Group Cohesion and Development

 (Picture taken by Supriya. SK16)

Recently, I saw an English movie – Miracle (as asked by Prof before session). The movie is a real story about young, restless and individualist hockey players transformed into a great US hockey team, who later won the 1980 Winter Olympics. The movie is about building THE team, raising the team spirit to higher levels, sense of belonging. The most important message it conveys is about group cohesion which increases the performance of the team significantly.

What is cohesion in the group? It’s the feeling of attraction, connection, positivity towards the p for the reason of friendship or due to the pride one feels on joining the group. Many groups use the “hazing”, in forms of sacrifices or doing something extraordinary to before joining the group. It increases the cohesion of the members between each other as well as towards the group as a whole. Organization and institutions follow a difficult procedure to select the right candidates. It’s just a modern ways of hazing, so as to get right people in the group. Also, organizations spend lot of moolahs just to create a great cohesion between team members.

I still remember the great cohesion developed between members during Sarkundi Expedition, one of my very difficult Himalayan Expedition. Our group name was Sarkundi-16. Within 10 days the members developed a great cohesion for each other as well as for the SK-16 as a whole. We passed all difficulties with a great co-ordination, shared the food, water and basic necessities with each other. The great cohesion of SK-16 became as the benchmark for all other groups later.

 (The Sarkundi Expedition - SK16 group)

(SK-16 group at the base camp after completing the expedition safely. Even on having people of extreme demographics, the group developed a high cohesion and friendship in just 10 days. Probably the difficult goal put us together. Most of us are still in touch with each other. Miss you SK-16.)

But I was surprised with a study being done upon the relationship between group cohesion and performance. It was found out that performance of the group have higher impact on cohesion than vice-versa. Hence,

Performance à Cohesion == Higher Impact

Cohesion à Performance == Comparatively Lower

It nullifies many assumptions that cohesion may lead to better performance. Instead, the focus upon increasing better performance may lead to greater cohesion between team. However, most of the organizations focus upon increasing team cohesion, probably because it is objectively achievable or it’s the HR’s bread-butter. :-O

Another interesting study was the importance of group norms. Norms are major deciding factors of a team to accelerate or retard its performance. Let’s say the people in the group made the point of working less or being unproductive then on having a higher cohesion the group’s performance will significantly decrease. Hence, keeping right norms for the group is highly essential to get a high performance team. The role of the leader here is highly significant as he needs to set productive norms for the team while keeping the team cohesive.

Group Development happen in stages like Forming (members become familiar), Storming (tensions among members for status), Norming (establishments of rules, roles, structure, relations etc), Performing (achieving goals) and finally Adjourning (termination and completion of tasks). Also, each group members passes through various quantum of commitment towards the group which happens during entry, acceptance, divergence and exit from the group.

Leadership

A leader needs to know the importance the cohesiveness in the group and how to leverage it. He should also know about the group development and group life-cycle to articulate his decision and actions accordingly. Leadership is important to get high performance team by increasing cohesiveness of the group and keeping productive norms in place.