Small Groups as Complex Systems

Formation, Coordination, Development, and Adaptation

Holly Arrow, Joseph E. McGrath, Jennifer L. Berdahl

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780803972308, 9780803972292
• eBook ISBN: 9781452238500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

"The emphasis on change at many levels of organization is critically important as is the first attempt to integrate sophisticated theory and research in organization psychology (e.g., Gersick, Hackman) with social psychological models of development such as Moreland and Levine."

--Reuben M. Baron, Emeritus, University of Connecticut

"Arrow, McGrath, and Berdahl?s ?Small Groups as Complex Systems? will change the way you think about groups, the way you think about research, and even the way you think about science." --Donelson R. Forsyth, Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth U

"The book is excellent, one of those very rare works that will have substantial impact on the field. I would use the book without hesitation in any advanced graduate seminar dealing with groups."

--Donelson R. Forsyth, Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth U

"A conceptually elegant analysis of groups as systems. Although the systems approach has been growing more influential in various fields of social psychology in the last ten years, no one has put forward a definitive analysis that applies with fidelity the general systems approach to group processes. McGrath and his colleagues fill that gap, not by paying lip service to popular scientific concepts such as recursive causality, open systems, attractors, and complexity theory, but by fully integrating these concepts into their no-nonsense analysis of such group level processes as formation, task performance, composition, development, and termination. Empirical work is folded into the theoretical mix along the way, but the focus is unrelentingly conceptual with the result that the authors deliver on their promise of developing a powerful, unified theory of group dynamics."

--Donelson R. Forsyth, Psychology, Virginia Commonwealth U

"Theirs is an ambitious book. They have profound ramifications for experimental social psychology. It is worth mentioning that AMD (Arrow, McGrarth, and Berdahl) list an ethnographic approach, which often implies the adoption of hermeneutic and semiotic methods (a hallmark of the anti-Enlightenment tradition in psychology), as a possible way forward."

--Yoshihisa Kashima, American Journal of Psychology

What are groups? How do they behave? Arrow, McGrath, and Berdahl answer these questions by developing a general theory of small groups as complex systems. Basing their theory on concepts distilled from general systems theory, dynamical systems theory, and complexity and chaos theory, they explore groups as adaptive, dynamic systems that are driven by interactions among group members as well as between the group and its embedding contexts. In addition, they consider not only the group?s members and their distribution of attributes, but also the group?s tasks and technology in order to understand how those members, tasks, and tools are intertwined, coordinated, and adjusted. Throughout the book, the authors focus our attention on relationships among people, tools, and tasks that are activated by a combination of individual and collective purposes and goals that change and evolve as the group interacts over time.

PART I

ORIENTATION, HISTORY, AND OVERVIEW OF THE THEORY

1

Introduction

This book presents a general theory of small groups as complex systems. Our theory addresses what groups are, how they behave, and with what consequences. We treat groups as adaptive, dynamic systems that are driven by interactions both among group members and between the group and its embedding contexts. We do not believe that groups can be adequately understood as collections of independently acting individuals. Instead, we focus our attention on relationships among people, tools, and tasks, activated by a combination of individual and collective purposes and goals that change and evolve as the group interacts over time.

The ideas in the book are both old and new. We build on our own past work (e.g., Argote & McGrath, 1993; Arrow, 1997; Arrow & McGrath, 1995; Berdahl, 1998, 1999; McGrath, 1997; McGrath & Berdahl, 1998; McGrath, Berdahl, & Arrow, 1995; McGrath & O’Connor, 1996) and also draw heavily on the work of many scholars who have made important empirical and theoretical contributions to the century-long history of small group research. This body of work is cited throughout the book, but we draw on past theory and research selectively, highlighting those ideas and data that seem most closely connected to the concepts in our own theory.

GROUPS AS COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

Although we consulted much past and current work to inform our thinking, we also believe this book offers something new. Our theory of groups is based on concepts borrowed from several other fields—general systems theory, dynamical systems theory, complexity and chaos theory—that study complex, adaptive, dynamic systems. Conceptualizing groups as holistic and dynamic systems is not new (e.g., Altman & Rogoff, 1987; Lewin, 1948). Drawing on concepts from the branch of mathematics known as dynamical systems theory for use in the social sciences is more novel, but we are not alone in our excitement about potential applications (see, e.g., Barton, 1994; Vallacher & Nowak, 1994). What is genuinely new, we believe, is the development of a comprehensive theory of small groups that adapts, transforms, and integrates concepts from dynamical systems theory in a way appropriate to thinking about systems that are themselves composed of complex systems—members whose actions are guided by goals, intentions, perceptions, and preconceptions that also change over time.

Let us specify the boundaries of our discourse. By small group, we mean a loosely coupled (Weick, 1995) system of mutually interacting, interdependent members, projects, and technology with a shared collective identity (see McGrath, 1984). Groups have temporal and psychological boundaries; group members are aware of the group as an entity and of their membership in it; and members’ behavior is linked and interdependent, with shared consequences. We do not include in our concept of small groups large sets of people who belong to a social category—such as Navajo, or female, or lower-middle-class American—whose members do not all interact directly and interdependently with one another. We also exclude sets of people in physical proximity who do not interact with one another or have a shared identity as a group—for example, people riding in an elevator together, or the students sitting in the first two rows of chairs in a classroom.

Small groups are formed for many different reasons and have different purposes—to provide enjoyable activities, to complete projects, to create political solidarity, to make money, or to enhance the status of members. Our thinking has been shaped most strongly by research on task-oriented groups in organizational settings—a traditional focus of much past research on small groups. However, the scope of our theory and our discussion is not limited to such groups. We intend our theory to apply to a broad range of small groups, including work groups but also friendship groups and sports teams, activity clubs and laboratory groups, expeditions and families.

To illustrate the importance of a complex systems perspective, consider a hypothetical project made up of six people from different departments of an organization: Sally from sales, Ed from engineering, Manuel from manufacturing, Felicia from finance, Mark from marketing, and Richard from R&D. The group has been assembled by top management at Minerva, a software company, to develop a plan for a sophisticated electronic notepad. What would one want to know about this group to predict how well its members will work together, whether one or more of its members will emerge as a group leader, and how creative and viable the product developed by the group will be?

One important feature of the group is the collection of attributes of the six people in it—their age, tenure, gender, race, and cultural background and the array of their individual skills, knowledge, training, values, and many other attributes. Interaction within the group is also affected by group members’ relationships with others outside the group—with friends and family, with people in their primary organizational departments, and with other people they know well and work with in the organization. These relationships help determine members’ status within the wider organization. But the group is much more than just the collection of individual members with various attributes and social connections. It is also in part defined by its purposes, which include, in this case, developing plans for a sophisticated notepad and by the resources—office and lab space, hardware and software equipment, policies, precedents, and budgets—that the group can acquire to fulfill its purposes. Some of these resources are controlled by the organization in which it is embedded. Group behavior is shaped by many aspects of the organization, including the status of the members’ departments (and how much clout group members have within these departments), the organization’s age and success within the industry, and organizational norms and culture. The group may also have to work with constraints established directly by the organization, such as an internal deadline for developing the product plan.

Some organizational attributes are in turn defined by the industry in which the organization operates. The competitiveness of the industry, the availability of capital via the stock market, and the organization’s history of innovation versus imitation of other companies’ products may also affect the ultimate viability of the product plan developed by this group.

Obviously, this cross-functional task force exists and operates at a level of group qua group, even though much of the work of the group (researching the marketplace, developing a budget, projecting sales, etc.) is completed by individual members. Members act on behalf of the group, in response to group purposes and shared expectations. Besides developing a successful product plan, the group’s purposes may also include serving member needs and maintaining satisfactory interpersonal relationships so that work can proceed.

This group can be viewed as an entity, or unit, or system, but it should not be viewed as an isolated system. Any group must continually coordinate both the varied contributions of its members and their often divergent interests. It must also reckon with various external forces and the environmental contexts within which the group is situated.

When attempting to predict what will happen in this group over time, one should look first to the prevailing conditions when the group formed. Which member(s) took charge and asserted a vision of the product and expertise at fulfilling that vision? Was Manuel still angry at Richard for dating his ex-girlfriend, or had their friendship been repaired? Were the marketing and finance departments at odds? Did Sally see the work of this group as competing with or supporting the mission of her department? What initial resources were provided to the group for developing and testing ideas? These and many other initial conditions could profoundly affect how well the group does whatever it is doing.

The group’s internal development—how relations between members change over time, for example, and how various ideas are developed by the group—will also be affected by changes in external conditions that alter the outcomes of group actions. Both initial circumstances and emergent events and conditions affect the group’s developmental path. The market for electronic notepads may change; a competitor company may beat Minerva in the race to develop one; the organization may cut the group’s budget, change its time line, or fire one of its members. These changes in circumstances will require adjustments by the group; if the group fails to adapt, the widening gap between group goals and an altered reality may generate a host of new stresses on both internal and external relations.

In this book, we argue that to fully understand groups, we need to view them as complex, adaptive, and dynamic systems, as illustrated in this extended example. Moreover, we need to deal not only with the group as a system but also with its interchanges with agents and forces in its embedding contexts and its interchanges with its constituent members. Furthermore, we need to consider not only the group’s members and their distribution of attributes but also the group’s tasks and technology; and we need to understand how those members, tasks, and tools are intertwined, coordinated, and adjusted. These issues are taken up, in detail, in Part II of the book.

HOW THE BOOK IS ORGANIZED

The book is organized into three parts. Part I has three chapters. After this opening chapter’s general orientation, Chapter 2 provides a brief history of small group research, and Chapter 3 presents an overview of the theory.

In Chapter 2, we identify seven bodies or “schools” of early group research whose proponents had different conceptions of what groups are and what they do and who concentrated both theory and research on different focal problems. Three of those schools focus primarily on basic research questions; four focus more on applied issues. We then describe six more recent bodies of theory and research. We note which insights or elements from this “baker’s dozen” of research streams we found particularly helpful in developing our theory of groups, and we analyze some limitations of most past and current work, which we attribute to an overreliance on positivist, reductionist notions of research and to methodological features of much research based on these notions.

Chapter 3 presents an overview of the theory, organized around five propositions about (a) the nature of groups, (b) three levels of causal dynamics that characterize group functioning, (c) the multiple functions that groups serve, (d) the elements of groups (members, projects, and technology) and patterns of relations among them, and (e) three modes of a group’s life course.

Part II of the book, consisting of Chapters 4 through 8, provides a detailed presentation of the theory organized around three modes of group life (formation, operations, and metamorphosis) and three levels of dynamics (local, global, and contextual dynamics). Chapter 4 discusses the mix of forces that lead to the formation of groups. Newly formed groups differ in the relative emphasis they place on group goals and on member needs and in the relative importance of their members, their projects, and their technology in determining the group structure. On the basis of these distinctions, we identify prototypical kinds of groups.

Chapters 5, 6, and 7 discuss the operations mode of a group’s life. Although all three levels of causal dynamics operate simultaneously, continuously, and interdependently, these three chapters examine the three levels of causal dynamics separately as they play out during the group’s operations mode. Chapter 5 examines local dynamics: the ongoing interactions among a group’s components at the relatively micro level. We use the term coordination for the operation of local dynamics and discuss the elaboration, enactment, and modification of the group’s pattern of member-task-tool relations, which we call the coordination network.

Chapter 6 addresses the global dynamics that emerge from the group’s local dynamics over time and that subsequently shape its local dynamics. We use the term group development to encompass the operation and outcome of these group-level processes. In Chapter 6, we identify six classes of global variables of interest to group researchers, which correspond to three intrinsic group functions (group production, member needs, and system integrity) and three instrumental functions (information processing, conflict and consensus managing, and coordination of member behavior). Drawing on ideas from dynamical systems and complexity theories, we discuss how global variables may evolve over time in groups under varying conditions and how such trajectories over time may be viewed as movement in an “attractor landscape.” We propose that the evolution of different global variables may follow different patterns within the same group, as well as differing across groups.

Chapter 7 addresses change over time that is driven by events that alter a group’s relationship with its embedding contexts. This is the level of contextual dynamics; it includes changes in the environment that affect the group and also initiatives by a group to come into better alignment with its environment. We call this bidirectional process adaptation. Drawing on ideas from evolutionary theory, we conceptualize adaptation as movement within a fitness landscape. Chapter 7 covers principles of adaptation, barriers to successful adaptation, internal factors affecting adaptation, and features of external change and of group responses to change.

Chapter 8 discusses the processes of transformation that take place as a group either disbands completely or else changes so fundamentally that its members no longer consider it to be the same group. We call this metamorphosis.

Part III of the book examines the implications of the theory as a basis for research on groups. The application of our ideas raises some perplexing issues, and we offer some practical suggestions for building a research program that can handle those challenges. Chapter 9 discusses conceptual and methodological issues that arise when one attempts to study groups as complex, adaptive, dynamic systems. Practical challenges include the time and expense of studying groups over time and the difficulties of dealing with multiple levels of analysis. Conceptual challenges include the need to rethink the meaning of time and validity for theory and research, the nature of causality, the proper scope for generalizing from results, and assumptions about measurement and error. Chapter 10 proposes a multiple-strategy program for developing and carrying out a systematic theoretical and empirical examination of groups as complex systems. It illustrates that strategy with recent examples of research that has studied groups over time. It ends with a section that recapitulates the main ideas of the book and outlines a research agenda for the future.

We conclude this opening chapter with a caveat and an invitation. The caveat arises because we find that our ideas are difficult to communicate in a medium that requires us to present the components of our theory sequentially rather than simultaneously. Just as different levels of group dynamics take place simultaneously and interdependently, the components of our theory are tightly interconnected. Some portions of various chapters can be more fully appreciated if they are reread after reading later chapters. After repeatedly moving material backward and forward as we wrote and rewrote the book, we concluded that there was no best sequence for presenting the ideas. Instead, the very need to present them in a sequence was a root problem. Although we have done our best to create a logical sequence, the result may still frustrate the reader in some places. Thus, we invite the reader to imagine that the product is in hypertext and that our many forward and backward references ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I: ORIENTATION, HISTORY, AND OVERVIEW OF THE THEORY
• PART II: THE THEORY IN DETAIL
• PART III: ISSUES AND STRATEGIES
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Authors