Groups, Networks, and
Organizations
How do these groups affect the
individual? How does the
individual affect these groups?
Social Groups
• Social groups are collections of people
who share a sense of common identity
and regularity interact with each other on
the basis of shared expectations. These
social groups shape nearly every
experience in our lives. Among the types
of social groups there are:
– In-groups – groups toward which one feels
loyalty and respect – “we” belong
– Out-groups – groups toward which one feels
antagonism and contempt – “ those” people
– Primary groups – includes family, friends, and
other peer groups to which one belongs
– Secondary groups – are large and impersonal
and often involve fleeting relationships; few
emotional ties, powerful commitments, or an
experience of unity.
• Reference groups provide a standard by
which we judge ourselves in terms of how
we think we appear to others.
– Cooley called this the “looking glass self”
• Group size affects group dynamics
– Small groups are more intimate and have
fewer numbers of relationships
– Large groups are more stable with far more
relationships and complexity
– Groups of 12 or more usually have some
formal structure
– Smallest group is a dyad
• Leaders are able to influence other
members of the group to what they want
– Transactional leaders involves routine
leadership concerned with getting a job done
– Transformation leaders involve changing the
very nature of the group itself
– Can you think of examples of each?
• Research supports the idea that individuals in
the group are highly susceptible to group
pressure
• Solomon Asch (1952) – Going along with the
group
– Participants were shown a standard line and then
three comparison lines. Their task was simply to say
which of the three lines next to the standard line
match it. When confederates gave false answers
first, 75% of participants conformed by giving the
wrong answer.
-The participants — the real subject and the
confederates — were all seated in a classroom
where they were told to announce their judgment
of the length of several lines drawn on a series of
displays. They were asked which line was longer
than the other, which were the same length, etc.
The confederates had been prearranged to all give
an incorrect answer to the tests.
- While most subjects answered correctly, many
showed extreme discomfort, and a high
proportion (32%) conformed to the erroneous
majority view of the others in the room when
there were at least three confederates present,
even when the majority said that two lines
different in length by several inches were the
same length. When the confederates were not
unanimous in their judgment, subjects were
much more likely to defect than when the
confederates all agreed. Control subjects with no
exposure to a majority view had no trouble
giving the correct answer.
- One difference between the Asch conformity
experiments and the Milgram experiment as
carried out by Stanley Milgram (also famous in
social psychology) is that the subjects of these
studies attributed their performance to their own
misjudgement and "poor eyesight", while those
in the Milgram experiment blamed the
experimenter in explaining their behavior.
Conformity may be much less salient than
authority pressure.
- A number of critiques have been lobbed against Asch's
experiment including a question of the motivation of
students to be accurate. Rather than testing conformity,
Asch's study may have simply measured a disinterested
student's reluctance to engage in conflict to get the
answer right. Moreover, in Asch's experiments the
subjects were not allowed to interact with confederates.
When the experiment was conducted in which even one
confederate was allowed to give the correct answer,
confirming responses dropped significantly. This is
consistent with Milgram's later findings of the effect of
"role models for defiance" in his classic Obedience
Experiment.
- Asch's experiment only tested behavioral acquiescence
and not attitude change.
- Stanley Milgram’s experiment on Obedience
to Authority demonstrated that individuals
will comply with others even when there is
the possibility of harm to themselves or
others
- The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of
social psychology experiments conducted by Yale
University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which
measured the willingness of study participants to
obey an authority figure who instructed them to
perform acts that conflicted with their personal
conscience. Milgram first described his research
in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later
discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974
book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental
View.
- The experiments began in July 1961,
three months after the start of the trial
of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in
Jerusalem. Milgram devised the
experiments to answer this question:
"Could it be that Eichmann and his
million accomplices in the Holocaust
were just following orders? Could we call
them all accomplices?”
- Milgram summed things up in his 1974 article, "The
Perils of Obedience", writing:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of
enormous importance, but they say very little about
how most people behave in concrete situations. I set
up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how
much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another
person simply because he was ordered to by an
experimental scientist.
- Stark authority was pitted against the subjects'
[participants'] strongest moral imperatives
against hurting others, and, with the subjects'
[participants'] ears ringing with the screams of
the victims, authority won more often than not.
The extreme willingness of adults to go to
almost any lengths on the command of an
authority constitutes the chief finding of the
study and the fact most urgently demanding
explanation.
- Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs,
and without any particular hostility on
their part, can become agents in a
terrible destructive process. Moreover,
even when the destructive effects of their
work become patently clear, and they are
asked to carry out actions incompatible
with fundamental standards of morality,
relatively few people have the resources
needed to resist authority.
- Groupthink – Janis and Mann (1977)
identified that members of a group ignore
ways of thinking an plans of action that go
against the group consensus.
- Not only does groupthink frequently
embarrass potential dissenters into
conforming, but it can also produce a shift
in perception so that alternative
possibilities are ruled out without being
seriously considered.
- Groupthink can lead to quick decisions that
may not be good ones
Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group
members who try to minimize conflict and reach
consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and
evaluating ideas. Groupthink may cause groups to
make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual
doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the
group’s balance. The term is usually used as a
derogatory term after the results of a bad decision.
Janis looked at the causes of groupthink. In his book, Victims of
Groupthink, he studied several presidents’ foreign policy
decisions. He examined the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban
missile crisis, and the Korean and Vietnam wars. After
examining how these decisions were made, he concluded that
there were three main causes of groupthink:
1. Highly cohesive groups are much more likely to engage in
groupthink. The closer they are, the less likely they are to
raise questions to break the cohesion.
2. The group isolates itself from outside experts. In order to
make a well informed decision, the group needs to invite
qualified experts to help weigh the possible risks.
3. Strong leadership leads to groupthink, because the leader
is more likely to promote his/her own solution.
Social psychologist Clark McCauley's three
conditions under which groupthink occurs:
1. Directive leadership.
2. Homogeneity of members' social
background and ideology.
3. Insulation of the group from outside
sources of information and analysis.
Symptoms of groupthink
In order to make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised
eight symptoms that are indicative of groupthink (197).
1. A feeling of invulnerability creates excessive optimism
and encourages risk taking.
2. Discounting warnings that might challenge assumptions.
3. An unquestioned belief in the group’s morality, causing
members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyped views of enemy leaders.
5. Pressure to conform against members of the group who
disagree.
6. Shutting down of ideas that deviate from the apparent
group consensus.
7. An illusion of unanimity with regards to going along with
the group.
8. Mindguards- self-appointed members who shield the
group from dissenting opinions.
Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (1986)
The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster is a classic case of
groupthink. The Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff on
January 28, 1986 (Vaughan 33). The launch had been
originally scheduled for January 22, but a series of problems
pushed back the launch date. Scientists and engineers
throughout NASA were eager to get the mission underway.
The day before the launch an engineer brought up a concern
about the o-rings in the booster rockets. Several conference
calls were held to discuss the problem and the decision to go
ahead with the launch was agreed upon. The group involved
in making the Challenger decision met several of the
symptoms of groupthink. They ignored warnings that
contradicted the group’s goal.
- The goal was to get the launch off as soon as possible,
and it ended up being a fatal mistake. They also suffered
from a feeling of invulnerability, up until that point NASA
had an almost spotless safety record. They also failed to
completely examine the risks of their decision; they
played it off as if it was nothing important. Another
factor that had suppressed the few engineers who were
"going against the grain" and "sounding the alarm" was
that all eyes were on NASA not to delay the launch and
that Congress was seeking to earmark large funding to
NASA given the large amount of publicity on the Teacher
in Space program. These misjudgements led to the
tragic loss of several astronauts, and a huge black mark
of NASA’s near perfect safety record.
• Networks constitute a broad source of
relationships, direct and indirect, some of which
may be especially important in business and
politics.
– For example, the poor, individuals of color, and
women often have less access to the most influential
economic and political networks in society that white
men are more likely to have access to.
– Is the internet a social network?
– Some limitations due to a lack of equal access, the
lack of physical proximity but the internet helps to
forge new relationships, the relationships can be very
stimulating, and involve many shared interests.
Organizations
• Organizations are groups with an identifiable
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membership that engages in concerted collective
action to achieve a common purpose.
Formal organizations are rationally designed to
achieve its objectives, often by means of explicit
rules, regulations, and procedures
Informal organizations may not have explicit
rules, regulations, and procedures but may be
designed to achieve their own objectives.
All modern organizations are, to some extent,
bureaucratic. Can you think of examples of
modern bureaucracies?
• Bureaucracies are characterized by
– Having a clearly defined hierarchy of authority
– Written rules about the conduct of officials
– Separation between tasks of the officials
within the organization and life outside of it
– Members don’t own the material resources
with which they operate
– Max Weber theorized about bureaucracies and
believed that they were the most effective in
organizing large numbers of people
• Bureaucracies are supposed to be more efficient
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but seem to be detached and impersonal
Informal networks appear to be as important as
formal networks both within an organization and
between organizations
The physical setting of the organization strongly
influences their social features.
– This includes the architecture of the organization and
surveillance of individuals that interact with the
organization
– Foucault calls surveillance the supervision of activities
in organizations. These efforts apply to all members
of the organization but especially those on the lower
strata of the organization
– Prison design it an interesting example (Jeremy
Bentham’s Panopticon in 1790)
Theory of Surveillance: The PANOPTICON
• The PANOPTICON was proposed as a model prison by
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a Utilitarian philosopher
and theorist of British legal reform.
• The Panopticon ("all-seeing") functioned as a round-theclock surveillance machine. Its design ensured that no
prisoner could ever see the 'inspector' who conducted
surveillance from the privileged central location within
the radial configuration. The prisoner could never know
when he was being surveilled -- mental uncertainty that
in itself would prove to be a crucial instrument of
discipline.
• French philosopher Michel Foucault described the
implications of 'Panopticism' in his 1975 work Discipline
& Punish: The Birth of the Prison --
Theories of Organizations
• Max Weber identified the tension between
the organizing forces of centralizing power
in the bureaucracy and the expanding
pressures in society of democracy.
• Can you think of examples?
Gender and Organizations
• It is clear that modern society has divisions
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within it for men and for women
Often, women occupy occupations that support
the careers of men
More women have advanced into the professions
occupied by men but have used the same
management styles that men have to make their
advances
Can you think of how men and women have
been treated differently in organizations?
Are there alternatives to bureaucracy?
Alternatives
• Efforts to increase the flexibility of organizations
• Adopting Japanese styles of management to
involve workers lower down in the organization
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Bottom-up decision making
Less specialization
Job security
Group Orientation
Merging of work and private lives
• Improvements in pay and responsibility that are
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based on seniority.
Group rather than individual performance
appraisal.
Modern use of technology can dramatically
change the way that organizations work. The
limitation of time and space are challenged.
Global Organization
• The United Nations is an example of a
global organization that involve
governmental groups.
• There are concerns about the rate of
globalization and the difficulties in
organizing both governmental and nongovernmental organizations.
• What do you think about the
“McDonaldization” of society and the
world?