, manifestations, and consequences of habitual behavior by individuals in organizations.
At the organization level of analysis, scholars recognized the existence
of habitual routines many years ago, and have been theorizing about them
68
GERSICK
AND
HACKMAN
ever since. Simon (1945), following Stene (1940), described organizational
habits as routines that develop in response to recurring questions and
become accepted practice-actions
taken without consciously considering alternatives. He deemed organizational
habits to be of far-reaching
importance,
because of the great difficulty of stopping an automatic
launch into these routines, even when changed circumstances make them
inappropriate.
Barnard (194511976) concurred, asserting that much concrete behavior in organizations is so habitual as to be ungovernable by
rational deliberation, a view echoed later by March and Simon (1958, pp.
141-142) who asserted that routinized performance programs govern
“most behavior in organizations.”
If habitual routines are pervasive at both the individual and organizational levels of analysis, then it seems inevitable that they would operate
in groups as well. Groups are among the most common settings for the
expression of individual behavior; and because groups are so frequently
used to accomplish organizational work, many organization-level
routines
are actually executed by interacting teams (Huse & Cummings, 1985).
Indeed, it appears that organized social systems require at least some
routinization of behavior to get work accomplished. Members of groups
must be able to predict the responses of other individuals for coordinated
action to be possible-and
routinization contributes to predictability.
The
same is true for larger social systems: groups within organizations must
standardize at least some aspects of their behavior to be able to act
interdependently
with other groups in pursuing collective objectives.
There are a few exceptions to the general silence about group habitual
routines. McClelland (1984) documented that groups do routinize their
decision-making
processes over time. Her results further suggest that
habitual routines may operate somewhat differently for groups than for
individuals: certain predictions that were derived from previous findings
about individual habits were not borne out at the group level of analysis.
Argyris (1969) showed not only that groups have habitual ways of dealing
with anxiety-arousing
and authority-relevant
material, but that these
maintenance
routines have great generality across various types of
groups, from rank-and-file production teams to top management committees. And Janis’s (1982) research on groupthink suggests that habitual
behavior may figure heavily in groups’ strategies for handling dissent and
deviance.
In a very different tradition, research on family therapy also shows the
pervasiveness and potency of habitual behavior in groups. As Minuchin
(1974, p. 17) explains, families inevitably develop myriad routines to address the tasks and needs of daily living. These are repeated “patterned
transactions” in which each participant “triggers and monitors the behavior of the other and is in turn influenced by the previous behavioral
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
69
sequence.” For structuralist clinicians, these group habits are such important determinants of family interaction that they supersede individual
psychodynamics as the key to diagnosis and treatment.
We have also found evidence of the power of group habits in our own
empirical work. Hackman and Morris (1975) discovered that experimental
groups, asked to do creative tasks, settled immediately into performance
routines that then guided behavior throughout the work period. There
were few signs of overt planning or process management activities in
these groups. Gersick (1988) studying naturally occurring project groups,
also found that groups exhibited persistent patterns for handling their
tasks, their internal processes, and their interactions with outside stakeholders. These routines persisted from the very beginning of their projects
until half way through their project calendars-at which point they did
change, a matter about which we will have more to say later.
It appears, then, that habitual routines are a fact of life in groups. In this
paper, we hope to lay a foundation for understanding them better. We do
not provide here either a literature review (there is not enough available
to do that) or a theory of habitual behavior in groups (it is premature to do
that). Rather, we seek to present a broad-brush survey of the territory.
We begin, in the next section, by defining the phenomenon and bounding
the domain we will address. Then we explore the functional and dysfunctional consequences of habitual routines in groups. Next we examine the
conditions under which groups develop habits and maintain them over
time and changing circumstances. Finally, we discuss the circumstances
when groups are likely to modify their habitual routines or break out of
them.
WHAT IS A HABITUAL
ROUTINE?
It is essential to distinguish reliably what is being dealt with here from
repetitive behaviors that fall outside the coverage of this paper. For us:
A habitual routine exists when a group repeatedly exhibits a functionally similar
pattern of behavior in a given stimulus situation without explicitly selecting it over
alternative ways of behaving.
While this definition is broad enough to apply to any group, we will deal
exclusively with groups that perform some kind of work in an organizational setting. We explain below what we mean by each component of the
definition, and identify some aspects of group habitual routines that are
critical to what we have to say in subsequent sections of the paper.
1. “Repeatedly.” Habits can vary in strength. Accordingly, our definition does not specify that a behavior must occur every time a given
stimulus situation appears-but it must happen many times, not just once.
2. “Functionally similar.” The issue here is not what specific words or
70
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behaviors are exhibited, but what function the behavior has for the group
or its work. For example, we would consider it a habit if a team repeatedly used joking to smooth over disagreements or to reduce tensions, no
matter what the specific content of the jokes happened to be. We assume
that habitual behavior usually serves some function when it is first established, even if it is a latent function not recognized by group members,
and even if it is as simple a function as “freeing the group from having to
think of alternative behaviors.”
3. “Pattern of behavior.” A pattern of behavior is a set of interactions
that expresses a group’s way of handling a given issue or problem it faces.
Whether explicit or implicit, it is a group’s observable, collective response to the invoking stimulus.
4. “In a given stimulus situation.” The behavior pattern is exhibited in
response to a bounded class of stimuli. Because coding of stimuli is a key
precursor of habitual behavior, there are several facets to this aspect of
the definition.
First, specific stimuli in a given class are dealt with as if they all had the
same meaning or significance for the group. A group that is using habitual
routines may quickly code new or different stimuli as falling into the same
class without giving explicit attention to them-even
if those stimuli are,
in fact, quite different. The Air Florida crew, for example, did not appear
to “believe” that the data shown on their instruments during the takeoff
roll were seriously discrepant from normal.
Second, it is the group’s perception or coding of a situation that elicits
the habitual behavior, even though such coding may be accomplished
without explicit group discussion, or even awareness by group members.
This state of affairs can occur when all group members have learned to
code certain cues in the same way: a yell from the coach may be simultaneously “read” identically by all members of an athletic team. But even
a single member’s perception may be enough to trigger a group reaction,
because once the others see a teammate launch into the routine response
for “situation X,” they assume the same coding. A group of life guards
does not wait until every member witnesses a swimmer in trouble to
initiate emergency procedures; it is enough for them to see one guard
racing toward the water.
Third, the stimuli that trigger that habit need not be externally imposed,
but may-like
the patterned transactions in Minuchin’s families-be
selfgenerated, as when interactions among group members create a state of
collective anxiety (the stimulus situation) to which the group responds by
scapegoating a member (the group response). It is sadly ironic that the Air
Florida crew did not adjust to the weather even as members talked about
how cold it was. But once the after-start checklist routine began, the
HABITUAL
71
ROUTINES
stimulus-response pattern of the checklist appeared to overrule stimuli
from the environment in governing crewmembers’ actions.
5. “Without explicitly selecting it over alternative ways of behaving.”
The test here is simple and inclusive: the group does not process its
behavior by explicitly discussing whether or not this way of proceeding is
better or worse than alternatives.
CONSEQUENCES
OF HABITUAL
ROUTINES
There are two features of habitual routines, as defined above, that bear
directly on the degree to which groups are better or worse off for having
them. First, habitual routines operate without engaging group members’
conscious attention, evaluation, or choice; they function automatically.
Second, habitual routines preserve and perpetuate existing patterns of
behavior; until and unless some extraordinary event occurs, they are
self-sustaining. These two features yield both functional and dysfunctional consequences for groups and their work.
Functional
Consequences
The most obvious overall advantage of habitual routines is that they
save time and energy, precisely because they need not be actively managed. For any group to take concerted action, members must have at least
rudimentary agreement on their definition of the situation, they must have
some kind of shared plan for how they will proceed, and they must exhibit
at least a modicum of coordination in executing their plan. Habitual routines can help with all three of these requirements.
Because similar stimuli are automatically treated the same way when a
habitual routine is in effect, a group can move quickly beyond stimulus
coding activities. Because habitual behavior follows automatically from
recognition of the invoking stimuli, a group need not spend time creating
and choosing the behavioral strategy that will guide the work. And because habitual routines are well practiced, the time and energy needed to
coordinate among members in executing behaviors is kept low.
At many steps along the way, then, groups’ habitual responses should
contribute substantially to efficient performance, and free members to
concentrate on nonroutine challenges. A second function of habitual behavior, perhaps less obvious, is that familiar, well-learned routines generally contribute to individual members’ comfort with the group. By reducing uncertainty about how things are done, habitual behaviors can
increase members’ confidence about their roles in the group, and reduce
their risk of “doing the wrong thing” and being perceived as deviant.
Although habitual routines may reflect the outcomes of past power
struggles among members, once in place they can minimize overt competition and disagreement. Thus, habitual routines can attenuate the un-
72
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certainty and anxiety that is inherent in collective work, and they can
foster the kind of comfort that comes from familiarity and predictability.
Yet, as will be seen below, this benefit may bring with it a cost in group
performance and can threaten the long-term viability of the group as a
performing unit.
Dysfunctional
Consequences
There are two major ways in which reliance on habitual routines may be
dysfunctional. First, performance can slip because members miscode performance situations, especially changing situations. Second, habitual routines can reduce the likelihood of innovative performance processes-and
ultimately can contribute to stagnation of the group and its members.
Miscoding of situations. Habits invite miscoding. If a group fails to
recognize a novel stimulus situation, or fails to see changes in a familiar
situation, it risks invoking a habitual routine when something else is
needed. Groups, like individuals, are likely to see what they know how to
respond t~sometimes
even things for which other responses would be
far more appropriate.
A more subtle dysfunction may occur when the stimulus stays the same
but the surrounding situation changes. Although the group may correctly
code the stimuli that invoke the habitual routine, it may fail to recognize
that the context has changed, and that the routine which heretofore has
always been appropriate for those stimuli may no longer be so. The group
does not realize this because, as is characteristic of habitual behavior,
members do not actively assess the situation or evaluate alternative behavioral choices. The result, in many cases, may be suboptimal performance .
While this problem can emerge for any group whose behavior has become habitual, it is particularly likely when a group historically has been
successful. Members of successful groups may be especially unlikely to
attend to the broader performance situation, precisely because their standard routines have always worked line in the stimulus situations that
invoke them (see, for example, Starbuck & Hedberg (1977) or Whetten
(1980) for descriptions of the phenomenon at the organization level, and
the work of Janis (1982) on the antecedents and consequences of
“groupthink”).
Reduced innovation. The likelihood of innovation, either in the task or
the interpersonal arena, may be reduced by habitual routines because the
group’s behavioral repertoire is not changing or expanding. Moreover,
productive dissent and disagreement are less likely when a group’s behavior is guided by habitual routines. The absence of dissent and disagreement assuredly increases member comfort with the group, as noted
above. Yet performance may suffer as a result. Numerous researchers
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
73
have shown that dealing with intermember conflict and with dissenting
views of members who hold minority opinions can prompt creative, nontraditional ways of responding to the group’s task (e.g., Hoffman, 1978;
Nemeth, 1986).
Over the long term, there may be a more subtle and potentially more
pernicious effect of reduced innovation. Because behaviors in the group
are being executed mostly by rote, there are diminished opportunities for
members (and for the group as a whole) to grow in competence, skill,
and/or perspective. In the absence of active exploration and experimentation, members may fall into a comfortable pattern that gets the work
done satisfactorily (assuming that the situation does not change in a way
that makes the habitual routines inappropriate). Yet over time both the
motivation and the opportunity for learning may diminish gradually, without anybody recognizing that these changes are taking place. This may
have been part of what occurred in the teams of research and development scientists studied by Katz (1982), when productivity peaked and
then declined after 3 years of members’ working together.
Contingencies. Habitual routines can help a group in some ways, and
be harmful in others. Whether the net effect of engaging in habitual behavior is positive or negative appears to depend heavily on the nature of
the performance situation. The mere existence of habitual routines obviously will not be a problem in situations where no change is needed-or
when a group somehow gets alerted when a change in routine performance processes actually is required. On the other hand, severe performance problems may result when change is needed and the group fails to
recognize that fact.
This suggests that two features of the performance situation may be
especially salient in affecting the functionality of habitual routines: (a) the
frequency of performance-relevant changes in the situation, and (b) the
severity of those changes-that is, the degree to which changes are large
enough to command a group’s attention. These situational features, in
interaction, generate the matrix shown in Fig. 1.
The performance consequences of habitual behavior should differ substantially across the four cells in the figure. In Cell 1, for example, the
performance situation seldom changes-and the changes that do occur
are minor. Groups that operate in that cell should be well-served by
habitual routines. The risk in this cell is that performance processes might
become so routinized and stable that members would find in their collective work little variety, challenge, or opportunity for personal learning
and growth.
Cell 2 presents potentially serious problems. If the situation is changing
gradually in a series of small steps, no one change may be great enough to
catch the group’s attention. Members are likely to persist with their es-
74
GERSICK AND HACKMAN
FREQUENCY OF CHANGES IN THE SITUATION
Moderate to High
Low
,““““-‘----‘--------,--L”“““”
I
I
I’
1
2
I
I
I
Frequent
Infrequent
f
Low 1
minor
1
minor
I
I
changes
changes
SEVERITY
I
I
:-----------------------:----------------------~
OF THE
t
CHANGES
I
4
3
i
I
Moderate to t
1
Infrequent
Frequent
High
i
I
major
major
I
f
changes
changes
I
I
I
L,,-,,,,-,,-,-,,,,,,---~-----,------------------~
FIG. 1, Frequency and severity of situational changes.
tablished behaviors unless, at some point, the discrepancy between the
situation and the group’s behavior causes a major failure. Without such a
failure, the group might go on operating at a suboptimal level indefinitely,
never seeing a real need to change its performance processes.
Stable habitual routines are likely to be maintained by groups operating
in Cell 3, because the situation itself is stable and routinized. The rare
drastic change that does occur, therefore, may catch the group entirely
unaware and unprepared. Serious performance problems may occur in
the time between the onset of the change and the group’s response to it,
because groups in Cell 3 do not anticipate major situational changes and
therefore do not have appropriate plans or programs ready to deal with
them when they do occur.
Predictions for Cell 4 differ as the frequency and severity of changes
move from moderate to high. When situational changes are consequential
enough to command the group’s attention and frequent enough to keep
members alert, a group should be well-protected against the dysfunctions
of habitual behavior. In these circumstances, a group would be wellserved by a meta-level habit that provides routines for dealing with
change. However, if the frequency of serious changes becomes too high,
such positive outcomes are less likely. With very frequent changes, it
could become impossible for a group to cope with its performance situation unless it were extraordinarily
versatile, or had a superb forecasting
system. Failing that, the group might develop an attitude of collective
fatalism, superstitious learning, and/or a set of objectively useless rituals-all devices that help members deal with stressful uncertainty, but
I
i
i
I
i
I
I
I
I
f
I
HABITUAL
75
ROUTINES
that lessen their ability to continue learning about the situation and experimenting with their behavior.
The predictions we have offered for these four cells are just that: predictions. As far as we know, no systematic research has been carried out
that would bear directly on them. Yet what is known about the potency of
situations in affecting group behavior (e.g., McGrath, 1984; Sundstrom &
Altman, 1988) suggeststhat research on the effects of performance situations on the functionality of group habitual routines could yield a useful
harvest of empirical findings.
HOW DO GROUPS
DEVELOP
HABITUAL
ROUTINES?
There are at least three conceptually distinct ways that a group can get
into habitual patterns of behavior: by importing those patterns, by creating them early in its life, and by gradually evolving them over time. As
will be seen, these processes have much in common with those through
which group norms are created and developed (Feldman, 1984).
Importation. In this case, a group follows routines that members did
not themselves develop. Nonetheless, members know how they are supposed to operate, and they proceed to act in those ways. Sometimes, for
example, behaviors are preset and overdetermined by organizational representatives-as when there is a standard operating procedure for which
all group members are routinely trained. This is often the case when
choreography must be precise for all organizational actions to mesh.
A special case of an imported routine occurs when organization representatives request that members engagein anticipatory planning and practice for an event that happens infrequently but that is highly important,
like an engine fire on an aircraft, or an overheat condition in a nuclear
power plant. In such circumstances, the organization wants the group to
be able to respond as quickly and automatically as if it had a habitual
routine, but cannot count on such a routine developing naturally-the
event is too infrequent, too complex, and the stakes are too high to wait
for that. The organization, therefore, overtrains the group’s response in a
simulated setting, so that when the tire bell rings in the cockpit, the result
is a behavior pattern that looks just like a well-practiced habitual routine.
In fact, it is an artificial habit, deliberately engineered for a good reason.
At other times there is no preset strategy, but members have common
previous task experiences, or share a common set of subcultural norms
about how things are supposed to be done in groups. When a member has
had previous experience with a task similar to the one now facing the
group, then the cues in the present circumstances will prompt recall of
routines that have worked in previous similar circumstances, and predispose that member to act in accord with those routines (Hackman, 1969).
If all members have common or similar previous experiences, members
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HACKMAN
may find that they “naturally”
fall into an agreeable set of performance
routines without ever having discussed them explicitly. The same should
be true when members share a common organizational culture or ideology
(Louis & Sutton, in press). In both cases, members share a priori premises
about the performance situation and strategies for proceeding to work
within it. When the group does convene, members may simply proceed to
do what everyone knows should be done, and a pattern of habitual behavior may be established without any explicit thought or discussion.
This kind of importation was found by Hackman and Morris (1973, in
their analyses of the transcripts of groups that were asked to write brief
essays in response to tasks of three different types. Some tasks asked
groups to create new materials (as in writing a story), others to take a
position on a controversial issue, and others to solve a practical problem.
They found that virtually all groups used the same behavioral routine or
strategy for working on tasks of a given type, that routines were different
for the three task types, and that, with few exceptions, the strategy a
group used was not explicitly discussed. The members, all students at the
same university, had considerable experience with tasks requiring the
production of written essays. Their previous learning about how to accomplish such tasks was simply imported into the group and accepted
without discussion. Only those few groups that happened to include a
member whose behavior indicated that the person was marching to a
different drummer took time from production work to discuss explicitly
how the work should be carried out.
This conceptualization
of the importation
process is informed by a
model of the development of group norms, proposed by Bettenhausen and
Murnighan (1985). The model posits that group interaction will unfold
immediately in a well-coordinated fashion if (a) group members’ scripts
(Abelson, 1976) are similar to one another’s and (b) members’ definitions
of the situation also are similar. In effect, the norm is imported and the
absence of disagreement and miscues implicitly affirms that all members
accept it. When either scripts or definitions of the situation brought to the
group differ among members, then their interaction will reveal that explicit attention to norms is needed, either sooner (if scripts are similar but
definitions of the situation differ) or later (if definitions of the situation are
similar but scripts differ). The processes described by Bettenhausen and
Mumighan for group norms appear to parallel those by which intact habitual routines are imported.
In sum, importation of routines appears to happen under two different
circumstances. One is when organizational representatives prespecify the
desired routines, train members in them prior to their entry into the
group, and provide motivational
incentives sufficient to ensure compliance with them. This may be especially likely when the performance
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
77
stakes are high for the organization and good coordination among members is required for task effectiveness-as in the aircraft engine fire example given above. The second circumstance is when the group task is
familiar and members are relatively homogeneous (especially regarding
previous experience with the work and/or membership in a strong, common organizational culture), as was the case for the groups studied by
Hackman and Morris. In both circumstances, observations of group process might suggest that group members had carefully developed and practiced a set of habitual routines, when in fact they may be strangers who
are starting to work together for the first time ever.
Creation atjht encounter. When the group task is novel, members are
heterogeneous, and/or the organization has not prespecified appropriate
routines, then the group must somehow derive a way of operating. In
doing so, members may create some behavior patterns with the potential
to persist as habitual routines. As with importation, routine-creation may
draw on propensities for coding and responding to stimuli that members
bring into the group, ready-made. In the case of creation, however, members’ responses to the particulars of a group’s beginning interact to form
new patterns that are specific to that group.
Gersick’s (1988) research on project groups shows how this can happen. For example, one team in her study was a group of hospital administrators, selected to form a project committee from a larger group of
department heads. The selection was made by a hospital vice-president at
the regular monthly meeting of his division. When he asked the assembled
group whose turn it was to chair the next committee, two women simultaneously “volunteered” the same colleague, each intending to work
closely with him on the project. Although the nominee asserted that he
preferred not to head up the committee, the vice president appointed him
anyway. And although neither woman wanted to work with the other,
each felt obligated, having nominated her colleague, to sign up. This
incident only took a minute, but it launched interaction patterns that
lasted through the first half of the team’s 12-week calendar.
Specifically, the committee leader, who did not want the job, took little
active leadership inside meetings. The two women vetoed each suggestion the other one made, and competed to control the committee by
talking privately with the leader after every meeting. Indeed, the group
maintained these patterns for 6 weeks, rejecting every idea anyone proposed for getting on with its task. Although this pattern might have developed even if the first interactions among members had been different,
internal evidence reported by Gersick (1984) strongly supports the contention that the initial encounter did establish some behavioral routines in
the group that defied change for a long time thereafter.
If members’ initial reactions to each other are important, their reactions
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to the behavior of the group’s leader (or to the external manager who
designs the group’s task) are likely to be even stronger. Ginnett (1987)
found that the way group leaders behaved at groups’ initial meetings set
lasting precedents for subsequent patterns of group interaction. Specifically, he documented what transpired in the initial briefings that airline
captains gave to cockpit and cabin crew members when they first met,
before going off on a multiday trip. He found that captains tended to brief
in one of four characteristic ways. Some of them briefed in ways that
creatively elaborated the airline’s core expectations about how crews
should function, tailoring shared general expectations to the particular
people on the crew and taking account of any special challenges or opportunities in the upcoming work. More typical were captains who af
firmed organizational expectations, but did not take initiatives to build the
team beyond them. Others abdicated responsibility
for building their
crews as teams, merely going through the required motions of conducting
a briefing. And a few captains actively undermined preexisting organizational expectations about how crews should function.
It would be expected that crews briefed by these four groups of captains would differ substantially in how they worked together, and Ginnett’s on-board observations affirmed that what happened in the briefing
significantly shaped the patterns of interaction characteristic of each
crew-starting
with the first leg of the trip, just minutes after the briefing
was completed. Although none of the crews Ginnett observed had ever
worked together before, a framework for members’ behavior was established within a few minutes after they first met that powerfully shaped
what transpired in the cockpit throughout much of each crew’s life history.
Although creation appears to be different from importation as a means
of establishing habitual routines in task-performing groups, there are two
significant commonalities between them: both processes result in routines
getting established very early in the life of the group, and established very
quickly with little or no time specifically devoted to hammering them out.
Whatever is on the table at a group’s first meeting, then, may be particularly potent in setting the early directions of a group.
The swiftness with which groups establish lasting patterns may derive
in part from the anxieties people have about dealing with process matters,
uncertainty, and planning (vs acting). We noted earlier that one of the
functions habitual routines serve is to increase members’ comfort in the
group. The problem members face is that the process of creating such
comfort-enhancing
routines can itself be anxiety arousing. So if routines
can be established very early in the life of a group, with a minimum of
time and energy expended in doing so, then their advantages can be
achieved without members having to face up to the anxieties that inhere
in group “process discussions” (Hackman 8z Morris, 1975).
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
79
The early establishment of routines, when it occurs, almost certainly
unfolds without members’ conscious awareness, resulting in habits that
are invisible as well as self-sustaining. Indeed, if a group were to undertake a review of habitual routines that were imported or created early in
its life it would risk reopening matters that members might well prefer to
keep behind them. As will be seen later in this paper, that is one reason
why it is rare for a group to spontaneously initiate changes or improvements in its established habitual routines.
Evolution over rime. Patterns of habitual behavior also can evolve incrementally over the life of a group, as members gain experience with
their task. Over time, group members gradually learn what is working
well, and what is creating problems among them or with the work. Group
behavior patterns can be shaped by reinforcers just as is the case for
individuals, and the result (if a group experiences success) can be relatively deep habitual patterns to which members have high commitment.
This evolutionary process can result in habitual routines that occupy a
central place in a group’s behavioral repertoire. Yet it also is possible for
habits to evolve as a by-product of the group’s work, almost accidentally.
Without really being aware of it, members (whose attention is on something else) fall into a particular routine-for example, a postmeeting coffee break. Members may even notice the routine, but there is no particular reason for them to do anything in response to that observation. The
result can be a habitual routine that is not central to the group’s lie or
work, and in which members have little motivational investment. Were
someone to suggest changing or eliminating the pattern, he or she probably would meet with little resistance. But precisely because the routine
is peripheral to the main concerns of the group, that suggestion is unlikely
to be made.
Conclusion. All three of the above processes-importation, creation at
first meeting, and evolution-may operate for any group, and they probably reinforce rather than conflict with one another. Yet there are two
special cases when some interesting interpersonal dynamics might be
expected to derive from interactions among the three processes.
One is when group maintenance routines are imported (members know
how to interact with each other in their general type of group) but tusk
performance routines must be created or evolved because the task is
unfamiliar. The second case is the reverse of the first: when task performance routines are imported (members all know how the work should be
done) but group maintenance strategies must be created or evolved, as
when the group is a heterogeneous collection of strangers from different
cultures or subcultures.
We expect that different things would happen in early group meetings
in these two cases, because members’ anxieties and uncertainties would
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be rooted in very different parts of group life (i.e., either task or socioemotional concerns would be particularly salient relative to the other).
Moreover, because the critical demands faced by groups in the two circumstanceswould be quite different, what should be done early in the life
of the group, ifit is to be effective, would be different as well. It would be
relatively straightforward to design a study comparing groups in these two
situations, which could both explore differences in actual group behavior
and predict which groups would get into trouble because the early behaviors they exhibited failed to address the critical demands that they subsequently would face.
WHAT MAINTAINS
HABITUAL
ROUTINES?
Our basic argument is that habitual behavior, once established, persists
more or less automatically until and unless something specific happens to
break a group out of its routine. With an accumulation of repetitions of a
new routine, the routine “settles in” to a group’s behavioral repertoire.
The more the habit is used, the less conscious it becomes, and the more
likely it is to be automatically repeated the next time the appropriate
stimuli appear. Members become less likely to change it, in part because
it has dropped from their awareness. Recent research on both the organizational (Miller & Friesen, 1984; Tushman & Romanelli, 1985) and the
group (Gersick, 1988)levels of analysis have illustrated the strength with
which simple inertia can keep behavior patterns from changing.
Moreover, this inertia can persist even when group members experience habitual behavior patterns as increasingly negative. For example,
early in the life of one project group studied by Gersick (1983) members
who came to a meeting unprepared would apologize, and then others
would deny there was a problem. This was no doubt the easiest and least
anxiety-arousing thing to do the first time it happened, but soon that
behavioral sequence became a standard routine for the group: each time
someone arrived unprepared, the person apologized and then other members asserted that it was “no problem.” One would expect that the routine would have been abandoned as the costs of maintaining it became
increasingly negative over time. However, the routine persisted throughout the life of the group, until, by the end of the project, members had
built up such an unequal work load, and so much resentment about it, that
they were barely speaking to one another.
How and why do habitual routines have such staying power in group
life? We examine below four possible explanations, each of which appears to have validity and which, when operating in concert, can make it
very dBicult indeed for a group that falls into a routine to break out of it.
Social impact. Even if individual members begin to feel uneasy about a
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
81
routine, they may refrain from explicitly raising the possibility of change
because they are waiting for someone else to take the lead. In the deadlocked hospital committee described earlier, for example, three of the five
group members said, in interviews conducted at the project’s conclusion,
that they were waiting for another member to take the initiative to move
the group out of its dysfunctional pattern of behavior.
Social impact theory (Latane, 1973; Latane, Williams & Harkins, 1979)
posits that individual reticence to take such initiatives should be far stronger in large groups than in small groups, which suggeststhat the likelihood
of a group breaking out of existing habitual routines should vary directly
with group size. So far as we are aware, this straightforward prediction
has not been empirically tested.
Social entrainment. This concept, borrowed from biology and applied
to social and organizational behavior by McGrath and his associates(e.g.,
McGrath & Kelly, 1986;McGrath, Kelly, 8zMachatka, 1984)refers to the
process whereby a system’s internal rhythm is “captured” by a temporal
process such that the rhythm of the system shifts toward the periodicity
and phase of the capturing process. Entrainment may be one factor that
contributes to the persistence of habitual routines across time and changing external conditions.
Kelly and McGrath (1985) showed how this can happen. They asked
groups to perform tasks of various types in two trials, one lo-min long,
the other 20-min, with time limit counterbalanced across groups. Results
showed that interaction did vary as a function of task type and time limit,
as expected. Of primary interest here, however, is the finding that patterns of behavior that emerged in the first trial (e.g., “we have to hurry,”
or “we have plenty of time”) persisted in the second trial-when the
group had either twice as much or half as much time as before. That is, the
“pacing” that the group established in response to the time limit for the
first trial persisted in the second trial, even though there was a 100%
change in the amount of time members actually had to complete the work.
While McGrath and his associates have focused their research primarily on entrainment to time, they note that other internal and external
conditions also can set entrainment processes in motion-resulting in
persistence of the infhrence of earlier conditions even when those conditions are no longer present. Thus, for habitual behavior, a group may
develop routines in response to conditions present at one point in its life,
become entrained on those patterns of interaction, and continue to use
them long after the original conditions have disappeared or been substantially altered. This process has more conceptual teeth in it than mere
inertia, in that it specifies a social process (modeled after well-established
biological processes) that promotes the persistence of habitual routines.
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Additional investigation of the conditions under which habitual routines
become entrained, and the dynamics of the entrainment process itself,
would appear to be well worthwhile.
Cost of change. To alter a routine after it has settled in involves not
merely deciding to head in a new direction, but also to give up an old
direction-one to which members may have become attached. Moreover,
the very process of changing habitual behavior is itself costly, which
introduces a bias in group life toward continuing with established behaviors. Finahy, there may be political costs or risks associated with alteration of a routine. Any explicitly proposed change may be viewed as a bid
for control of the group, and other members may prevent a group from
moving into a new pattern to protect themselves and their special interests from that possibility.
Such veto power may be especially in evidence when one or more
members enjoy special importance within the group whenever a given
routine is executed. For example, if a marketing group routinely performs
a certain kind of analysis whenever a competitor adjusts prices, then
those who are expert in doing that analysis may have a vested interest in
keeping that routine intact. These members might even seek to expand
the domain of stimuli that prompt the routine (e.g., Alderfer, 1977,p. 244;
Weber, 1922/1958, pp. 251-252), by expanding the stimulus category
“price adjustment” to include ever more kinds of competitor actions.
Such redefinition would simultaneously enhance the importance of the
marketing group in the larger organization and contribute to the persistence of the habitual routine over time and changing circumstances.
Group norms. The behavioral norms that evolve in groups also can add
pressure to adhere to habitual routines. Once a routine has been established in a group, the behaviors involved in executing that routine are
likely to come under normative control. Members who deviate from habitual routines are then brought back into line just as if they had violated
any other norm of conduct in the group. Because groups, especially cohesive groups, tend not only to seek uniformity of member behavior but
also to have powerful means at their disposal to achieve it, sustained
deviance is unlikely to occur (Hackman, 1976). In such cases, one would
expect habitual routines to be exhibited with increasing regularity and
reliability over time.
To augment the above process, evidence to date (e.g., Hackman 8%
Morris, 1975) suggeststhat many groups have a meta-norm, rarely articulated, that members should not explicitly discuss their first-level norms.
For example, group members are unlikely to suggest spontaneously that
the group examine its own behavior to assesswhether it could be operating better. The net effect of this meta-norm, then, is to inhibit collective
HABITUAL
83
ROUTINES
reflection and lessen the chance that a group will acknowledge (let alone
consider changing) its first-level norms.
The more powerfully group norms control member behavior (and the
stronger the me&t-norms that make such control undiscussable), the less
likely individual members will be to take initiatives that question existing
habitual routines-even if individual group members privately feel the
need to change. That can be unfortunate, because (as discussed earlier)
there is ample evidence that the persistent expression of minority views
about what should be happening in a group often is beneficial for a group
and its work (Moscovici, 1985; Nemeth, 1986). On the one hand, strong
group norms are essential to orderly collective behavior; on the other,
they can inhibit reflection on the continued appropriateness of the very
routines that provide such order.
In sum, the four factors discussed above (simple inertia, social entrainment, the anticipated cost of change, and group norms that enforce adherence to existing routines) can result in group habits that are, in many
cases, effectively self-maintaining. Yet sometimes groups do break out of
their routines. What can jolt a group out of its existing patterns of behavior and into a state of mindful, deliberate processing of how it is responding to the stimuli it encounters? That is addressed next.
WHEN DO GROUPS
BREAK OUT OF HABITUAL
ROUTINES?
Although evidence bearing directly on this question is scanty, we can
now begin to identify the conditions under which a group will break out of
a habitual routine. Three factors are relevant: (a) the impetus for change,
(b) the timing of the possible change, and (c) the tenacity of the routine
itself. We examine each of these in turn.
Impetus for Change
Habitual routines generally persist until and unless there is some explicit impetus for change. We discuss below five different occasions that
offer the possibility (although do not mandate) that a group will modify,
abandon, or replace one or more of its habitual routines. They are: (a)
encountering a novel state of affairs, (b) experiencing a failure, (c) reaching a milestone in the life or work of the group, (d) receiving an intervention that calls members’ attention to their group norms, and (e) having to
cope with a change in the structure of the group itself.
Encountering
novelty. In reviewing the conditions under which individuals break their habitual routine, Weiss and Ilgen (1985) note that
numerous researchers have identified novelty as a factor that instigates
cognitive activity-and therefore that can prompt change or abandonment
of a habit. Although that view appears to be well accepted by researchers
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interested in habitual behavior, the effects of novelty are more complicated than they might at first seem.
Consider, for example, a group that encounters a stimulus that no member has ever seen before. Because that stimulus is truly novel, no habitual
routine will be invoked because habitual routines are, by definition, patterns of behavior that occur in response to a given stimulus. The novelty
that can break a group out of its habitual patterns, then, must reside in the
situation rather than in the stimulus itself. Yet, as we have seen, habitual
routines often persist even when the situation has changed (so long as the
evoking stimulus is still present. That is one of the reasons they can be
dysfunctional, as with the Air Florida crash with which we began this
paper. That crew was in a novel situation (wintry weather, for a crew not
accustomed to it), but the novelty apparently was insufficient to cause the
group to break out of its standard take-off routine. One can readily imagine a degree of novelty in the situation that would have broken the routine, however; for example, the presence of an armed hijacker in the
cockpit.
It may be that to provide an impetus sufficient to provoke reexamination of a habitual routine, the novelty in a situation must be so great that
it raises uncertainty about the meaning of the stimulus itself. That is,
because the situation is so different, the stimulus also appears different.
With a hijacker present, a captain’s call for the after-start checklist would
take on a different meaning for members than it would in less novel
circumstances. Moreover, as the novelty of a situation increases, it
should become increasingly likely that some group member will call attention to its uniqueness. If that happens and she or he receives support
from at least some other members, then there is a real possibility that the
habitual routine will be reexamined and perhaps modified or abandoned.
In sum, novelty may indeed be an impetus for changing a habitual
routine. The dynamics by which this happens, however, may be neither
simple nor straightforward. For one thing, it may be situational novelty,
rather than novelty in the stimulus itself, that provokes group members to
take a look at their routines (cf., Denning, 1988). Second, change seems
unlikely unless the situation is experienced as very different from what
members are accustomed to. And third, the process of recognizing and
interpreting the changed situation centrally involves social processes
within the group.
Experiencing failure. Another factor often pointed to in discussions of
individual habitual behavior is failure or “goal blockage.” Weiss and
Ilgen (1985) point out that “either sudden, unexpected failure to reach
stable goals or a re-evaluation or change of goals can result in the uncertainty necessary to reconsider the appropriateness of routines” (p. 60).
This would seem likely to hold true for groups as well.
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
85
Indeed, one could argue that failure-induced change might be especially
likely, or come especially quickly, in groups because there are multiple
individuals available to perceive that a routine is not working and to point
that out to their colleagues. Moreover, once a group has recognized and
accepted the fact that its routines are no longer working the way they used
to, it might fmd a more generous repertoire of alternatives available than
would be the case for an individual, since a group has multiple members
who often have a variety of perspectives on the work.
There is, however, a significant caveat to this optimistic scenario.
Some groups faced with failure simply execute their existing habitual
routines more vigorously, rather than call them into question. This response can create subsequent problems, at least for some kinds of tasks.
“We’re failing, so let’s try harder” is a strategy that may be highly appropriate in a tug-of-war, but less so when innovative responses are required .
The tendency for social systems,including groups, to close down rather
than open up under stress and threat is well-documented (e.g., Staw,
Sandelands, & Dutton, 1981). Organizational decline is a good case in
point (Greenhalgh, 1983). After pointing out the chronic tension in social
systemsbetween stability and conservatism on the one hand, and change
and adaptation on the other, Greenhalgh notes that “under the stressful
conditions of decline, when variation is perhaps most needed, the conservative tendencies tend to be exacerbated” (p. 241). This phenomenon
was documented for groups under threat by Gladstein and Reilly (1985).
And, in a study that specifically addressed the development and persistence of routinized group decision-making behavior, McClelland (1984)
found, contrary to her expectation, that groups that had experienced
failure routinized their decision making and adapted to failure feedback at
the same rate as did those that had experienced consistent success. In
sum, if there is empirical evidence that moderate or occasional failure
prompts groups to reexamine their habitual routines, we have been unable
to find it.
Why do groups that are failing so often intensify execution of existing
routines rather than reconsider their appropriateness? Two mechanisms
may be in operation, separately or in concert. One is the “escalating
commitment” phenomenon. Research on this phenomenon has been conducted primarily at the individual level of analysis (e.g., Staw, 1981) and
typically focuses on the continued investment of material resources after
data have become available that previous investments have not paid off as
anticipated. It seemsreasonable to assumethat groups, too, might sometimes respond to performance failures by escalating their commitment to
existing habitual routines rather than reconsidering them.
A second mechanism has to do with social facilitation processes. If it
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can be assumed that the experience of failure serves to heighten members’ arousal (an individual-level
phenomenon that can be powerfully
reinforced and enhanced by fellow group members), then, following Zajonc (1965), one could expect an increase in the degree to which the
dominant (in this case, habitual) response would be exhibited.
Clearly, additional research is required to identify those conditions
under which failure will result in reconsideration of habitual routines as
opposed to recommitment
to them. Like novelty, it is by no means certain
that failure or goal blockage will automatically
result in a review or revision of habitual routines; instead, these events merely provide one of
several occasions that may have such an effect.
Reaching Q milestone. Reaching a natural breakpoint in the task (such
as finishing a first draft of a paper), or reaching a milestone in the life of
the group (such as an anniversary of the group’s founding), can provide
team members with a stimulus to break away from old patterns and initiate new ones. In her field study of project teams, Gersick (1984; 1988)
found that each team studied developed a distinctive approach toward its
task as soon as it commenced work and stayed with that approach until
precisely half way between its first meeting and its project deadline.
(Since groups’ projects were of varying duration, these periods varied
from several days to several weeks.)
At the midpoint of its life, every group underwent a major transition. In
a concentrated burst of changes, groups dropped old patterns, reengaged
with outside supervisors, adopted new perspectives on their work, and
made dramatic steps forward. Groups also showed changes in more mundane patterns at the time of their transitions; for example, midpoint meetings typically occurred at unusual times or locations, lasted longer, and/or
showed different patterns of seating and attendance than previous meetings. Field study evidence suggested-and
a subsequent laboratory study
documented (Gersick, 1989)-that teams use midpoints (and sometimes
other temporal markers) as milestones against which to pace themselves.
Because they are half-way through, members feel it is “time to move
ahead,” and push themselves to take new steps in the work. In the process, habitual routines can change, sometimes radically.
If one were to extrapolate from Gersick’s findings to groups that are not
time bounded, one might expect to see a similar phenomenon in operation: a group reaches a natural breakpoint in its work and members find
themselves compelled to take a look at their routines before the start of
the next work period. Yet we see no evidence of that, either in the literature or in our own research. In Hackman’s (unpublished) research on
aircrews and semiconductor manufacturing teams, for example, distinct
breakpoints were easy to identify: between days of a multiday trip for the
cockpit crews, and at the end of six-week-long production periods for the
HABITUAL
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87
manufacturing teams. In neither of these casesdid teams spontaneously
attend to or assesstheir performance routines, or reconfigure themselves
in any significant way for the upcoming work period.
Why do on-going groups appear to operate differently from what Gersick found for time-limited project groups? Three features of the design of
the groups appear to be critical. Gersick’s groups had clear, strong goals
and specific deadlines by which the goals had to be achieved and full
authority to manage their own performance processes. It may be that all
three of these conditions are required for the kind of midpoint transition
she observed to occur. In the absence of a motivating goal, a clear “due
date,” and the discretion to make changes in performance strategy,
groups may not be able to undertake the kind of review and reconfiguration she documented.
Receiving an intervention. Receiving an intervention-such as from an
authority figure in the organization or from a group leader or consultantcan prompt a group to review its habitual routines. At issue here is the
degree to which an interventionist is able to help a group alter the focus
of its attention temporarily, from executing its routines to examining their
appropriateness for the task and situation. In effect, the interventionist
uses his or her special role to cut through the meta-norm that inhibits
explicit review of group norms about behavior (discussed above), and to
help members examine routines that they may not even realize they are
following.
This is the kind of thing done by good process consultants (Schein,
1969)and team leaders (Hackman & Walton, 1986). Yet there is no reason
to assume that the initiative for norm-relevant interventions must originate outside the group; sometimes interventions are actively sought by
members themselves. Five of the eight teams Gersick studied in the field,
for example, sought outside help or solicited outside ideas at their calendar midpoints-and then used these fresh inputs to shape their transitional moves forward. So, when the time is right, groups may take initiatives to secure the kind of outside help that eventually can lead to reconsideration of habitual routines, even though member-initiated
discussion of routines without external assistance rarely is observed.
Coping with structural change. A major change in a group’s structure
also can provide an impetus for reexamining, and possibly reconfiguring,
the routines members use in carrying out their work. We look specifically
at three structural features-the composition of the group, the design of
its task, and the amount of authority the group has to manage its own
affairs. When one of these features changes, members are likely to experience their group and its work as quite different than before. And that can
prompt a fresh look at habitual routines that previously had been accepted
unquestioningly.
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Recomposition
of the group. In a large organization, a few changes in
personnel are unlikely to affect established routines. In a group, however,
membership changes may have profound effects on the group’s repertoire
of habitual routines. When even one member enters a small group, habits
can become visible as the newcomer tries to learn, and old members try
to teach, how things are done in the group. Moreover, the arrival of a new
member may be coincident with the departure of an established member-perhaps
someone who has played a central part in the execution of
certain habitual routines. Membership change, then, may call into question many things that need not be addressed during periods of stability,
and those questions offer at least the possibility of being converted into
changes in the group’s habitual routines.
Redesign ofthe group tusk. The task of a group is itself one of the major
sources of stimuli members confront on a regular basis, ranging from the
actual materials with which a group works to cues about team objectives
and/or required behavioral processes (Hackman,
1969). When a task
changes, then, the configuration of stimuli a group encounters will change
as well, and members may find that their standard routines are insufftcient
for (or inappropriate to) the new work requirements and opportunities.
And that, of course, can prompt a return to active processing of the
choices open to the group.
Alteration of the group’s authority. How a group operates is very different if the group is merely executing what someone else has decided
about, as opposed to managing most or all of its own affairs. A way of
assessing the level of a group’s authority proposed by Hackman (1987)
results in placement of a group on a four-step continuum ranging from
“manager-led”
through “self-managing”
and “self-designing”
to “selfgoverning.” A change in a group’s authority on this continuum (in either
direction) should provide a strong impetus for members to reconsider
their habitual routines, since many standard ways of proceeding will no
longer be appropriate if the group now has noticeably more (or less)
authority to manage itself than it did before.
Summary. We have drawn on several lines of research to identify five
different occasions that can prompt a group to break out of a habitual
routine. These occasions are perhaps not as distinct from one another as
our discussion might suggest. All involve some change in how the context
is perceived-which
also has been shown to be critical to the dynamics of
both creativity and the Einstellung effect (i.e., the tendency to persist
with the same approach to a problem or series of problems). Denning
(1988, p. 118) for example, has proposed that creativity necessarily involves, first, recognition of the context within which one has been working-and then the “invention of a new context” that allows one to break
from existing routines. And Ericsson and Simon (1984, p. 129) report that
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
89
the Einstelhmg effect can be reduced by alterations in the context (specifically, when test items are marked as belonging to separate sets rather
than as one continuous series).
If any of the five occasions for change we have discussed is actually to
result in a break from an existing routine, then some change in the group’s
definition of the situation appears to be required. If a group is failing, for
example, change from existing routines will be unlikely if members attribute their lack of successmerely to their failure to execute well. If, on
the other hand, the failure prompts members to view the situation as “a
whole new ballgame,” then existing routines may be interrupted and real
change becomes more likely. Whether such redefinition occurs, in any
case, depends as well on questions of timing and on the properties of the
routine itself. We turn to these matters next.
Timing
of the Change
While habitual routines rarely change without some identifiable impetus, whether a change actually does occur depends on when the impetus
is encountered by the group. At some times in their life cycles groups are
open to reconsideration of their habitual routines: at other times, even a
very powerful event pointing out the inadequacy of existing routines may
be insufficient to shake a group out of them.
Existing research suggeststhat times favorable for initiating, revising,
or replacing habitual routines include: the start (or restart) of the group,
the midpoint of its life cycle, and other major times of transition in the
group’s life and/or work. When a group is in a basically stable period,
significant change in habitual routines is unlikely. In the Gersick study of
project teams we have been discussing, for example, groups did not reconsider their routines prior to reaching their midpoint transition-ven
though in a number of the groups several members showed that they were
highly dissatisfied with prior patterns of behavior. And once the midpoint
transition was past, groups did not seriously reconsider the new directions they had chosen, even when members made suggestions that they
do so.
By the same token, one would predict that on-going groups (i.e., those
that do not have a fixed beginning and end, as Gersick’s groups did)
would be unlikely to successfully review or revise their routines while in
a period of intense, driving performance. Change would be far more likely
at the end of a performance period or at some other time when normal
performance processes come to a natural pause.
There are, moreover, some potential interactions between the impetus
for change and its timing. Consider, for example, alteration of group
structure as an impetus for reexamining habitual routines. When a group
encounters a major change in composition, task, or authority, that may in
!I0
GERSICK
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HACKMAN
itself create a disjunction in the flow of the work sufficient to establish a
state of readiness for review for which one might otherwise have to wait.
Similar reasoning applies to the impetus for change provided by reaching
a milestone in the life or work of the group. At such times, even continuing groups (which rarely initiate reassessmentof their performance routines spontaneously) may be far more amenable to outside intervention
that involves review of habitual routines than would be the case at other
times. An interventionist who appears then might find the group significantly more open to her or his initiatives than one who seeks to intervene
in the midst of a mainline performance period, partly because milestones,
by marking the close or beginning of performance periods, invite perceptions that the context is changing.
Tenacity of the Habitual
Routine
Some habits are harder to change than others. Three attributes of habits
bear on the amenability of a routine to change. They are: the orientation
of the habitual routine (i.e., toward socioemotional vs task issues), the
depth of the routine (i.e., the degree to which the routine is deep in group
history and invisible to members), and the centrality of the routine (i.e.,
the degree to which it deals with behaviors associated with the primary
task of the group).
Orientation. Habits having to do with socioemotional issues should be
less amenable to change than routines that guide task performance processes.One reason for this prediction is simply that socioemotional issues
tend to be anxiety-arousing, and people generally do not rush to address
them in group settings. In addition, individual members are more likely to
have strongly held personal preferences and styles for dealing with socioemotional issues than they do for matters having mainly to do with
getting work done. Thus, a group routine for handling instances of
“deviant” behavior by a member should be more resistant to change than
one that guides behavior dealing, for example, with the occasional late
arrival of production materials. It is easier to deal with “it” than with
“us.” Routines that protect a group from having to deal with affectively
negative socioemotional issues should be particularly difticult to change,
especially since such routines keep the group from ever learning the consequencesof exchanging and dealing with negative feelings.
Depth. The depth of a habit refers to the degree to which it is “buried”
in the life of a group, unacknowledged and perhaps even unknown to
group members. Such habits cannot be changed until after members have
come to understand that they have the habitual routine and that it is
consequential for the life and/or work of the group. A surface habit, on the
other hand, is known to the group, and should be much easier to change,
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
91
simply by someone suggesting that it be stopped, and other members
agreeing.
Centrality. Some habitual routines have to do with matters at the heart
of a group’s work. Alteration of such routines can directly affect how, and
potentially how well, a group performs its primary task. Other routines
are more peripheral. Peripheral routines help a group deal efftciently with
mundane matters that probably merit little concern in their own right
because they have little relevance to the group task. Thus, a central
routine for an aircrew might involve the sequencing of landing preparation
activities; a peripheral routine might dictate when uniform hats are removed and where in the cockpit they are hung. Peripheral routines such
as this should be far more amenable to change than are those located close
to the heart of a group’s work.
Summary predictions. The matrix shown in Fig. 2 provides a set of
predictions about the amenability of habitual routines to change for each
of the cells generated by the last two properties discussed-depth and
centrality. Note as well that within each cell (although this is not shown
in the figure) routines having mainly to do with socioemotional issues are
predicted to be more resistant to change than are those that deal mainly
with task performance processes.
Summary
In sum, we have argued in this section that a group will not explicitly
rethink its habitual behavior unless two conditions are met. First, there
must be an explicit impetus for change, something that offers the group an
opportunity to reconsider its behavior in response to the eliciting stimuli.
CENTRALITY
Peripheral
Central
r”““““““““‘““‘,
“““““‘-“““‘“““I
I
I
I
t
Easy to change:
Moderate: potential
I
f
Surface I habit is accessible
problem is opening
I
and nonconsequential 1
Pandora’s box
I
f:-------------------------‘--------------------------i
DEPTH
I
t
Moderate:
potential
f
I
Difficult to change:
problem
is
getting
i
Buried [
habit is inaccessible
t
access to the habit,
and consequential
I
awareness of it
i
i
L--------------------I ,,,,-,,-,,-,,-,,-,-,----J
FIG. 2. The amenability of habitual routines to change.
I
I
;
1
I
i
t
I
t;
I
I
92
GERSICK
AND
HACKMAN
Such occasions include encountering novelty, experiencing failure, reaching a milestone in the life or work of the group, receiving an outside
intervention relevant to group norms, and having to cope with change in
the structure of the group itself.
Second, the time must be right for a habitual routine to be modified or
replaced. Even if the time is right, we suggest that habitual behavior will
rarely change if there is no specific impetus for change. On the other
hand, if the time is wrong, habitual behavior is unlikely to change even if
there is an explicit impetus. Both an impetus and an appropriate time are
needed.
And, finally, change may not occur for certain habitual routines even
when both of these conditions are present. If the habit is buried deeply in
the life of the group, central to its primary task, and oriented heavily
toward socioemotional issues, then it could take a truly major jolt to break
a group out of its existing routines.
IMPLICATIONS
AND CONCLUSIONS
We are uneasy suggesting conclusions and implications for the material
in this paper, because so little of what we have written is backed up by
empirical data. Our unease is mitigated only slightly by knowing that one
of the major reasons we wrote the paper in the first place was to encourage additional research on group habitual routines-and,
we hope, to
provide a slightly elevated platform from which to initiate such studies.
Yet there do seem to be some implications for practice even from the few
studies that have been done on group habitual routines. And there certainly are many opportunities for research that would move understanding beyond what we now know about them.
Implications for Practice
Existing knowledge about habitual routines in groups, it seems to us,
has implications
both for those who design task-performing
groups and
those who lead them. Practitioners’ objectives, of course, typically are to
structure and lead groups in ways that foster the benefits of habitual
behavior, while keeping to a minimum the likelihood that groups will fall
victim to their dysfunctions. To accomplish this requires that designers
and leaders of groups create conditions that foster both attention (the
monitoring of routines and their possible effects), and motivation (the
active desire to develop and maintain routines that are appropriate for the
group’s work and situation).
For designers, the device of a self-managing team (e.g., Cummings,
1981; Hackman, 1987) may offer one reasonable approach. Because such
teams have the authority and responsibility for managing their own behavior, including responding to changing task and situational demands,
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
93
they are more likely than manager-led teams to both (a) develop routines
that aid in maintaining flexibility, and (b) keep the level of deliberate
processing within the group high enough to avoid many of the dysfunctional consequences that can come from mindless habitual behavior.
In addition, it appears that it would be advantageous to build a direct
link between a group and other groups with which it must deal (either
inside or outside its organization), thereby ensuring that the group is
directly exposed to perturbations in its environment. This, too, should
foster active processing, and would contrast with an alternative (and frequently observed) design strategy in which task-performing teams are
“protected” from the organizational context and external environment.
In the latter cases,the rationale often is to provide a buffer for the group,
so it can focus on its own task performance without distraction. In practice, such a buffer also can insulate a team from having to deal with, or
even attend to, environmental changes that may have implications for the
appropriateness of its habitual routines.
For leaders (contrasted here with designers, although we recognize that
the same person may have both responsibilities), the material we have
addressed suggests two levels of intervention, both of which involve
questions of timing. At the first level, a leader can offer direct interventions aimed at helping a group examine the routines it uses in executing its
work, thereby increasing the likelihood that members will catch inappropriate routines before serious damage is done-and perhaps even develop
new routines that are uniquely suited to the task and situation. The timing
issue has to do with the readiness of a group for such an intervention. The
scanty evidence that exists on this matter also is convincing to us: only
when a group is at some breakpoint in its work are such interventions
likely to “take” and have their intended effects. To suggest that a group
step back and take a look at its norms and routines around performance
processes when members are wholly occupied with executing those processesis likely to be, at best, ineffective-and perhaps even distracting
and actively unhelpful.
A second level of leader intervention involves helping a group develop
metu routines that prompt members to initiate their own review of their
first-level habitual routines on a regular basis and at appropriate times.
Again, timing is critical: this kind of intervention can only be done when
a group is ready for some serious reflection on how it manages its affairs.
It is tempting to suggest that such a meta-routine could be established at
the first meeting of a new group, but we are doubtful that it could be done
so easily, even with a competently designed and executed plan for that
meeting. The first meeting is indeed important in getting a group off on the
right foot (see, for example, Ginnett, 1987), and it can lay the groundwork
for the subsequent development of meta-routines of the type we are dis-
94
GERSICK
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HACKMAN
cussing. Yet we strongly suspect that such routines cannot be developed
without repetition, and without members having logged a good measure of
experience working together. It will take staying power for a leader to
help members understand how occasional review of their habi:ual routines can be advantageous, and to help them do the gradual, incremental
learning that we believe is required to build such activities into the fabric
of a group’s life.
Implications
for Research
There are many unanswered empirical and conceptual questions noted
throughout this paper. In fact, we know distressingly little about habitual
behavior in groups-and
we hope this paper has piqued the interest of at
least a few researchers in filling in some of the many gaps in knowledge
about them. Let us close by identifying a number of questions that we find
especially interesting.
One has to do with the social processes involved in the development,
maintenance, and change of habitual routines. Much of what we know
about habitual routines in groups has been imported, often intact, from
the rather richer literature on individual habitual behavior. What is interesting about groups is that they are social entities, with much of what goes
on visible in the group interaction process. It seems to us that it should be
both relatively straight forward and highly productive to place those social processes under a microscope and chart how the ways that people
work together affect (and are affected by) groups’ habitual routines.
We also believe that there is much ore still to be mined concerning the
role of time and group life cycles in understanding habitual routinesparticularly regarding those times when groups become attentive to their
habitual routines and motivated to improve them. Evidence to date,
scanty as it is, seems to point relentlessly to the importance of time and
timing as factors that can spell the difference between a group enjoying
the benefits of habitual routines versus falling victim to their dysfunctions.
Finally, we are intrigued by the ways in which the relationship between
a group and its organizational context may shape habitual routines. There
surely are some kinds of settings that actively foster habitual behavior and
others that actively discourage it. And there surely are some kinds of
settings that promote active review of habitual routines and others that
implicitly
encourage groups to drift into relatively mindless automatic
processing. And, finally, there may even be some settings in which groups
are relatively likely to develop the kind of meta-routine we discussed
above, in which members themselves initiate periodic reassessment of
their first-level routines. Although we presently know little about such
HABITUAL
ROUTINES
95
matters, the material reviewed in this paper strongly suggeststhat groupcontext relationships play a central role in their dynamics.
It obviously would be advantageous to capture and examine interesting
patterns of habitual behavior in groups wherever and whenever they exist. However, some instances of such behavior-for example, the metaroutine that results in self-initiated review of first-level routines-may
occur spontaneously only on rare occasions. If it is true that such metaroutines tend not to appear naturally, then action research may be required to investigate the conditions required to create them, the ways
they evolve and operate over time, and their short- and long-term consequences for groups that have them. The same may be true for other
interesting, theoretically significant, but infrequently occurring features
of habitual behavior in groups.
Habitual routines are a fact of life in groups, as they are for individuals.
One cannot imagine a group operating very long, or very successfully,
without them. Yet they are hard to keep under control-there is always
the risk that either too much time and energy will be spent managing them
(resulting in the old “process drives out content” problem) or that too
little attention will be given them (resulting in the kind of mindless automatic processing we have discussedin this paper). In our view, additional
research aimed at investigating further the ways in which groups succeed
and fail at keeping their habitual routines under control is likely to result
in greater knowledge not only about group-level habits, but also about the
fundamental processes that operate when groups of people take collective
action within larger social systems.
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