Why Social Cohesion Is Not Important For Work Performance

Adverse effects of group cohesiveness

Discuss about the Social Cohesion is not Important to Work Performance.

It is important to note that in the recent past it has been found that even though personal relationships among coworkers are looked at as important, too much socialization can result in a sharp decline in team performance. It is extensively presumed that the resilient collective ties shaped between social groups lead to a better off, more productive personnel, sustained by employees’ reassuring assertiveness and collective ideas. This notion becomes particularly significant as teams and group work turn out to be more dominant within corporations (Di Vincenzo, &Mascia, 2012). As the thinking goes, personal relationships forged in the workplace should help colleagues be straightforward with one another, share visions more professionally, benefit relatively than demoralize one another, and increase the group’s overall performance. 

However, according to the carried out research, it has been found that too much of a good thing can backfire over time. Although social ties at first were seen to improve team performance, it has been found that excessive cohesion within the workforce at long last may cause a negative effect. Accordingly, this is probably due to overly friendly teams’ lapse into groupthink; this obstructs workers tracking down of new ideas as well as strategies.

Groupthink

It is important to note that the active and cohesive teams run the hazard of groupthink, while making decisions. It occurs when the team members are unwilling to convey the rebellious opinions to avoid any kind of conflict within the cohesive group. Ideas held by majority group or the fundamental team individuals are considered as acknowledged and substitute views are as the downcast. When the groups ate excessively consistent, they are mostly doubtful of conflicting views articulated by outsiders. In fact, information, provided by the outsiders, that can contradict the opinion of the group, may be hidden by the members of the group. Therefore, the groupthink might result into concentrated or irrational decisions (Mach, Dolan, & Tzafrir, 2010).

Conventionality and group think are the two post probable threats to the high group cohesiveness. Group conformity occurs when the team members hold behaviors that are comparable, mostly in the attempt to cope with or to reduce the disagreements among the members of the group. This kind of behaviors can convert the norms of the group as well. When the team members are in conformity with the norms of the group, it may cause the lack of potential innovation or creativity and may lower the quality of output. Group think only happens is the group of people has lost their individual ability of thinking and depend on the group thinking to make the decisions. 

Group Norms

Resistance to change

The members of a cohesive group tend to follow the norms of the group. The group norm is obvious and implied guidelines, which manages the actions, performance and the values of the members of the group. There are few rules that can facilitate the group to work successfully, like inspiring everyone in the group to make the decisions and the good timekeeping (Kramer, Bhave & Johnson, 2014). However, the low performance rules can be quite harmful to the production of the group. For example, a member of a cohesive group might be hesitant to put more energy to reach the target if the norm says to work at a stable pace.

Cohesive group members are likely to depend on each other and may counter attack ideas and input coming from outside. The outcome might be the separation and the light sense of dominance over the other members of the organization. This can result in the cohesive groups finding it difficult the change of their values, behaviors or the actions. This happens mostly, when the external forces cause the change (Mach, Dolan & Tzafrir, 2012). In fact, if an individual in the team is convinced with the requirements of the changes, the other members can find the change to be difficult and practice it because of the strong group dynamics.

Despite the fact that, there is a trivial shortcoming to productivity, the failed efforts to increase the efficiency might have poor effects.  If the superiors endeavor to match the positive effects of success, it might lead to success by setting the group goals that are stress free. This can lead to groups, which lack production while thinking; they may be over-producing (Salas et al., 2015). Apart from that, the attempt in raising the productivity by setting the goal too high may reduce the morale of individuals while the members of the group fail to meet the target.

Moreover, conflict is another negative effect of team cohesion. Although at some point conflict can result in a solution to a problem, many at times conflict create even more problems. To begin with, discord that comes about as a result of enmity between people may lower team cohesion as well as the aptitude of the members of the team to work together. Also, conflict leads to distractions that need a lot of time and attempt to determine. Thus this may setback the task completion and also put the goals of the team at risk.

Team productivity

Another significant factor is that communication may endure while the individuals remove their attention, therefore leading to poor synchronization of mutually dependent jobs. Heightened emotions and stress may reduce the satisfaction of team members, which increases frustrations that may end up leading to bad judgments (Mathieu et al., 2015). At some point, this may end up prompting individuals to pull out from the team, which calls for the project of a new member or lead to a scarcity in resources, which ends up making it extra challenging for a group meeting its purpose. Ultimately, the conflicting members are left unaddressed, may result in the total incapability of the group to work and finally the demobilization of the group.

First Hypothesis:

Personal pessimistic mood will have a negative influence on the performance of team by dropping of that perception of individual team member of group social cohesion.  

Team workload sharing-

It is described as the extent to which, members of a group consistently share the amount of work in a project. Liao and Loi, (2010) argues out that sharing of the workload enhances the team success by averting the social loafing. However, members with a pessimistic mood have negative designation towards each other and are about to attribute the team challenges to the flaws of other members. It is true that people with a negative attitude are more apt to negatively perceive the conditions in the place of work. On the other hand, individuals with a positive attitude make more optimistic and lenient judgments to other people leading to increasing performance levels of assisting behaviors (Choi, & Rainey, 2010).  As a result, it is true that a constant negative mood may lead to less helpful actions and a pessimistic acknowledgment of the extent that members of the team may contribute to the final result. Accordingly, it is expected that people with negative mood will identify that the team members are not contributing when it comes to work sharing. In this regard, it leads to individuals constraining their contributions towards the group due to them taking in that others are not contributing. Consequently, it is expected that:

Singular negative mood will have a negative influence on team performance by reducing those individual team members’ perceptions of teamwork sharing.

Conflict can be examined as the part of the performance of the team. Researchers have been able to categorize the conflict into process conflict, relationship and tasks. Process conflict can be defined as the disagreement over the approach of the team to the task and the methods and the processes of the group. Task conflict deals with the conflict over the content of the work and naturally gets resolved by using the rational argument. The relationship conflict centers to the emotional divergence among the members of the team, which generate pessimistic emotions in the team such as hostility. Basing on the research on the influence of conflict, it produced conflicting results. For instance, it was found that even if the interpersonal conflict in a group lead to the reduction of the performance rate of the team, while the task conflict in the team may result in the higher performance of the group (Bartram et al., 2014)

Basing on the above it can be predicted that

Conclusion

Cohesiveness is the compound of forces that give rise to the approach by the contributors of the group identity. Cohesive teams might result in communicating in a better way between the members and the group members support each other. This make the members feel more at home within the team. The members of a cohesive group are good at communication and team work. Nevertheless, the production of the team gets better than the other less cohesive teams (Colquitt et al., 2013). Even though a cohesive group is not necessarily an active group, the consistent teams do not like to get bounded by the norms of the group and it might create segregation effects on the members of the team and they like to prescribe to the pro-social behavior. Solid cohesive groups can grow a critical or may be aggressive attitude towards other people who are outsiders to the group. They may present potential inconvenience for the management. However, the advanced level of output is not certain by the cohesive teams. In addition, there might be a fall in the production rate with a higher degree of cohesiveness and concentration to the social activities.

Reference List

Bartram, T., Karimi, L., Leggat, S. G., & Stanton, P. (2014). Social identification: linking high performance work systems, psychological empowerment and patient care. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 25(17), 2401-2419.

Colquitt, J. A., Scott, B. A., Rodell, J. B., Long, D. M., Zapata, C. P., Conlon, D. E., & Wesson, M. J. (2013). Justice at the millennium, a decade later: A meta-analytic test of social exchange and affect-based perspectives.

Di Vincenzo, F., &Mascia, D. (2012). Social capital in project-based organizations: Its role, structure, and impact on project performance. International Journal of Project Management, 30(1), 5-14.

Kramer, A., Bhave, D. P., & Johnson, T. D. (2014). Personality and group performance: The importance of personality composition and work tasks. Personality and Individual Differences, 58, 132-137.

Mach, M., Dolan, S., &Tzafrir, S. (2012). The differential effect of team members’ trust on team performance: The mediation role of team cohesion. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 83(3), 771-794.

Mathieu, J. E., Kukenberger, M. R., D’Innocenzo, L., & Reilly, G. (2015). Modeling reciprocal team cohesion–performance relationships, as impacted by shared leadership and members’ competence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(3), 713.

Salas, E., Grossman, R., Hughes, A. M., & Coultas, C. W. (2015). Measuring team cohesion: Observations from the science. Human factors, 57(3), 365-374.