Group Behaviour, Teams and Leadership

Put five capable people in a room and they behave differently than they would alone: some go quiet, some go along, some ease off. Group behaviour is the study of why.

Group behaviour is how individuals act, interact and influence one another within a group, through shared goals, roles, communication and social influence. Belonging to a group can change a person's behaviour, attitudes and decisions.

Group norms are the unwritten rules that guide behaviour and set shared expectations. Positive norms bring harmony and productivity; negative norms bring excessive pressure and lower performance. Example: members mute their phones in meetings without being asked.

Social loafing is putting in less effort in a group than when working alone, on the assumption that others will make up for it. Group performance falls, and so does the motivation of the committed members. Example: two students doing most of a group case study. Maximilien Ringelmann's rope-pulling experiments in the late 1800s first showed it: the more people pulled, the less each pulled. It shrinks when each person's contribution is visible, teams are small, and the task matters to them.

Don't confuse a group with a team. Every team is a group, but not every group is a team. In a team, members share responsibility for one result; in a work group, each answers for their own part.

A plant manager in Pune calls the weekly meeting of the line supervisors a "team". But each supervisor leaves with their own targets and no one else's problems. Calling people a team does not make them one, and different jobs need different kinds of teams.

Robbins and Judge separate two things. A work group interacts mainly to share information and help each member do their own job. A work team produces, through joint effort, more than the sum of what each member puts in.

Teams assemble, refocus and disband faster than permanent departments, and they give employees more say. Four types are usually named.

Multiteam systems serve tasks too big for one team. Two or more interdependent teams share a higher goal: in effect, a team of teams. Simply adding members to one team raises the coordination load and can do more harm than good.

Team effectiveness model. Robbins and Judge group what makes a team effective into three sets of influences.

Reading the model: a team with the right people but no resources or trust will struggle, and good people who loaf or clash will waste a good setting.

Don't confuse a cross-functional team with a self-managed team. Cross-functional describes who is on the team: different departments. Self-managed describes how it is run: without a supervisor. One team can be both.

Where it breaks. A team is not always better. Meetings, joint decisions and coordination cost time, so a task one skilled person can do alone is usually best left to that person. Virtual teams also lose facial and tone cues and the casual chat that builds trust, so they need clear goals and regular contact.

For exams. Know the four types by their one-line job, the work group and work team contrast, and the three groups in the effectiveness model.

New teams almost always hit a rough patch a few weeks in. Tuckman's stages say that is normal, and show what helps at each point.

Team building is a deliberate process of building trust, collaboration and agreement on goals. It runs from trust, to communication, to resolving conflict, to collaboration, to shared goals. It brings trust and empathy, creativity, better communication and better problem-solving.

Bruce Tuckman described four stages in 1965; with Mary Ann Jensen he added a fifth, adjourning, in 1977. Think of a college fest committee: excited first meetings, a row over the budget, agreed ground rules, a smooth fest weekend, and a farewell dinner.

Where it breaks. The stages describe a common pattern, not a law. Teams can skip a stage, slip back when a member changes, or storm and perform at the same time.

Forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning.

A product team at a Mumbai firm has five brilliant ideas people and nobody who checks the budget, chases the vendor or finishes the paperwork. The talent is there, but the team keeps missing its dates. Belbin's roles name what such a team is lacking.

Belbin studied management teams at Henley Management College and published his findings in 1981. He first named eight roles. He later added a ninth, the Specialist, once his work moved into real organisations, where deep expert knowledge mattered. His point was that strong teams are balanced: they mix different kinds of contribution.

The Thinking group is also called the cerebral group. The two roles that were renamed are the original Chairman, now Co-ordinator, and the original Company Worker, now Implementer.

Example. In the Mumbai team, the Plants are plentiful, but there is no Implementer to turn ideas into a schedule and no Completer Finisher to catch errors. The manager adds one of each, or asks two members to take those roles on purpose. The team's output improves.

Allowable weaknesses are the flip side of each strength. Belbin's advice is to accept them and cover them with other members, not to expect a person to fix them.

Don't confuse a team role with a functional role or a Tuckman stage. A functional role is the job someone is hired for, such as accountant. A team role is a style of contributing that shows in any job. Tuckman describes how a team develops over time. Belbin describes who is in it. Also, a team does not need nine different people: one person can cover two or three roles, and a small team can still be balanced.

Where it breaks. The questionnaire reports how people see themselves, and results can shift with the job and the people around. Researchers have questioned how well the scores predict team success. Use the roles to start a conversation, not to label people.

In practice. Before forming a team, list the roles the task needs. Ask where the gaps are, and who can stretch to fill each. Watch out for a team with too many Shapers, who clash, or too many Plants, who produce ideas but no output.

For exams. Recall the three groups of three: action (Shaper, Implementer, Completer Finisher), people (Co-ordinator, Teamworker, Resource Investigator) and thinking (Plant, Monitor Evaluator, Specialist). Note that the Specialist was the later, ninth role.

Action, people, thinking: three groups of three.

Two managers take over two branches of the same bank. Same rules, same pay, same kind of customers. A year later one team is steady and the other has lost three people. What differed was how each one led.

A leader's core roles are to set direction, manage conflict, inspire and improve productivity. Thinking about how to do this has moved through four broad answers.

Lewin's three styles (1939) are still the starting point:

Situational leadership turns the contingency idea into a practical rule: match the style to how ready the follower is for the task.

Transformational leaders change what followers want, not only what they do. Transactional leaders trade reward for effort. Verghese Kurien built Amul around an idea dairy farmers could own: a cooperative run by and for its milk producers. That is the transformational kind.

Effective leaders are visionary (future and strategic direction), empathetic (understand others' feelings), communicative (clear information and ideas), ethical (fair and morally sound decisions) and decisive (confident action).

Don't confuse leadership with management. In John Kotter's distinction, management copes with complexity: plans, budgets, control. Leadership copes with change: direction, alignment, motivation. Most managers need both.

Where it breaks. Style labels describe tendencies, not fixed types; most leaders shift between them. Trait lists read well but predict little on their own. Situational leadership is popular in training, but research gives it only mixed support.

For exams. Match each theory to its author and its key terms: LPC (Fiedler), readiness (Hersey and Blanchard), path–goal (House), the four Is (Bass), the grid (Blake and Mouton).

Go deeper for practitioners

Fiedler's contingency model (1967) treats style as fixed. A leader is task-motivated or relationship-motivated, measured by the least preferred co-worker (LPC) scale. A situation is more or less favourable depending on leader–member relations, task structure and position power. Task-motivated leaders do best when the situation is very favourable or very unfavourable; relationship-motivated leaders in between. The advice is to change the situation, or the leader, rather than the style.

House's path–goal theory (1971) says a leader's job is to clear the path to goals. It names four behaviours: directive, supportive, participative and achievement-oriented, chosen to fit the task and the people.

Blake and Mouton's grid (1964) plots concern for production against concern for people, each from 1 to 9: 1,1 impoverished; 9,1 authority–compliance; 1,9 country club; 5,5 middle of the road; 9,9 team management, the one they recommend.

Bass's four Is of transformational leadership: idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration. In Judge and Piccolo's 2004 review of many studies, both transformational leadership and contingent reward, a transactional behaviour, were strongly linked with followers' satisfaction and leaders' effectiveness; laissez-faire was linked with worse results.

A decision. A strong performer is promoted to lead her former peers. They are skilled and keen. Situational leadership says delegate; her instinct, wanting to prove herself, is to direct. Which costs more if she gets it wrong?

A company promotes its best salesperson to head a region, because she is confident, driven and good at the job. Within a year the region is struggling. The traits that made her a star did not make her a good leader. Trait theory, and the views that followed it, explain why this happens.

Traits often named. Adaptability, assertiveness, the capacity to motivate people, courage and resolution, creativity, decisiveness, eagerness to accept responsibility, emotional stability, intelligence and sound judgement, need for achievement, people skills, perseverance, self-confidence, task competence, trustworthiness, and understanding followers' needs.

What the research shows. Early reviews, such as Stogdill's in 1948, found that no list of traits reliably separated leaders from others. Later work on the Big Five personality traits (see Personality) found extraversion most closely linked to leadership, followed by conscientiousness and openness to experience. Traits do better at predicting who emerges as a leader than who leads effectively. So they are a useful starting point, not a full explanation.

Don't confuse trait theory with behavioural theory. Trait theory assumes leaders are largely born, so it helps choose the right person. Behavioural theories look at what leaders do, so they imply leaders can be trained. A note that says traits "can be trained" is mixing the two.

Newer views add the relationship, the followers and the values behind leadership.

Example of LMX. A branch manager hands her two trusted deputies the new loan scheme and lets them decide how to run it. The other four staff get routine work and fixed instructions. The deputies rate her highly. The others feel overlooked.

Where it breaks. LMX shows that groups tend to split into in-groups and out-groups, but in-group status often follows similarity and early impressions, not merit. Leaders should check who is in their circle and why (see Workforce diversity). Charisma also has a dark side: a self-serving leader can be as magnetic as one who serves others. Writers therefore contrast the socialised charismatic leader with a self-centred one. The socialised leader conveys other-centred values and models ethical conduct.

Related item. The Vroom and Yetton leader participation model is a contingency theory that gives rules for how much to involve followers in a decision, depending on the situation.

For exams. Pair each name with its idea: Carlyle with the great man, LMX with in-group and out-group, House with charismatic, Greenleaf with servant leadership, Vroom and Yetton with participation in decisions.

A board of capable people can still make a decision none of them would have made alone. Group dynamics explains how.

Group dynamics are the psychological processes and patterns of interaction at work within a group. They shape participation, collaboration, conflict resolution and performance.

• Group size. Small groups allow deeper discussion and faster decisions. Large groups bring more diversity, but more coordination and communication problems.
• Group cohesiveness is the degree of bonding and commitment among members. High cohesiveness improves coordination and performance; extreme cohesiveness may suppress dissent.
• Groupthink happens when a group values harmony and avoiding conflict above critical evaluation: alternatives are ignored and decisions get worse. Irving Janis built the idea in 1972 from cases such as the Bay of Pigs invasion; Nixon's inner circle during Watergate is also often cited.

Signs of groupthink, in Janis's account: a feeling that the group cannot fail, explaining away warnings, pressure on anyone who disagrees, self-censorship, and an illusion that everyone agrees.

In practice. Ask someone to argue the other side, have the most senior person speak last, and bring in an outsider before a big decision.

Don't confuse cohesion with groupthink. Cohesion helps a group work together. Groupthink is what happens when keeping that cohesion matters more than getting the decision right.

Harmony above critical thinking: alternatives ignored, poor decisions.