Lessons from T Groups- part 2:Individual and the group

The old proverb about too many cooks is obviously true for many organizations and groups. Is a group more effective at solving problems than are individuals working alone?

The field of group processes in behavioral science has grown because of increasing data that groups can be astonishingly ineffective. Group think as per studies lowered intellectual effectiveness, especially in certain political or large organizations. Assessing ground reality and moral judgment is also impacted, even among professionals who are highly intelligent and capable as a result of conformity pressures.

Two reasons where group think becomes counter-productive are:

a.     In a group the assumption could be that individual slackness may remain unanimous.

b.     All coordination involves costs; even when two people synchronize their activities it takes time, effort and some psychological costs of accommodation.

The bigger question is how then would groups work efficiently? At times in groups, a few individuals outperform majority, in terms of effort and output. Yet, it is the groups that gets the credit. Individual achievement may be side lined. At times, individuals may have an “excessive” need to go on an overdrive and the group then can ”set up” the person to do all the work. The payoff for the group is that while they can relatively take it easy, the task is still being completed-thanks to the overachievers in the group. In the short term , this is ok. However in the long term patterns like that need to be pointed out and corrected so that the group doesn’t operate on the norm of “exploitation” and also fail to develop and leverage all it’s members potential. Frequent individual and group efforts supplement each other. An effective way of balancing group needs vs individual needs is to divide task basis one’s natural aptitude and interest. In such a case, most likely the group will achieve optimum results and individual won’t be burdened. When a problem demands a single overall insight or an original set of decisions, an individual approach may be better than a group effort. Problems demanding a wide variety of skills and information on the cross checking of facts and ideas seem to need a group approach.