Strickly speaking, a group is an assembly of people or things. However, in sociological terms a group has four major characteristics. 1. consist of two or more people 2. the people must be interacting 3. the members of the group must have shared expectations 4. members must have a common identity.
A dyad is a group of two, a triad is a group of three and more than three is a small group. Sociologists, interestingly enough, have found that 15 is the largest number of people that can work well in one group. When the group is larger than that, then people will sort themselves into smaller groups.
The organization of groups can be either formal or informal. In a formal group, the structure, goals and activities or the group are clearly defined. In an informal group there is no official structure or established rules of conduct.
Types of Groups
An aggregrate group consists of a number of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time. A social category consists of a number of people with certain characteristics in common.
The easiest ways to classify groups is by their degree of intimacy. A primary group is a small group of people who interact over a relatively long period of time on a direct and personal basis. In secondary groups, the interaction is anonymous, the bonds are impresonal, the duration of time of the group is short, and where the relationships involve few emotional ties.
Characteristics of Groups
Ferdinand Tonnies distinguished between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. By gemeinschaft, Tonnies was referring to those small communities characterized by trasition and united by geographic proximity in relationships largely of the primary group sort. Gesellschaft refers to contractual relationships of a voluntary nature of limited duration and quality, based on rational self-interest, and formed for the explicit purpose of achieving a particular goal.
New Braunfles: A gem-einschaft heading towards gesellschaft?
Interaction Processes
Also involved in the interaction processes (the ways role partners agree on goals, negotiate reaching them, and distribute resources) are such factors as:
1. Principles of exchange (characteristic of market relationships in which people bargain for the goods and services they desire. 2. Competition between individuals and groups over scarce resources in which the parties not only agree to adhere to certain rules of the game but also believe they are necessary or fair. 3. Cooperation (an agreement to share resources for the purpose of achieving a common goal. 4. Compromise (an agreement to relinquish certain claims in the interest of achieving more modest goals.) 5. Conflict (the attempt by one party to destroy, undermine, or harm another) and such related methods of reducing or temporarily eliminating conflict as coaptation (the case of dissenters being absorbed into the dominant group), mediation (the effort to resolve a conflict through the use of a third party), and the ritualized release of hostility under carefully controlled circumstances such as the Olympic games.
Reference groups are social groups that provide the standards in terms of which we evaluate ourselves. For exmaple, if a a high school student is worried about how her family will react to her grades, she is using her family as a reference group. The choice of reference groups is important because they can have both a positive and negative effect.
Other types of social groups include in-groups which, unlike out-groups (those groups toward which a person feels a sense of competition or opposition), are those to which "we" belong.
Group Leadership
Leadership is an element of all groups. A leader is a person who initiates the behavior of others by directing, organizing, influencing, or controlling what members do and how they think.
Group research has found two different types of leaders: instrumental (task-oriented leaders who organize the group in the pursuit of its goals) and expressive (social-emotional leaders who achieve harmony and solidarity among group members by offering emotional support).
Among the various styles of leadership are the authoritarian leader who gives orders, the democratic leader who seeks a consensus on the course of action to be taken, and the laissez-faire leader who mainly lets the group be-doing little if anything to provide direction and organization.
Bureaucracy
A bureaucracy is a rationally designed organizational model whose goal it is to perform complex tasks as efficiently as possible. A bureaucracy is a rational system of organization, administration, discipline, and control. Ideally, a bureaucracy has the following characteristics: 1. Paid officials on a fixed salary which is their primary source of income. 2. Officials who are accorded certain rights and privileges as a result of making a career out of holding office. 3. Regular salary increases, seniority rights, and promotions upon passing exams 4. Officials who qualify to inter the organization by having advanced education or vocational training. 5. The rights, responsibilities, obligations, privileges, and work procedures of these officials are rigidly and formally defined by the organization. 6. Officials are responsible for meeting the obligations of the office and for keeping the funds and files of that office separate from their personal ones.
The Peter Principle states that "in any hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
Iron Law of Oligarchy, formulated by Robert Michels, is the weakness of bureaucracies involving their tendency to result in a tendency of organizations to become increasingly dominated by small groups of people.