Group Dynamics - Science topic

See prof Manfred Kets de Vries. On his webpage you can find his books and articles listed nicely in a referencing style. See for example.: https://www.insead.edu/faculty/manfred-f-r-kets-de-vries

Hello Mr. Weaver.

I think it is a very interesting theme.

thank you,

Olga Gold

SI que existe. La cohesión se basará en la comprensión de la diversidad que posee el grupo por parte de quien lidera, y a partir de ello generar políticas de gestión transversales, con distribución de responsabilidades claramente definidas para todos.

Including group as a covariate will tell you if there were any group differences in the post-test (after controlling for the pre-test). By comparison, including the interaction effect would test whether there were differences between groups in the rate at which the pre-test score was converted to the post-test score.

Another alternative would be to compute a difference score by subtracting the pre-test score from the post-test, and then doing a t-Test to see if the amount of change was similar between the two groups.

If you search the ingroup/outgroup research sites and articles, you will find many research designs you will be able to adopt or adapt for your study. As I understand the theory, people will strive for a balance between distinctiveness and inclusion.

Any technique that will stimulate ingroup/outgroup behaviour will naturally elicit strategies for distinctiveness and inclusion. You will just have to devise ways of spotting/naming these behaviours. After that it merely a matter of counting and statistical evaluation.

following

Dear Mr Kensinger,

Thank you for your reply. I understand that practical expertise can be very valuable, depending on experience on the large. Since you said that your colleages valued your role, most likely a mixed background within scientific teams is beneficial and can limit excess as well as yield more compelling and grounded results.

Best,

Thorsten Koch

So not to deviate, my pc is in pieces and seperated from my hard drive. As soon as I can get it all on the cloud and make sure I have all my documents I will send. I can maybe provide references so long and later the actual articles? Would that suffice?

Middelkoop mentions socio-technical systems as the origins of self-managed teams. The idea of leaderless teams was first introduced by Lewin and used by the Tavistock people during World War 2. I can recommend that you read an article by Trist who promoted that approach strongly.

You can find the article in the link. The same text was used in Volume 2 of the Tavistock Anthology of 1990.

What about "Anger Games" saga? There is a young people group vs a older cruel people group at the beginning. There is a salvific pairing ( the main protagonist and her friend-boy friend") who fight for the freedom of the poor people group. At the end in the last film of the saga, only the ( very pretty) protagonist can help the dependent poor people to raise against the dictatorship.

Social network analysis, which seeks to understand networks and their participants, ought indeed to be of help; may be of interest.

This paper has two aims. First I will present the key elements of this epistemic conception of political legitimacy. Second I will show the challenges it faces. On a one hand, the counterfactual of many of its postulates and on the other, the obvious problems of bias consensualist of this model.

You might start with these sources:

From my capacity as a faculty of engineering, I have a suggestion. It is based on the feed back that I have received from my students. Most of the times they are not able to understand the practical situation of the mathematical functions, techniques and methods that they learn.

Good Luck

Hi Eva,

I'm assuming you're already familiar with the literature on homophily (there are quite some studies on this). This recent paper of Daniele Mascia and colleagues might be interesting to look into, as it considers complementarity as a predictor of patient sharing relations (although 'just' as a control variable):

Mascia, Pallotti, & Angeli (2016). Don't stand so close to me: competitive pressures, proximity and inter-organizational collaboration. Regional Studies

May I recommend you to have a look at the following link.

Hi Jochem, there are not that many experiments in this field, with Mazerolle's QCET being one of the most well known experiments, but there was also a Scottish version of QCET conducted (MacQueen & Bradford, 2015) and another one I am aware of, comes from a doctoral thesis. Another paper that I would recommend is one from Matt Radburn (linked to this post also) - it didn't involve manipulating the encounter, but it did vary information given to the participant about the identity of the people who were in contact with the police.

In terms of effect sizes for the power calculation, you are likely to be much more limited in how many participants you can get for VR study versus how many participants studies of police-citizen encounters in the field are getting. From my understanding, the effect sizes are small even in those big samples, so if you based your calculations on those, then you would end up with a very big sample estimate. 

Have you tried looking at other VR studies to get some information on the typical sample sizes? That could give you a more informative and feasible answer, based on the methodology you are using.

All the best with your work - I would love to hear how you get on!

Thanks all for your answers. When I say "Group conflict" I refer to group of students.

I don't have background data to back my hypothesis. I want to process a Database in order to discover if there exists a relationship between group conflict and teaching skills.

Professor Metre,

Instead of using normalized gain scores, I suggest you just use ANCOVA. This will handle any initial differences as well as any other covariates that may exist in the study.

Most qualitative research using longer in-depth interviews will use questions taken from existing scales and adapted for interviewing participants or they are formulated by the researcher/research team in order to answer the research question.  For my recent research in gender identity I looked at the literature around Psychological Androgyny, Femininity, and Masculinity (especially Sandra Bem's work from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) to form questions about personal perceptions and reflections about femininity and the intersection with marital status, in order to explore how these aspects impacted on psychological health and social wellbeing.  Therefore I would suggest being guided by your research question and existing literature in order to formulate appropriate questions for your study.  I hope this helps?!

The research ethics governance principle that requires members of a workgroup to be informed they are able to opt out from participating in their group's activities when a research intervention is taking place there conflicts with the fundamental of group dynamics that any change in the membership of a group creates a new and different group.  So you can't research the effectiveness of a workgroup climate-shaping intervention because the members of the workgroup can absent themselves from participating in the workgroup - even though the employer wants them to participate in their workgroup's climate-shaping activity. My paper (attached; submitted for publication but not yet accepted) provides references to articles that align with our concern that its time for research ethics to be up-dated and revised to avoid such blockers to essential research. (I'd agree with the article that states that the existing, antiquated research ethics paradigm is "strangling" certain types of research.) 

I don't know of any particular studies, but having been a participant of some of these kings of groups that use online fora for forming and meetings, I can perhaps provide some insights.

The groups that I have become a part of were generally either one of two kinds. First, there were cohort groups where members of a cohort pursuing a particular degree at an institution independently formed social media groups to support one another through our classes. This kind of group is helpful in a prescribed setting were everyone in a cohort is taking the same classes at the same time. I participated in two of these, one from Full Sail University students in the MFA in Media Design program. The other was from Concordia University in the Master of Education program. Both were valuable, and I sometimes still see people checking in to keep in touch years after the completions of the programs.

The second kinds of outside study social media group was set up by a professor for all the students--current and former--to help and support one another and to enhance and enrich the learning in such an environment. Sometimes these kinds of groups have been closed to only class members. Other times, they were open to a wider audience that shared a common interest and could contribute positively to the group experience.

I hope this was at least marginally helpful.

Thank you Ian and Camille for you helpful suggestions!

The classic approach to making observational measures of group functioning is Robert Bales' Interaction Process Analysis (1950), later modified and called Systematic Multiple Level Observation of Groups (SYMLOG).

If you just Google "Bales IPA" you'll find lots of very usable information. It works very well, especially if you have multiple observers.

@ Morten Bo Søndergaard Svendsen:

Hi Morten,

Thanks for your interest I will contact you shortly. And yes, open source is the way of the future in my opinion! I intend to have a repository for the software on GitHub so that I can track changes and additions. Thanks again!

You have selected a five point Likert scale to get the response by alumni. If the analysis is to reduce the items or indicators in factor to explain better the success of methodology you can use as alternative the optimal scaling analysis always when the data show that the mayor part of response are accumulated in a less response than 5

categories, eg in the category 1 and 2 are accumulated only a 10$ of this response optimale scaling help you tu reduce the indicators into a new scale automatically and providing turn the number of factor and the indicators of validity and consistence of the construct. Please see you http://www.uv.es/RELIEVE/v17n1/RELIEVEv17n1_3eng.htm

I have not come across any publications on collective flow, but there is an underlying theoretical problem with the way the concept is operationalised in different academic disiplines and, arguably, whether or not it can be applied to groups as a consequence of its inherent epistemological assumptions. I would suggest you look at methodological and theoretical work on flow such as Moneta (2012) to examine the extent to which group applications are appropriate. If you find the concept problematic for your project I would suggest looking at T.J.Scheff's work on reciprocity, social emotions and attunement.

You might find the following book useful

Harrison M. Trice (1993). Occupational Subcultures in the Workplace. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.

Good luck, Bruce

Threats, attacks and horrors have left their marks on our cognitive development.

Ivan,

You can perhaps get some idea from the following two works.

Hi Juan,

I think "reciprocity" can be an important construct explain why satisfied team members can contribute to overall team outcomes.  This is based on a mixed methods study that I'd conducted on project team members whereby when they were satisfied, the project performance has improved.  During the qualitative phase of the study through interviews with some participants, when team members received benefits contributed by other team members, this has created gratitude showing which rendered them to do something good in return to those team members (contributors).  May be through multiplier effect, this has improved the project performance outcomes.  Lesson learned for me from that study is - team leader needs to proactively trigger the "reciprocal action" e.g. doing good for others by demonstrating it himself / herself earlier and more frequently or motivate team members to do the same in which this might significantly improve the team outcomes.  I think this learning might apply to sport team in which may be you can contribute some empirical results.  In case you want, you can refer to this link on that study / article that I'd written.  Wishing you all the best.

Regards,

Fung

If it is a group meeting to discuss and make decisions regarding action, some kind of committee, then whoever is the chairperson needs to exercise due authority through accepted procedures. There always will be a desire among those present to display their personality, conscious and unconscious, to their own advantage however incongruous and intrusive. If it is a 'work' group then it has to be managed by the chairperson and his/her second, the secretary(?), with clear rules of exchange and interaction, all speaking 'through the Chairperson'. If you want to learn more about group interactions then there is the possibility to enter a group-analytic group which is a group that meets 'without a task' in order to see what happens. Power in groups is generated as inevitably as electricity is by a dynamo; two people meeting will generate power whether as lovers or business partners or as friends. How they manage it and what they do with it -  as with any work-group - requires higher levels of understanding and mutuality that are the result of increasing personal understanding and interaction. Group-analysis helps a good deal, though the ideal is never reached.

Try "Experiences in Groups" by W Bion; any of S H Foulkes' five titles, and a decent book on how to conduct business meetings.

As authors we all tend to go through a self-imposed solitary confinement, so that you have my sympathy, informed by experience, for endured punishment. An external observer of our repartee might take "Solitary generalization is not a normal human condition" to be a generalization about certain generalizations made by an individual (Clark McCauley) ostensibly in a state of abnormal human condition. :-)  Thanks for your insights!

This is a good question without an obvious answer.

An almost mathematical approach to answering this question is the whimsical proposal of a category Reality introduced in

R.E. Lauro, Beyond the colonization of human imagining and everyday life: Crafting mythopoeic lifeworlds as a theological response to hyperreality, Ph.D. thesis, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, 2012:

file:///Users/jfpeters/Downloads/RenoLauroPhDThesis.pdf

See page 76, based on Baudrillard 1972 book.

On RG, see the works of S.A. de Groot:

In particular, see

S.A. de Groot, In search of beauty.  Developing beautiful organizations, Ph.D. thesis, Technische Universiteit Endhoven, 2014.

My contributions is that one has also to consider the culture of the both the students and the teachers.  Sometimes also parents or guardians affect the students depending on the way they are bringing up these children/

Poole, S., Poole, M. S., & Hollingshead, A. B. (Eds.). (2004). Theories of small groups: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Sage Publications.

Theories of Small Groups: Interdisciplinary Perspectives brings together the threads that unify the field of group research. The book is designed to define and describe theoretical perspectives on groups and to highlight select research findings within those perspectives. In this text, editors Marshall Scott Poole and Andrea B. Hollingshead capitalize on the theoretical advances made over the last fifty years by integrating models and theories of small groups into a set of nine general theoretical perspectives. Theories of Small Groups is the first book to assess, synthesize, integrate, and evaluate the body of theory and research on small groups across disciplinary boundaries.

We have done research suggesting that should work.  In some of our studies we have had strangers play cooperatively or competitively in video games and find increases in tit-for-tat or cooperative behavior.  In the most relevant study to your concerns (Velez, Mahood, Ewoldsen & Moyer-Guse, 2013), we found that cooperative game play increased cooperation even when outgroups were playing together.  In these studies we were using violent games because of the ongoing debate the effects of playing violent games.  But John Velez recently extended this work in his dissertation using sports games (a street basketball video game) and found similar effects.  

I am a group analyst working in the UK. A few years ago some colleagues and I experimented with a programme developed by the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. It's called Compendium, and is free to download. Just Google Compendium for the link. It's a dialogue mapping tool, originally developed to help track ideas as they emerge in a group context. A colleague at the Open University helped us to adapt it for use in coding exchanges between members of an analytic group. The results of our experiment were written up in our "house" journal, Group Analysis, under the title, "Mapping the Matrix". Sadly, as a busy clinician rather than a researcher I did not find the time to develop ideas further.

We get caught in 'binary reductive categories' (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 2008) of the social phenomenon. Decentralized and centralized system of decision making both are crucial. I feel discussion should be around identifying cases and scenario where decentralization is must and then facilitating it through an inductive process.

There are scholars who "fear" elite capture in when decentralization is in discourse (Dasgupta & Beard, 2007; Platteau, 2004; Iverson etal, 2006). But we need to examine who is behind elite capture at global level. The research titled "The Network of Global Corporate Control" by Vitali et al (2011) might throw some light on this (link to paper and TED talk appended. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/james_b_glattfelder_who_controls_the_world   

No, there is no such study. What comes closest are studies on interorganizational trust as being influenced by societal institutions. Have a look at the 2 Organization Studies articles of mine featured on my Researchgate webpage. Maybe you can transfer these insights to the group level....

Hello,

here are some articles regarding the requested topics.

I hope, they are what you searching for.

Jehn, K. A., Northcraft, G. B., & Neale, M. A. (1999). Why differences make a

difference: A field study of diversity, conflict, and performance in workgroups.

Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 741–763.

Kochan, T., Bezrukova, K., Ely, R. J., Jackson, S. E., Joshi, A., & Jehn, K. A., et al.

(2003). The effects of diversity on business performance: Report of the diversity

research network. Human Resource Management, 42(1), 3–21.

Cady, S. H., & Valentine, J. (1999). Team innovation and perceptions of consideration.

What difference does diversity make? Small Group Research, 30(6), 730–750.

Bowers, C. A., Pharmer, J. A., & Salas, E. (2000). When member homogeneity is

needed in work team: A meta-analysis. Small Group Research, 31(3), 305–327.

Cox, T. H., & Blake, S. (1991). Managing cultural diversity: implications for

organizational competitiveness. Academy of Management Executive, 5(3), 45–56.

Ely, R. J., & Thomas, D. A. (2001). Cultural diversity at work: The effects of diversity

perspectives on work group processes and outcomes. Administrative Science

Quarterly, 46(2), 229–273.

Harrison, D. A., & Klein, K. J. (2007). What´s the difference? Diversity constructs as

separation, variety, or disparity in organizations. Academy of Management Review,

32, 1199–1229.

Hi Brenda,

This is a very interesting and important question.. i look forward to find out how you eventually decide to run this activity and hope that you will share it in this forum as well..

A potential activity addressing the learning outcomes you mentioned can be a simulated situation requiring efficient team dynamics and interpersonal skills.. there can be many examples taken from real-life scenarios..

One situation i have heard used for training can be a patient requiring emergent surgery who needs to be moved to operating room, and at the same time, communication with attending as well as the patient and patient's relatives.. in addition, efficient communication with nursing staff, operating room, intensive care, blood bank, lab and radiology is required..

If a group of resident is allowed to watch and 'peer assess' the exercise run by a team of residents assigned different roles, i think many of the areas you have highlighted can be touched upon...

Hope this helps, regards, raza

Dear Adam I can advice you the following paper just publised in RQES: Marilyn A. Looney (2013): Interpreting Linked Psychomotor Performance Scores, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 84:1, 52-58

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2013.762291

Dear Isabella,

I'm sorry I've missed you answer.

At our firm, where I currently work we often use SWOT analysis to implement changes.

But when facilitating you can always use the FFF model.

Feelings (what was going on, what has happended with the participants, what did they feel, what was the behaviour that trigger it...),

Funciton (what was the outcome of an excercise, what was the goal, was it achieved, what was the function of the specific behaviour for the actor of the behaviour, what was the goal...),

Future (what can we change, what kind of action will we tak in the future when something like this accures, what have we learn and what do we want to use from the excercise...).

You can always check different trainer sites for tools, such as:

You will find a lot of material on those sites and you can use them. Maybe you can also check for NEULAND videos on youtube, they could be helpful when trying to come up with a new team excercise.

All the best,

Jan