Emotional intensity: The strength of emotions—either positive or negative—employees have while working together. Successful businesses often feature strong group cohesiveness in the workplace. Employees who work well together are often able to increase their company's efficiency while completing team projects and working toward company goals.
It's important to have a sense of group cohesion in a work environment because it can positively affect employee morale, productivity and communication. Here are a few factors that affect group cohesiveness:. Time spent: Some find that group cohesion levels are higher when employees spend longer amounts of time together.
Increasing time spent together can help employees become familiar with one another, which can lead to better group communication and build trust. Group size: Employees may feel a greater sense of closeness to one another if they work in smaller groups.
This can promote trust and effective communication since employees have the opportunity to gain a better perspective on their peers' values and emotions. Shared values: People who share similar personal values, goals and perspectives may feel more comfortable with one another because they're able to relate and use those commonalities to connect on a deeper level.
This connection can help strengthen employee bonds and increase morale. Behavior management: Understanding employee behaviors can help you identify ways to increase group cohesion among different behavior types. Different employee behaviors may include leadership, assertiveness, people-pleasing and introversion, for example. Group cohesiveness can enhance different aspects of a work environment and increase job satisfaction by offering individuals a sense of purpose, positive socialization and meaningful relationships.
Some other primary benefits of group cohesiveness include:. Employees often experience increased morale after positive social interactions. Group projects and teams have many opportunities to promote positive socialization since team members work together often to accomplish their goals or objectives. Employees who have high morale may also contribute to their company's success due to a sense of loyalty for a business that helps them feel happy and important.
Employees may feel a sense of importance or purpose while working in a group, as effective managers often assign each team member a specific role in a group, depending on their personality traits and strengths. A sense of importance can motivate an employee to complete their tasks, mainly through an understanding of what outcomes may occur if they don't fulfill their job role as a team member. Team members who experience group cohesiveness may prioritize their team's tasks due to a feeling of accountability, which may help a group accomplish their goals or complete tasks quickly and cohesively.
Communication is one of the most vital components of working successfully in a group. Groups typically communicate on a regular basis to measure progress, assign tasks and understand the group's goals. Group cohesiveness can help develop effective communication and foster meaningful relationships among peers.
If you or your company wants to improve group cohesiveness in your workplace, consider the following five tips:. In trying to understand what makes work groups and teams effective, an important question for theory and practice is what keeps a group together, or what leads the members of a group to stay committed to the group?
The term group cohesiveness or cohesion was coined by Leon Festinger and colleagues to refer to the social glue that binds group members together. The concept of group cohesiveness has a wide appeal in research in applied psychology in such diverse areas as organizational behavior, social psychology, military psychology, sport psychology, educational psychology, and counseling.
Much of this interest is inspired by the widely shared recognition that keeping groups together is important to the successful functioning of systems relying on group work. Aside from a concern with what leads group members to remain with a group, the interest in group cohesiveness is also inspired by the assumption that more cohesive groups function better, at least in part because members of more cohesive groups presumably are more willing to exert themselves on behalf of the group.
Evidence for this proposition is mixed, however. To address this issue, Brian Mullen and Carolyn Copper integrated the results of many studies on the relationship between group cohesiveness and group performance. Complementing these findings, more recent evidence suggests that whether group cohesiveness is conducive to group performance is contingent on the extent to which the group embraces high performance goals and norms.
If not, high cohesiveness may in fact be associated with lower performance. Group cohesiveness has always been at least implicitly associated with a greater willingness of group members to exert themselves on behalf of the group and therefore with increased group productivity and performance.
Some issues complicate our understanding of the concept of group cohesiveness and its consequences, however. A first issue is the measurement of group cohesiveness. The concept of group cohesiveness refers to the forces that bind individuals to the group or the attraction of group members to the group. Interpersonal attraction may be an aspect of group cohesiveness, but it is not the only aspect of group cohesiveness and might not be the most important one.
As the members consider the group as their own, just like a family, they will help other members of the group in times of need which will further strengthen their bonds.
The turnover of members will be very low. If possible, all the members attend the group meetings and group activities and take active part in discussions relating to preparing of strategies for achieving individual and group goals. One of the factors which influence cohesiveness is similarity of attitudes and values. As a result, members tend to like each other and perceive themselves as similar. These characteristics lead members to be relatively dependent on the group for satisfaction and, thus, they are susceptible to being influenced.
For example, if any member is getting involved in organisational politics for enhancing his personal goals, the group might put social pressure on him and make him comply with the group norms. Cohesiveness and success are mutually dependent upon each other.
Cohesiveness makes the goal achievement easier and goal achievement adds to success. The reason for this relationship is that higher degree of cohesiveness leads to high degree of communication, participation and conformity to group norms. Such coordinated efforts result in agreement about the goals to be achieved, the methods of achieving them and finally achieving the final goals.
Members of cohesive groups communicate with each other more than the members of non-cohesive groups. Because the members share common ideologies, goals, backgrounds or attitudes, they are inclined to greater communicativeness. Such communication is reinforcing as it tends to foster and cement positive social relations as well as depth in personal relationships.
Members of cohesive groups are more satisfied as compared to members of non-cohesive groups. Thus is understandable because if members are not satisfied they will leave the group and join some other group. Members are more satisfied due to so many factors which include friendliness, respect, support, achievement, protection and a feeling of security. Studies consistently show that the relationship of cohesiveness and productivity depends on the performance related norms established by the group.
If performance related norms are high, a cohesive group will be more productive than will a less cohesive group.
But if cohesiveness is high and performance norms are low, productivity will be low. If cohesiveness is low and performance norms are high, productivity increases but less than in high cohesiveness-high norms situation.
Where cohesiveness and performance related norms are both low, productivity will tend to fall into the low to moderate range.
The worst situation for the manager is a highly cohesive group with low performance norms. Here members are highly motivated to work for their personal satisfaction only not for the organisational goals.
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