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Understanding group dynamics: Definition, theory, and examples

Unless you’re a writer who self-publishes, there’s a good chance you need to rely on others to accomplish anything in your role. Your colleagues support you, provide you with information, and play their part. Product managers never work in isolation.

You might be a member of a group, or even the leader, but regardless, working in a group comes with a unique set of challenges and expectations. Because of this, understanding group dynamics is essential for achieving the best results for your product.

In this article, you will learn what group dynamics are, how groups form, and the challenges that may arise.

What are group dynamics?

Group dynamics are the behaviors and psychological dimensions that occur between or within a social group. These refer to the roles individuals play in social settings and the way that they interact, cooperate, and compete with each other.

Understanding group dynamics allows you to better understand your team and maximize its potential.

There are a range of different groups you might belong to. These are some of the most common:

• Product group — The collection of product people working within the same organization and driving product-focused activities. This might include chief product officers, lead product managers, product managers, and product owners
• Scrum / delivery group — People tasked with getting product changes through the process and out of the door to end users. Often, these are scrum masters, software engineers, tech leads, QA, and designers
• Management group — Strategic decision makers who determine the direction of future activities. Normally these are department heads or C-suite members
• Colleague group — An informal collection of people you work alongside who share common interests, but without the formal structure of some of the other groups

Tuckman’s stages of group development (forming, norming, storming, performing)

Group formation refers to the roles and interaction that individuals undertake to bring people together into a coherent group.

This process was first described by Bruce Truckman in his 1965 publication “ Developmental Sequence in Small Groups ,” where he described the phases of group development in four distinct phases:

Imagine you are hired to join a start-up that’s just beginning its first product development journey. On day one you walk into the office and are faced with a founder, a designer, and an engineer. You are now part of this new group and the start of the journey to launching your new product requires your group to come together and start working on the MVP .

This initial period involves the group aligning around the overall goals for the product (both long-term and short-term), including some guidance from the founder on the vision and discussions from the group on what might be possible and when.

At this stage, the group is new, so individuals are typically understanding and polite with each other. Trust between members hasn’t been developed yet and there are fewer arguments among members, as individuals are cautious and aware of how they will be perceived and fit within the group.

2. Storming

Once your start-up group has a defined MVP and is working on a plan for its delivery, the group progresses together and trust has been developed between members. Now there’s a more secure environment where individuals can express their opinions. This can result in some degree of conflict.

For example, the founder could be insistent on the delivery of a feature in the MVP, which is countered by the engineer pushing back due to its initial complexity. This interaction between two members of the group doesn’t just impact those two members.

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The nature of the group means that the remaining members are also involved, trying to determine where the power in the group lies, how they’re expected to react to this disagreement, and what it might mean for them going forward.

Time progresses and now your start-up group works through any potential conflict and assumes roles and responsibilities for how they approach all aspects of group activity. This enables you to develop conventions of operation that support movement towards the agreed goal. Individuals can now make decisions on how they need to behave within the group to ensure that the goal is reached.

4. Performing

As you continue delivering on the goal and approach the launch of the MVP you are motivated and clear on what you need to do in order to get the product released. By this time, everyone in the group knows their role and can make autonomous decisions that keep everything moving in the right direction towards delivering the MVP release.

5 challenges groups face

Following the journey of your start-up team, you’d think everything was smooth sailing and the group got together, figured out what to do, and got on with it. However, the challenge with groups is that they involve multiple individuals and the dynamics between these members can have a real impact on the success of the group.

There are a range of challenges within a group including:

Lack of creativity

In early-stage groups, it’s common for there to be a lack of trust between team members. This happens because you put individuals together who don’t know each other, who haven’t worked together, and who don’t know what to expect from each other.

A popular way to address this is to promote team-building activities that can foster a level of trust and understanding that can then be transferred from the activity to the workplace. Think about paint-balling, sailing, or orienteering. These exercises provide a safe space for some of the forming and norming to occur outside of the main task at hand, but allow for growth in relationships and importantly trust.

With individual tasks, you only have yourself to consider and it’s clear that the results will likely reflect the effort you put in. On the other hand, In a group setting there can be an imbalance in effort that has a negative impact on the group’s performance.

If your start-up founder sets the goal and then disappears until delivery day, the team will think that the founder’s effort doesn’t match that of the team and frustration can ensue. You might overhear team members saying, “Why should I put in so much effort if others in the team don’t bother?” Once you’re at this point, the team needs to realign and provide more clarity on the expectations of its members.

Continuing from the example, if the designer comes up with a new design for a particular feature and presents it to the group, the group might accept the design without any serious feedback. The group knows they need to move forward and remain to date. However, challenging and providing critical feedback is key to pushing groups forward toward delivering better solutions.

If your group is too comfortable they won’t push the boundaries, so it’s important for there to be an opportunity to challenge and question the possibilities. Encourage an innovation culture led by constructive criticism .

If you give a group too much freedom they can splinter off in different directions, while, with too little autonomy a group can feel as if they aren’t invested in the group and are just cogs in the machine. You need to strike a balance between setting clear goals and providing opportunities for them to develop their own solutions.

Depending on the size of your group, the ability for sub-groups to form introduces risks to the performance of the overall group. Different dynamics will start to appear within the sub-groups that can derail the wider dynamics.

The exclusion of some group members from a sub-group (whether intentionally or not) might negatively impact trust or increase frustrations, and sub-groups might develop different goals that don’t fully align with the core group’s goals.

Group roles

Ultimately, the strongest groups are the ones where roles and responsibilities are clear. This supports the movement toward a common goal. However, when we’re talking about roles here we aren’t talking about job titles.

Within any group, there are task-based, procedural, and social roles to play in order for the group to achieve the team goals that include:

• Coach — Someone who provides support to individuals throughout the project, helping team members deliver the best of themselves
• Compromiser — The person who helps the team achieve their goals by finding a path through any challenges put in their path
• Coordinator — This role involves getting people together for discussions, keeping records of decisions, and providing clarity on activities. Without coordination, groups can go off in different directions
• Critic — Someone who is prepared to question approaches, decisions, and actions in order to ensure that the path is the right one
• Facilitator — The person who brings people together, makes sure roles and goals are clear, and ensures that the team are equipped to deliver
• Initiator — Someone who is always looking to find new solutions or encourage actionIf you think back to a time when you were working in a team you will likely be able to identify times when you’ve played all of these roles. You could have been a coach to the intern who needed support in finding their voice, or a critic of a proposed approach.

Assessing your own groups

Now that you’ve seen some of the factors that influence the dynamics within a group, take the time to understand how your groups are performing by asking yourself these questions:

• Does your group know its goals and how it’s performing against them?
• Do they feel like there are common goals that they own?
• If your group goes off course, how does it get back on track?
• Does your group challenge each other in a positive way?
• Do members feel like they can share their views with the group?
• How can members share their concerns or frustrations?
• Does your team learn from its mistakes?

You might answer yes to some of these and no to others, but the important thing is to be honest so that you can take steps as a group to address areas of improvement.

Teams are organic. The dynamics of a group are constantly evolving, with the changing of team members and the phase of work. Good teams will adapt and continue to work toward their common goal.

The important thing to remember is that groups need attention and nurturing.

If you’re struggling with a group, don’t assume that everyone understands group dynamics or has the skills to operate effectively within a group environment. Instead, lean on Tuckman’s stages of group development to understand what stage of development your team is at. Also keep in mind the major challenges that groups face and try to mitigate them as much as possible.

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6.2 Group Dynamics and Behavior

Learning objectives.

• Explain how and why group dynamics change as groups grow in size.
• Describe the different types of leaders and leadership styles.
• Be familiar with experimental evidence on group conformity.
• Explain how groupthink develops and why its development may lead to negative consequences.

Social scientists have studied how people behave in groups and how groups affect people’s behavior, attitudes, and perceptions (Gastil, 2009). Their research underscores the importance of groups for social life, but it also points to the dangerous influence groups can sometimes have on their members.

The Importance of Group Size

The distinction made earlier between small primary groups and larger secondary groups reflects the importance of group size for the functioning of a group, the nature of its members’ attachments, and the group’s stability. If you have ever taken a very small class, say fewer than 15 students, you probably noticed that the class atmosphere differed markedly from that of a large lecture class you may have been in. In the small class, you were able to know the professor better, and the students in the room were able to know each other better. Attendance in the small class was probably more regular than in the large lecture class.

Over the years, sociologists and other scholars have studied the effects of group size on group dynamics. One of the first to do so was German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who discussed the effects of groups of different sizes. The smallest group, of course, is the two-person group, or dyad , such as a married couple or two people engaged to be married or at least dating steadily. In this smallest of groups, Simmel noted, relationships can be very intense emotionally (as you might know from personal experience) but also very unstable and short lived: if one person ends the relationship, the dyad ends as well.

The smallest group is the two-person group, or dyad. Dyad relationships can be very intense emotionally but also unstable and short lived. Why is this so?

erin m – 2 couples – CC BY-NC 2.0.

A triad , or three-person group, involves relationships that are still fairly intense, but it is also more stable than a dyad. A major reason for this, said Simmel, is that if two people in a triad have a dispute, the third member can help them reach some compromise that will satisfy all the triad members. The downside of a triad is that two of its members may become very close and increasingly disregard the third member, reflecting the old saying that “three’s a crowd.” As one example, some overcrowded college dorms are forced to house students in triples, or three to a room. In such a situation, suppose that two of the roommates are night owls and like to stay up very late, while the third wants lights out by 11:00 p.m. If majority rules, as well it might, the third roommate will feel very dissatisfied and may decide to try to find other roommates.

As groups become larger, the intensity of their interaction and bonding decreases, but their stability increases. The major reason for this is the sheer number of relationships that can exist in a larger group. For example, in a dyad only one relationship exists, that between the two members of the dyad. In a triad (say composed of members A, B, and C), three relationships exist: A-B, A-C, and B-C. In a four-person group, the number of relationships rises to six: A-B, A-C, A-D, B-C, B-D, and C-D. In a five-person group, 10 relationships exist, and in a seven-person group, 21 exist (see Figure 6.2 “Number of Two-Person Relationships in Groups of Different Sizes” ). As the number of possible relationships rises, the amount of time a group member can spend with any other group member must decline, and with this decline comes less intense interaction and weaker emotional bonds. But as group size increases, the group also becomes more stable because it is large enough to survive any one member’s departure from the group. When you graduate from your college or university, any clubs, organizations, or sports teams to which you belong will continue despite your exit, no matter how important you were to the group, as the remaining members of the group and new recruits will carry on in your absence.

Figure 6.2 Number of Two-Person Relationships in Groups of Different Sizes

Group Leadership and Decision Making

Most groups have leaders. In the family, of course, the parents are the leaders, as much as their children sometimes might not like that. Even some close friendship groups have a leader or two who emerge over time. Virtually all secondary groups have leaders. These groups often have a charter, operations manual, or similar document that stipulates how leaders are appointed or elected and what their duties are.

Sociologists commonly distinguish two types of leaders, instrumental and expressive. An instrumental leader is a leader whose main focus is to achieve group goals and accomplish group tasks. Often instrumental leaders try to carry out their role even if they alienate other members of the group. The second type is the expressive leader , whose main focus is to maintain and improve the quality of relationships among group members and more generally to ensure group harmony. Some groups may have both types of leaders.

Related to the leader types is leadership style . Three such styles are commonly distinguished. The first, authoritarian leadership , involves a primary focus on achieving group goals and on rigorous compliance with group rules and penalties for noncompliance. Authoritarian leaders typically make decisions on their own and tell other group members what to do and how to do it. The second style, democratic leadership , involves extensive consultation with group members on decisions and less emphasis on rule compliance. Democratic leaders still make the final decision but do so only after carefully considering what other group members have said, and usually their decision will agree with the views of a majority of the members. The final style is laissez-faire leadership . Here the leader more or less sits back and lets the group function on its own and really exerts no leadership role.

When a decision must be reached, laissez-faire leadership is less effective than the other two in helping a group get things done. Whether authoritarian or democratic leadership is better for a group depends on the group’s priorities. If the group values task accomplishment more than anything else, including how well group members get along and how much they like their leader, then authoritarian leadership is preferable to democratic leadership, as it is better able to achieve group goals quickly and efficiently. But if group members place their highest priority on their satisfaction with decisions and decision making in the group, then they would want to have a lot of input in decisions. In this case, democratic leadership is preferable to authoritarian leadership.

Some small groups shun leadership and instead try to operate by consensus . In this model of decision making popularized by Quakers (T. S. Brown, 2009), no decision is made unless all group members agree with it. If even one member disagrees, the group keeps discussing the issue until it reaches a compromise that satisfies everyone. If the person disagreeing does not feel very strongly about the issue or does not wish to prolong the discussion, she or he may agree to “stand aside” and let the group make the decision despite the lack of total consensus. But if this person refuses to stand aside, no decision may be possible.

Some small groups operate by consensus instead of having a leader guiding or mandating their decision making. This model of decision making was popularized by the Society of Friends (Quakers).

John – All Are Welcome – CC BY 2.0.

A major advantage of the consensus style of decision making is psychic. Because everyone has a chance to voice an opinion about a potential decision, and no decisions are reached unless everyone agrees with them, group members will ordinarily feel good about the eventual decision and also about being in the group. The major disadvantage has to do with time and efficiency. When groups operate by consensus, their discussions may become long and tedious, as no voting is allowed and discussion must continue until everyone is satisfied with the outcome. This means the group may well be unable to make decisions quickly and efficiently.

One final issue is how gender influences leadership styles. Although the evidence indicates that women and men are equally capable of being good leaders, their leadership styles do tend to differ. Women are more likely to be democratic leaders, while men are more likely to be authoritarian leaders (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Because of this difference, women leaders sometimes have trouble securing respect from their subordinates and are criticized for being too soft. Yet if they respond with a more masculine, or authoritarian, style, they may be charged with acting too much like a man and be criticized in ways a man would not be.

Groups, Roles, and Conformity

We have seen in this and previous chapters that groups are essential for social life, in large part because they play an important part in the socialization process and provide emotional and other support for their members. As sociologists have emphasized since the origins of the discipline during the 19th century, the influence of groups on individuals is essential for social stability. This influence operates through many mechanisms, including the roles that group members are expected to play. Secondary groups such as business organizations are also fundamental to complex industrial societies such as our own.

Social stability results because groups induce their members to conform to the norms, values, and attitudes of the groups themselves and of the larger society to which they belong. As the chapter-opening news story about teenage vandalism reminds us, however, conformity to the group, or peer pressure, has a downside if it means that people might adopt group norms, attitudes, or values that are bad for some reason to hold and may even result in harm to others. Conformity is thus a double-edged sword. Unfortunately, bad conformity happens all too often, as several social-psychological experiments, to which we now turn, remind us.

Solomon Asch and Perceptions of Line Lengths

Several decades ago Solomon Asch (1958) conducted one of the first of these experiments. Consider the pair of cards in Figure 6.3 “Examples of Cards Used in Asch’s Experiment” . One of the lines (A, B, or C) on the right card is identical in length to the single line in the left card. Which is it? If your vision is up to par, you undoubtedly answered Line B. Asch showed several students pairs of cards similar to the pair in Figure 6.3 “Examples of Cards Used in Asch’s Experiment” to confirm that it was very clear which of the three lines was the same length as the single line.

Figure 6.3 Examples of Cards Used in Asch’s Experiment

Next, he had students meet in groups of at least six members and told them he was testing their visual ability. One by one he asked each member of the group to identify which of the three lines was the same length as the single line. One by one each student gave a wrong answer. Finally, the last student had to answer, and about one-third of the time the final student in each group also gave the wrong answer that everyone else was giving.

Unknown to these final students, all the other students were confederates or accomplices, to use some experimental jargon, as Asch had told them to give a wrong answer on purpose. The final student in each group was thus a naive subject, and Asch’s purpose was to see how often the naive subjects in all the groups would give the wrong answer that everyone else was giving, even though it was very clear it was a wrong answer.

After each group ended its deliberations, Asch asked the naive subjects who gave the wrong answers why they did so. Some replied that they knew the answer was wrong but they did not want to look different from the other people in the group, even though they were strangers before the experiment began. But other naive subjects said they had begun to doubt their own visual perception : they decided that if everyone else was giving a different answer, then somehow they were seeing the cards incorrectly.

Asch’s experiment indicated that groups induce conformity for at least two reasons. First, members feel pressured to conform so as not to alienate other members. Second, members may decide their own perceptions or views are wrong because they see other group members perceiving things differently and begin to doubt their own perceptive abilities. For either or both reasons, then, groups can, for better or worse, affect our judgments and our actions.

Stanley Milgram and Electric Shock

Although the type of influence Asch’s experiment involved was benign, other experiments indicate that individuals can conform in a very harmful way. One such very famous experiment was conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram (1974), who designed it to address an important question that arose after World War II and the revelation of the murders of millions of people during the Nazi Holocaust. This question was, “How was the Holocaust possible?” Many people blamed the authoritarian nature of German culture and the so-called authoritarian personality that it inspired among German residents, who, it was thought, would be quite ready to obey rules and demands from authority figures.

Milgram wanted to see whether Germans would indeed be more likely than Americans to obey unjust authority. He devised a series of experiments and found that his American subjects were quite likely to give potentially lethal electric shocks to other people. During the experiment, a subject, or “teacher,” would come into a laboratory and be told by a man wearing a white lab coat to sit down at a table housing a machine that sent electric shocks to a “learner.” Depending on the type of experiment, this was either a person whom the teacher never saw and heard only over a loudspeaker, a person sitting in an adjoining room whom the teacher could see through a window and hear over the loudspeaker, or a person sitting right next to the teacher.

The teacher was then told to read the learner a list of word pairs, such as mother-father, cat-dog, and sun-moon. At the end of the list, the teacher was then asked to read the first word of the first word pair—for example, “mother” in our list—and to read several possible matches. If the learner got the right answer (“father”), the teacher would move on to the next word pair, but if the learner gave the wrong answer, the teacher was to administer an electric shock to the learner. The initial shock was 15 volts (V), and each time a wrong answer was given, the shock would be increased, finally going up to 450 V, which was marked on the machine as “Danger: Severe Shock.” The learners often gave wrong answers and would cry out in pain as the voltage increased. In the 200-V range, they would scream, and in the 400-V range, they would say nothing at all. As far as the teachers knew, the learners had lapsed into unconsciousness from the electric shocks and even died. In reality, the learners were not actually being shocked. Instead, the voice and screams heard through the loudspeaker were from a tape recorder, and the learners that some teachers saw were only pretending to be in agony.

Before his study began, Milgram consulted several psychologists, who assured him that no sane person would be willing to administer lethal shock in his experiments. He thus was shocked (pun intended) to find that more than half the teachers went all the way to 450 V in the experiments, where they could only hear the learner over a loudspeaker and not see him. Even in the experiments where the learner was sitting next to the teacher, some teachers still went to 450 V by forcing a hand of the screaming, resisting, but tied-down learner onto a metal plate that completed the electric circuit.

Milgram concluded that people are quite willing, however reluctantly, to obey authority even if it means inflicting great harm on others. If that could happen in his artificial experiment situation, he thought, then perhaps the Holocaust was not so incomprehensible after all, and it would be too simplistic to blame the Holocaust just on the authoritarianism of German culture. Instead, perhaps its roots lay in the very conformity to roles and group norms that makes society possible in the first place. The same processes that make society possible may also make tragedies like the Holocaust possible.

The Third Wave

In 1969, concern about the Holocaust prompted Ron Jones, a high school teacher from Palo Alto, California, to conduct a real-life experiment that reinforced Milgram’s findings by creating a Nazi-like environment in the school in just a few short days (Jones, 1979). He began by telling his sophomore history class about the importance of discipline and self-control. He had his students sit at attention and repeatedly stand up and sit down in quiet unison and saw their pride as they accomplished this task efficiently. All of a sudden everyone in the class seemed to be paying rapt attention to what was going on.

The next day, Jones began his class by talking about the importance of community and of being a member of a team or a cause. He had his class say over and over, “Strength through discipline, strength through community.” Then he showed them a new class salute, made by bringing the right hand near the right shoulder in a curled position. He called it the Third Wave salute, because a hand in this position resembled a wave about to topple over. Jones then told the students they had to salute each other outside the classroom, which they did so during the next few days. As word of what was happening in Jones’s class spread, students from other classes asked if they could come into his classroom.

On the third day of the experiment, Jones gave membership cards to every student in his class, which had now gained several new members. He told them they had to turn in the name of any student who was disobeying the class’s rules. He then talked to them about the importance of action and hard work, both of which enhanced discipline and community. Jones told his students to recruit new members and to prevent any student who was not a Third Wave member from entering the classroom. During the rest of the day, students came to him with reports of other students not saluting the right way or of some students criticizing the experiment. Meanwhile, more than 200 students had joined the Third Wave.

On the fourth day of the experiment, more than 80 students squeezed into Jones’s classroom. Jones informed them that the Third Wave was in fact a new political movement in the United States that would bring discipline, order, and pride to the country and that his students were among the first in the movement. The next day, Jones said, the Third Wave’s national leader, whose identity was still not public, would be announcing a grand plan for action on national television at noon.

At noon the next day, more than 200 students crowded into the school auditorium to see the television speech. When Jones gave them the Third Wave salute, they saluted back. They chanted, “Strength through discipline, strength through community,” over and over, and then sat in silent anticipation as Jones turned on a large television in front of the auditorium. The television remained blank. Suddenly Jones turned on a movie projector and showed scenes from a Nazi rally and the Nazi death camps. As the crowd in the auditorium reacted with shocked silence, the teacher told them there was no Third Wave movement and that almost overnight they had developed a Nazi-like society by allowing their regard for discipline, community, and action to warp their better judgment. Many students in the auditorium sobbed as they heard his words.

The Third Wave experiment was designed to help high school students in Palo Alto, California, understand how the Nazi Holocaust (represented by this photo of the Auschwitz concentration camp) could have happened. The experiment illustrated that normal group processes that make social life possible can also lead people to conform to objectionable standards.

George Olcott – Auschwitz Fence – CC BY-NC 2.0.

The Third Wave experiment once again indicates that the normal group processes that make social life possible also can lead people to conform to standards—in this case fascism—that most of us would reject. It also helps us understand further how the Holocaust could have happened. As Jones (1979, pp. 509–10) told his students in the auditorium, “You thought that you were the elect. That you were better than those outside this room. You bargained your freedom for the comfort of discipline and superiority. You chose to accept the group’s will and the big lie over your own conviction.…Yes, we would all have made good Germans.”

Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment

In 1971, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo (1972) conducted an experiment to see what accounts for the extreme behaviors often seen in prisons: does this behavior stem from abnormal personalities of guards and prisoners or, instead, from the social structure of prisons, including the roles their members are expected to play? His experiment remains a compelling illustration of how roles and group processes can prompt extreme behavior.

Zimbardo advertised for male students to take part in a prison experiment and screened them out for histories of mental illness, violent behavior, and drug use. He then assigned them randomly to be either guards or prisoners in the experiment to ensure that any behavioral differences later seen between the two groups would have to stem from their different roles and not from any preexisting personality differences had they been allowed to volunteer.

The guards were told that they needed to keep order. They carried no weapons but did dress in khaki uniforms and wore reflector sunglasses to make eye contact impossible. On the first day of the experiment, the guards had the prisoners, who wore gowns and stocking caps to remove their individuality, stand in front of their cells (converted laboratory rooms) for the traditional prison “count.” They made the prisoners stand for hours on end and verbally abused those who complained. A day later the prisoners refused to come out for the count, prompting the guards to respond by forcibly removing them from their cells and sometimes spraying them with an ice-cold fire extinguisher to expedite the process. Some prisoners were put into solitary confinement. The guards also intensified their verbal abuse of the prisoners.

By the third day of the experiment, the prisoners had become very passive. The guards, several of whom indicated before the experiment that they would have trouble taking their role seriously, now were quite serious. They continued their verbal abuse of the prisoners and became quite hostile if their orders were not followed exactly. What had begun as somewhat of a lark for both guards and prisoners had now become, as far as they were concerned, a real prison.

Shortly thereafter, first one prisoner and then a few more came down with symptoms of a nervous breakdown. Zimbardo and his assistants could not believe this was possible, as they had planned for the experiment to last for two weeks, but they allowed the prisoners to quit the experiment. When the first one was being “released,” the guards had the prisoners chant over and over that this prisoner was a bad prisoner and that they would be punished for his weakness. When this prisoner heard the chants, he refused to leave the area because he felt so humiliated. The researchers had to remind him that this was only an experiment and that he was not a real prisoner. Zimbardo had to shut down the experiment after only six days.

Zimbardo (1972) later observed that if psychologists had viewed the behaviors just described in a real prison, they would likely have attributed them to preexisting personality problems in both guards and prisoners. As already noted, however, his random assignment procedure invalidated this possibility. Zimbardo thus concluded that the guards’ and prisoners’ behavioral problems must have stemmed from the social structure of the prison experience and the roles each group was expected to play. Zimbardo (2008) later wrote that these same processes help us understand “how good people turn evil,” to cite the subtitle of his book, and thus help explain the torture and abuse committed by American forces at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after the United States invaded and occupied that country in 2003. Once again we see how two of the building blocks of social life—groups and roles—contain within them the seeds of regrettable behavior and attitudes.

Groupthink may prompt people to conform with the judgments or behavior of a group because they do not want to appear different. Because of pressures to reach a quick verdict, jurors may go along with the majority opinion even if they believe otherwise. Have you ever been in a situation where groupthink occurred?

Brian DeWitt – Wolf Law Courtroom – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

As these examples suggest, sometimes people go along with the desires and views of a group against their better judgments, either because they do not want to appear different or because they have come to believe that the group’s course of action may be the best one after all. Psychologist Irving Janis (1972) called this process groupthink and noted it has often affected national and foreign policy decisions in the United States and elsewhere. Group members often quickly agree on some course of action without thinking completely of alternatives. A well-known example here was the decision by President John F. Kennedy and his advisers in 1961 to aid the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba by Cuban exiles who hoped to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Although several advisers thought the plan ill advised, they kept quiet, and the invasion was an embarrassing failure (Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 1997).

Groupthink is also seen in jury decision making. Because of the pressures to reach a verdict quickly, some jurors may go along with a verdict even if they believe otherwise. In juries and other small groups, groupthink is less likely to occur if at least one person expresses a dissenting view. Once that happens, other dissenters feel more comfortable voicing their own objections (Gastil, 2009).

Key Takeaways

• Leadership in groups and organizations involves instrumental and expressive leaders and several styles of leadership.
• Several social-psychological experiments illustrate how groups can influence the attitudes, behavior, and perceptions of their members. The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments showed that group processes can produce injurious behavior.

For Your Review

• Think of any two groups to which you now belong or to which you previously belonged. Now think of the leader(s) of each group. Were these leaders more instrumental or more expressive? Provide evidence to support your answer.
• Have you ever been in a group where you or another member was pressured to behave in a way that you considered improper? Explain what finally happened.

Asch, S. E. (1958). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In E. E. Maccoby, T. M. Newcomb, & E. L. Hartley (Eds.), Readings in social psychology . New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Brown, T. S. (2009). When friends attend to business . Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Retrieved from http://www.pym.org/pm/comments.php?id=1121_0_178_0_C .

Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders . Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Gastil, J. (2009). The group in society . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hart, P. T., Stern E. K., & Sundelius B., (Eds.). (1997). Beyond groupthink: Political group dynamics and foreign policy-making . Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink . Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Jones, R. (1979). The third wave: A classroom experiment in fascism. In J. J. Bonsignore, E. Karsh, P. d’Errico, R. M. Pipkin, S. Arons, & J. Rifkin (Eds.), Before the law: An introduction to the legal process (pp. 503–511). Dallas, TX: Houghton Mifflin.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority . New York, NY: Harper and Row.

Zimbardo, P. G. (2008). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil . New York, NY: Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1972). Pathology of imprisonment. Society, 9 , 4–8.

Sociology Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

8.2 Group Dynamics

Learning objectives.

• Understand the difference between informal and formal groups.
• Learn the stages of group development.
• Identify examples of the punctuated equilibrium model.
• Learn how group cohesion affects groups.
• Learn how social loafing affects groups.
• Learn how collective efficacy affects groups.

Types of Groups: Formal and Informal

What is a group ? A group is a collection of individuals who interact with each other such that one person’s actions have an impact on the others. How groups function in organizations important implications for organizational productivity. Groups in which members respect one another, feel the desire to contribute to the team, and are capable of coordinating their efforts may have high performance levels, whereas teams characterized by extreme levels of conflict or hostility may demoralize members of the workforce.

In organizations, you may encounter different types of groups. Informal work groups are made up of two or more individuals who are associated with one another in ways not prescribed by the formal organization. For example, a few people in the company who get together to play tennis on the weekend would be considered an informal group. A formal work group is made up of employees who mutually influence and interact regularly with one another on work-related matters. We will discuss many different types of formal work groups later on in this chapter. We will also distinguish groups from teams.

Stages of Group Development

Forming, storming, norming, and performing.

American organizational psychologist Bruce Tuckman presented a robust model in 1965 that is still widely used today. Based on his observations of group behavior in a variety of settings, he proposed a four-stage map of group evolution, also known as the forming-storming-norming-performing model (Tuckman, 1965). Later he enhanced the model by adding a fifth and final stage, the adjourning phase . Interestingly enough, just as an individual moves through developmental stages such as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, so does a group, although in a much shorter period of time. According to this theory, in order to successfully facilitate a group, the leader needs to move through various leadership styles over time. Generally, this is accomplished by first being more directive, eventually serving as a coach, and later, once the group is able to assume more power and responsibility for itself, shifting to a delegator. While research has not confirmed that this is descriptive of how groups progress, knowing and following these steps can help groups be more effective. For example, groups that do not go through the storming phase early on will often return to this stage toward the end of the group process to address unresolved issues. Another example of the validity of the group development model involves groups that take the time to get to know each other socially in the forming stage. When this occurs, groups tend to handle future challenges better because the individuals have an understanding of each other’s needs.

Figure 8.2 Stages of the Group Development Model

In the forming stage, the group comes together for the first time. The members may already know each other or they may be total strangers. In either case, there is a level of formality, some anxiety, and a degree of guardedness as group members are not sure what is going to happen next. “Will I be accepted? What will my role be? Who has the power here?” These are some of the questions participants think about during this stage of group formation. Because of the large amount of uncertainty, members tend to be polite, observant, and avoid conflict. They are trying to figure out the “rules of the game” without being too vulnerable. At this point, they may also be quite excited and optimistic about the task at hand, perhaps experiencing a level of pride at being chosen to join this particular group. Group members are trying to achieve several goals at this stage, although this may not necessarily be aware of it. First, they are trying to get to know each other. Often this can be accomplished by finding some common ground. Members also begin to explore group boundaries to determine what will be considered acceptable behavior. “Can I interrupt? Can I leave when I feel like it?” This trial phase may also involve testing the appointed leader or seeing if an informal leader emerges in groups in which no leader is assigned. At this point, group members are also discovering how the group will work in terms of what needs to be done and who will be responsible for each task. This stage is often characterized by abstract discussions about issues to be addressed by the group; those who like to get moving can become impatient with this part of the process. This phase is usually short in duration, perhaps a meeting or two.

Once group members feel sufficiently safe and included, they tend to enter the storming phase. Participants focus less on keeping their guard up as they shed social facades, becoming more authentic and more argumentative. Group members begin to explore their power and influence, and they often stake out their territory by differentiating themselves from the other group members rather than seeking common ground. Discussions can become heated as participants raise contending points of view and values, or argue over how tasks should be done and who is assigned to them. It is not unusual for group members to become defensive, competitive, or jealous. They may even take sides or begin to form cliques within the group. Questioning and resisting direction from the leader is also quite common. “Why should I have to do this? Who designed this project in the first place? Why do I have to listen to you?” Although little seems to get accomplished at this stage, group members are becoming more authentic as they express their deeper thoughts and feelings. What they are really exploring is “Can I truly be me, have power, and be accepted?” During this chaotic stage, a great deal of creative energy that was previously buried is released and available for use, but it takes skill to move the group on from the storming phase. In many cases, the group gets stuck in the storming phase.

OB Toolbox: Avoid Getting Stuck in the Storming Phase!

There are several steps you can take to avoid getting stuck in the storming phase of group development. Try the following if you feel the group process you are involved in is not progressing:

• Normalize conflict . Let members know this is a natural phase in the group-formation process. Ensure conflict is about the task, avoid any personal attacks.
• Be inclusive . Continue to make all members feel included and invite all views into the room. Mention how diverse ideas and opinions help foster creativity and innovation.
• Make sure everyone is heard . Facilitate heated discussions and help participants understand each other.
• Support all group members . This is especially important for those who feel more insecure.
• Remain positive . This is a key point to remember about the group’s ability to accomplish its goal.
• Don’t rush the group’s development . Remember that working through the storming stage can take several meetings.

Once group members discover that they can be authentic and that the group is capable of handling differences without dissolving, they are ready to enter the next stage, norming.

“We survived!” is the common sentiment at the norming stage. Group members often feel elated at this point, and they are much more committed to each other and the group’s goal. Feeling energized by knowing they can handle the “tough stuff,” group members are now ready to get to work. Finding themselves more cohesive and cooperative, participants find it easy to establish their own ground rules (or norms ) and define their operating procedures and goals. The group tends to make big decisions, while subgroups or individuals handle the smaller decisions. By this point, the group should be open with and have respect for one another, and members ask each other for both help and feedback. They may even begin to form friendships and share more personal information with each other. At this point, the leader should become more of a facilitator by stepping back and letting the group assume more responsibility for its goal. Since the group’s energy is running high, this is an ideal time to host a social or team-building event.

Galvanized by a sense of shared vision and a feeling of unity, the group has now shifted into high gear. Members are more interdependent, individuality and differences are respected, and group members feel themselves to be part of a greater entity. At the performing stage, participants are not only getting the work done, but they also pay greater attention to how they are doing it. They ask questions like, “Do our operating procedures best support productivity and quality assurance? Do we have suitable means for addressing differences that arise so we can preempt destructive conflicts? Are we relating to and communicating with each other in ways that enhance group dynamics and help us achieve our goals? How can I further develop as a person to become more effective?” By now, the group has matured, becoming more competent, autonomous, and insightful. Group leaders can finally move into coaching roles and help members grow in skill and leadership.

Just as groups form, so do they end. For example, many groups or teams formed in a business context are project oriented and therefore are temporary in nature. Alternatively, a working group may dissolve due to an organizational restructuring. Just as when we graduate from school or leave home for the first time, these endings can be bittersweet, with group members feeling a combination of victory, grief, and insecurity about what is coming next. For those who like routine and bond closely with fellow group members, this transition can be particularly challenging. Group leaders and members alike should be sensitive to handling these endings respectfully and compassionately. An ideal way to close a group is to set aside time to debrief (“How did it all go? What did we learn?”), acknowledge each other, and celebrate a job well done. As a team leader/facilitator, you might also consider following up again with the group six months or a year later. Sometimes, time is needed for reflecting on lessons learned, and those after-the-fact insights can help people with their future group work.

The Punctuated-Equilibrium Model

As you may have noted, the five-stage model we have just reviewed is meant to be a linear process. According to the model, a group progresses to the performing stage, at which point it finds itself in an ongoing, smooth-sailing situation until the group dissolves. In reality, subsequent researchers, most notably Joy H. Karriker, have found that the life of a group is much more dynamic and cyclical in nature (Karriker, 2005). For example, a group may operate in the performing stage for several months. Then, because of a disruption, such as a competing emerging technology that changes the rules of the game or the introduction of a new CEO, the group may revert back to the storming phase before returning to performing. Ideally, any regression in the linear group progression will ultimately result in a higher level of functioning. Proponents of this cyclical model draw from behavioral scientist Connie Gersick’s study of punctuated equilibrium (Gersick, 1991).

The concept of punctuated equilibrium was first proposed in 1972 by paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, who both believed that evolution occurred in rapid, radical spurts rather than gradually over time. Identifying numerous examples of this pattern in social behavior, Gersick found that the concept also applied to organizational change. She proposed that groups remain fairly static, maintaining a certain equilibrium for long periods of time. Change during these periods is incremental, largely due to the resistance to change that arises when systems take root and processes become institutionalized. In this model, revolutionary change occurs in brief, punctuated bursts, generally catalyzed by a crisis or problem that breaks through the systemic inertia and shakes up the deep organizational structures in place. At this point, the organization or group has the opportunity to learn and create new structures that are better aligned with current realities. Whether the group does this is not guaranteed. In sum, in Gersick’s model, groups can repeatedly cycle through the storming and performing stages, with revolutionary change taking place during short transitional windows. For organizations and groups who understand that disruption, conflict, and chaos are inevitable in the life of a social system, these disruptions represent opportunities for innovation and creativity.

Figure 8.3 The Punctuated Equilibrium Model

Cohesion can be thought of as a kind of social glue. It refers to the degree of camaraderie within the group. Cohesive groups are those in which members are attached to each other and act as one unit. Generally speaking, the more cohesive a group is, the more productive it will be and the more rewarding the experience will be for the group’s members (Beal et al., 2003; Evans & Dion, 1991). Members of cohesive groups tend to have the following characteristics: They have a collective identity; they experience an emotional bond and a desire to remain part of the group; they share a sense of purpose, working together on a meaningful task or cause; and they establish a structured pattern of communication.

The fundamental factors affecting group cohesion include the following:

• Similarity . Generally, the more similar group members are in terms of age, sex, education, skills, attitudes, values, and beliefs, the more easily and quickly the group will bond. However, groups that work hard to create cohesion in spite of significant differences can enjoy especially deep bonds.
• Stability . The longer a group stays together, the more cohesive it becomes.
• Size . Smaller groups tend to have higher levels of cohesion.
• Support . When group members receive coaching and are encouraged to support their fellow team members, group identity strengthens.
• Satisfaction . Cohesion is correlated with how pleased group members are with each other’s performance, behavior, and conformity to group norms.

As you might imagine, there are many benefits in creating a cohesive group. Members are generally more personally satisfied and feel greater self-confidence and self-esteem when in a group where they feel they belong. For many, membership in such a group can be a buffer against stress, which can improve mental and physical well-being. Because members are invested in the group and its work, they are more likely to regularly attend and actively participate in the group, taking more responsibility for the group’s functioning. In addition, members can draw on the strength of the group to persevere through challenging situations that might otherwise be too hard to tackle alone.

OB Toolbox: Steps to Creating and Maintaining a Cohesive Team

• Align the group with the greater organization . Establish common objectives in which members can get involved.
• Let members have choices in setting their own goals . Include them in decision making at the organizational level.
• Define clear roles . Demonstrate how each person’s contribution furthers the group goal—everyone is responsible for a special piece of the puzzle.
• Situate group members in close proximity to each other . This builds familiarity.
• Give frequent praise . Both individuals and groups benefit from praise. Also encourage them to praise each other. This builds individual self-confidence, reaffirms positive behavior, and creates an overall positive atmosphere.
• Treat all members with dignity and respect . This demonstrates that there are no favorites and everyone is valued.
• Celebrate differences . This highlights each individual’s contribution while also making diversity a norm.
• Establish common rituals . Thursday morning coffee, monthly potlucks—these reaffirm group identity and create shared experiences.

Can a Group Have Too Much Cohesion?

Keep in mind that groups can have too much cohesion. Because members can come to value belonging over all else, an internal pressure to conform may arise, causing some members to modify their behavior to adhere to group norms. Members may become conflict avoidant, focusing more on trying to please each other so as not to be ostracized. In some cases, members might censor themselves to maintain the party line. As such, there is a superficial sense of harmony and less diversity of thought. Having less tolerance for deviants, who threaten the group’s static identity, cohesive groups will often excommunicate members who dare to disagree. Members attempting to make a change may even be criticized or undermined by other members, who perceive this as a threat to the status quo. The painful possibility of being marginalized can keep many members in line with the majority.

The more strongly members identify with the group, the easier it is to see outsiders as inferior, or enemies in extreme cases, which can lead to increased insularity. This form of prejudice can have a downward spiral effect. Not only is the group not getting corrective feedback from within its own confines, it is also closing itself off from input and a cross-fertilization of ideas from the outside. In such an environment, groups can easily adopt extreme ideas that will not be challenged. Denial increases as problems are ignored and failures are blamed on external factors. With limited, often biased, information and no internal or external opposition, groups like these can make disastrous decisions. Groupthink is a group pressure phenomenon that increases the risk of the group making flawed decisions by allowing reductions in mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment. Groupthink is most common in highly cohesive groups (Janis, 1972).

Cohesive groups can go awry in much milder ways. For example, group members can value their social interactions so much that they have fun together but spend little time on accomplishing their assigned task. Or a group’s goal may begin to diverge from the larger organization’s goal and those trying to uphold the organization’s goal may be ostracized (e.g., teasing the class “brain” for doing well in school). Normalizing conflict and even encouraging it (e.g., by assigning a group member to the “devil’s advocate” role each meeting) can provide a safer environment for disagreements.

In addition, research shows that cohesion leads to acceptance of group norms (Goodman, Ravlin, & Schminke, 1987). Groups with high task commitment do well, but imagine a group where the norms are to work as little as possible? As you might imagine, these groups get little accomplished and can actually work together against the organization’s goals.

Social Loafing

Social loafing refers to the tendency of individuals to put in less effort when working in a group context. This phenomenon, also known as the Ringelmann effect, was first noted by French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann in 1913. In one study, he had people pull on a rope individually and in groups. He found that as the number of people pulling increased, individuals reduced their own effort so that the benefits of more people were not realized (Karau & Williams, 1993).

Why do people work less hard when they are working with other people? Observations show that as the size of the group grows, this effect becomes larger as well (Karau & Williams, 1993). The social loafing tendency is less a matter of being lazy and more a matter of perceiving that one will receive neither one’s fair share of rewards if the group is successful nor blame if the group fails. Rationales for this behavior include, “My own effort will have little effect on the outcome,” “Others aren’t pulling their weight, so why should I?” or “I don’t have much to contribute, but no one will notice anyway.” This is a consistent effect across a great number of group tasks and countries (Gabrenya, Latane, & Wang, 1983; Harkins & Petty, 1982; Taylor & Faust, 1952; Ziller, 1957). Research also shows that perceptions of fairness are related to less social loafing (Price, Harrison, & Gavin, 2006). Therefore, teams that are deemed as more fair should also see less social loafing.

OB Toolbox: Tips for Preventing Social Loafing in Your Group

When designing a group project, here are some considerations to keep in mind:

• Carefully choose the number of individuals you need to get the task done . The likelihood of social loafing increases as group size increases (especially if the group consists of 10 or more people), because it is easier for people to feel unneeded or inadequate, and it is easier for them to “hide” in a larger group.
• Clearly define each member’s tasks in front of the entire group . If you assign a task to the entire group, social loafing is more likely. For example, instead of stating, “By Monday, let’s find several articles on the topic of stress,” you can set the goal of “By Monday, each of us will be responsible for finding five articles on the topic of stress.” When individuals have specific goals, they become more accountable for their performance.
• Design and communicate to the entire group a system for evaluating each person’s contribution . You may have a midterm feedback session in which each member gives feedback to every other member. This would increase the sense of accountability individuals have. You may even want to discuss the principle of social loafing in order to discourage it.
• Build a cohesive group . When group members develop strong relational bonds, they are more committed to each other and the success of the group, and they are therefore more likely to pull their own weight.
• Assign tasks that are highly engaging and inherently rewarding . Design challenging, unique, and varied activities that will have a significant impact on the individuals themselves, the organization, or the external environment. For example, one group member may be responsible for crafting a new incentive-pay system through which employees can direct some of their bonus to their favorite nonprofits.
• Make sure individuals feel that they are needed . If the group ignores a member’s contributions because these contributions do not meet the group’s performance standards, members will feel discouraged and are unlikely to contribute in the future. Make sure that everyone feels included and needed by the group.

Collective Efficacy

Collective efficacy refers to a group’s perception of its ability to successfully perform well (Bandura, 1997). Collective efficacy is influenced by a number of factors, including watching others (“that group did it and we’re better than them”), verbal persuasion (“we can do this”), and how a person feels (“this is a good group”). Research shows that a group’s collective efficacy is related to its performance (Gully et al., 2002; Porter, 2005; Tasa, Taggar, & Seijts, 2007). In addition, this relationship is higher when task interdependence (the degree an individual’s task is linked to someone else’s work) is high rather than low.

Key Takeaway

Groups may be either formal or informal. Groups go through developmental stages much like individuals do. The forming-storming-norming-performing-adjourning model is useful in prescribing stages that groups should pay attention to as they develop. The punctuated-equilibrium model of group development argues that groups often move forward during bursts of change after long periods without change. Groups that are similar, stable, small, supportive, and satisfied tend to be more cohesive than groups that are not. Cohesion can help support group performance if the group values task completion. Too much cohesion can also be a concern for groups. Social loafing increases as groups become larger. When collective efficacy is high, groups tend to perform better.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Beal, D. J., Cohen, R. R., Burke, M. J., & McLendon, C. L. (2003). Cohesion and performance in groups: A meta-analytic clarification of construct relations. Journal of Applied Psychology , 88 , 989–1004.

Evans, C. R., & Dion, K. L. (1991). Group cohesion and performance: A meta-analysis. Small Group Research , 22 , 175–186.

Gabrenya, W. L., Latane, B., & Wang, Y. (1983). Social loafing in cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Cross-Cultural Perspective , 14 , 368–384.

Gersick, C. J. G. (1991). Revolutionary change theories: A multilevel exploration of the punctuated equilibrium paradigm. Academy of Management Review , 16 , 10–36.

Goodman, P. S., Ravlin, E., & Schminke, M. (1987). Understanding groups in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior , 9 , 121–173.

Gully, S. M., Incalcaterra, K. A., Joshi, A., & Beaubien, J. M. (2002). A meta-analysis of team-efficacy, potency, and performance: Interdependence and level of analysis as moderators of observed relationships. Journal of Applied Psychology , 87 , 819–832.

Harkins, S., & Petty, R. E. (1982). Effects of task difficulty and task uniqueness on social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 43 , 1214–1229.

Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of Groupthink . New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 65 , 681–706.

Karriker, J. H. (2005). Cyclical group development and interaction-based leadership emergence in autonomous teams: An integrated model. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies , 11 , 54–64.

Porter, C. O. L. H. (2005). Goal orientation: Effects on backing up behavior, performance, efficacy, and commitment in teams. Journal of Applied Psychology , 90 , 811–818.

Price, K. H., Harrison, D. A., & Gavin, J. H. (2006). Withholding inputs in team contexts: Member composition, interaction processes, evaluation structure, and social loafing. Journal of Applied Psychology , 91 , 1375–1384.

Tasa, K., Taggar, S., & Seijts, G. H. (2007). The development of collective efficacy in teams: A multilevel and longitudinal perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology , 92 , 17–27.

Taylor, D. W., & Faust, W. L. (1952). Twenty questions: Efficiency of problem-solving as a function of the size of the group. Journal of Experimental Psychology , 44 , 360–363.

Tuckman, B. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin , 63 , 384–399.

Ziller, R. C. (1957). Four techniques of group decision-making under uncertainty. Journal of Applied Psychology , 41 , 384–388.

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• v.3(4); 2016 Apr

Understanding the group dynamics and success of teams

Michael klug.

1 Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

James P. Bagrow

2 Vermont Complex Systems Center, The University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

3 Vermont Advanced Computing Core, The University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

Associated Data

All data analysed are made publicly available by the GitHub Archive Project ( https://www.githubarchive.org ).

Complex problems often require coordinated group effort and can consume significant resources, yet our understanding of how teams form and succeed has been limited by a lack of large-scale, quantitative data. We analyse activity traces and success levels for approximately 150 000 self-organized, online team projects. While larger teams tend to be more successful, workload is highly focused across the team, with only a few members performing most work. We find that highly successful teams are significantly more focused than average teams of the same size, that their members have worked on more diverse sets of projects, and the members of highly successful teams are more likely to be core members or ‘leads’ of other teams. The relations between team success and size, focus and especially team experience cannot be explained by confounding factors such as team age, external contributions from non-team members, nor by group mechanisms such as social loafing. Taken together, these features point to organizational principles that may maximize the success of collaborative endeavours.

1. Introduction

Massive datasets describing the activity patterns of large human populations now provide researchers with rich opportunities to quantitatively study human dynamics [ 1 , 2 ], including the activities of groups or teams [ 3 , 4 ]. New tools, including electronic sensor systems, can quantify team activity and performance [ 5 , 4 ]. With the rise in prominence of network science [ 6 , 7 ], much effort has gone into discovering meaningful groups within social networks [ 8 – 15 ] and quantifying their evolution [ 15 , 16 ]. Teams are increasingly important in research and industrial efforts [ 3 , 4 , 17 – 21 ], and small, coordinated groups are a significant component of modern human conflict [ 22 , 23 ]. There are many important dimensions along which teams should be studied, including their size, how work is distributed among their members, and the differences and similarities in the experiences and backgrounds of those team members. Recently, there has been much debate on the ‘group size hypothesis’ that larger groups are more robust or perform better than smaller ones [ 24 – 27 ]. Scholars of science have noted for decades that collaborative research teams have been growing in size and importance [ 20 , 28 – 30 ]. At the same time, however, social loafing, where individuals apply less effort to a task when they are in a group than when they are alone, may counterbalance the effectiveness of larger teams [ 31 – 33 ]. Meanwhile, case studies show that leadership [ 3 , 34 – 36 ] and experience [ 37 , 38 ] are key components of successful team outcomes, while specialization and multitasking are important but potentially error-prone mechanisms for dealing with complexity and cognitive overload [ 39 , 40 ]. In all of these areas, large-scale, quantitative data can push the study of teams forward.

Teams are important for modern software engineering tasks, and researchers have long studied the digital traces of open source software projects to better quantify and understand how teams work on software projects [ 41 , 42 ]. Researchers have investigated estimators of work activity or effort based on edit volume, such as different ways to count the number of changes made to a software's source code [ 43 – 46 ]. Various dimensions of success of software projects such as popularity, timeliness of bug fixes or other quality measures have been studied [ 47 – 49 ]. Successful open source software projects show a layered structure of primary or core contributors surrounded by lesser, secondary contributors [ 50 ]. At the same time, much work is focused on case studies [ 45 , 51 ] of small numbers of highly successful, large projects [ 41 ]. Considering these studies alone runs the risk of survivorship bias or other selection biases, so large-scale studies of large quantities of teams are important complements to these works.

Users of the GitHub web platform can form teams to work on real-world projects, primarily software development but also music, literature, design work and more. A number of important scientific computing resources are now developed through GitHub, including astronomical software, genetic sequencing tools and key components of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment's data pipeline. 1 A ‘GitHub for science’ initiative has been launched 2 and GitHub is becoming the dominant service for open scientific development.

GitHub provides rich public data on team activities, including when new teams form, when members join existing teams and when a team's project is updated. GitHub also provides social media tools for the discovery of interesting projects. Users who see the work of a team can choose to flag it as interesting to them by ‘starring’ it. The number of these ‘stargazers’ S allows us to quantify one aspect of the success of the team, in a manner analogous to the use of citations of research literature as a proxy for ‘impact’ [ 52 ]. Of course, as with bibliometric impact, one should be cautious and not consider success to be a perfectly accurate measure of quality , something that is far more difficult to objectively quantify. Instead this is a measure of popularity as would be other statistics such as web traffic, number of downloads and so forth [ 47 ].

In this study, we analyse the memberships and activities of approximately 150 000 teams, as they perform real-world tasks, to uncover the blend of features that relate to success. To the best of our knowledge this is the largest study of real-world team success to date. We present results that demonstrate (i) how teams distribute or focus work activity across their members, (ii) the mixture of experiential diversity and collective leadership roles in teams, and (iii) how successful teams are different from other teams while accounting for confounds such as team size.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: in § 2 , we describe our GitHub dataset; give definitions of a team, team success and work activity/focus of a team member; and introduce metrics to measure various aspects of the experience and experiential diversity of a team's members. In § 3 , we present our results relating these measures to team success. In § 4 , we present statistical tests on linear regression models of team features to control for potential confounds between team features and team success. Lastly, we conclude with a discussion in § 5 .

2. Material and methods

2.1. dataset and team selection.

Public GitHub data covering 1 January 2013 to 1 April 2014 was collected from githubarchive.org in April 2014. In their own words, ‘GitHub Archive is a project to record the public GitHub timeline, archive it, and make it easily accessible for further analysis’. These activity traces contain approximately 110M unique events, including when users create, join, or update projects. Projects on GitHub are called ‘repositories’. For this work, we define a team as the set of users who can directly update (push to) a repository. These users constitute the primary team members as they have either created the project or been granted autonomy to work on the project. The number of team members was denoted by M . Activity or workload W was estimated from the number of pushes. A push is a bundle of code updates (known as commits), however most pushes contain only a single commit (electronic supplementary material; see also [ 46 ]). As with all studies measuring worker effort from lines-of-code metrics, this is an imperfect measure as the complexity of a unit of work does not generally map to the quantity of edits. Users on GitHub can bookmark projects they find interesting. This is called ‘stargazing’. We take the maximum number of stargazers for a team as its measure of success S . This is a popularity measure of success; however, the choice to bookmark a project does imply it offers some value to the user. To avoid abandoned projects, studied teams have at least one stargazer ( S >0) and at least two updates per month on average within the githubarchive data. These selection criteria leave N =151 542 teams. We also collect the time of creation on GitHub for each team project. This is useful for measuring confounds: for example, older teams may tend to have both more members and more opportunities to increase success. Of the teams studied, 67.8% were formed within our data window. Beyond considering team age as a potential confounder, we do not study temporal dynamics such as team formation in this work. A small number of studied teams (1.08%) have more than 10 primary members ( M >10); those teams were not shown in figures, but they were present in all statistical analyses. Lastly, to ensure our results are not due to outliers, in some analyses we excluded teams above the 99th percentile of S . Despite a strong skew in the distribution of S , these highly popular teams account for only 2.54% of the total work activity of the teams considered in this study (2.27% when considering teams with M ≤10 members).

2.1.1. Secondary team

GitHub provides a mechanism for external, non-team contributors to propose work that team members can then choose to use or not. These proposals are called pull requests. (Other mechanisms, such as discussions about issues, are also available to non-team contributors.) These secondary or external team contributors are not the focus of this work and have already been well studied by OSS researchers [ 41 ]. However, it is important to ensure that they do not act as confounding factors for our results, as more successful teams will tend to have more secondary contributions than other teams. So we measure for each team M ext , the number of unique users who submit at least one pull request, and W ext , the number of pull requests. We will include these measures in our combined regression models. Despite their visibility in GitHub, pull requests are rare [ 53 ]; in our data, 57.7% of teams we study have W ext =0, and when present pull requests are greatly outnumbered by pushes on average: 〈 W / W ext | W ext >0〉=42.3 (median 16.0), averaged over all teams with at least one pull request.

2.2. Effective team size

The number of team members, M , does not fully represent the size of a team as the distribution of work may be highly skewed across team members. To capture the effective team size m , accounting for the relative contribution levels of members, we use m =2 H , where H = − ∑ i = 1 M f i log 2 ⁡ f i , and f i = w i / W is the fraction of work performed by team member i . This gives m = M when all f i =1/ M , as expected. This simple, entropic measure is known as perplexity in linguistics and is closely related to species diversity indices used in ecology and the Herfindahl–Hirschman index used in economics.

2.3. Experience, diversity and leads

Denote with R i the set of projects that user i works on (has pushed to). (Projects in R i need at least twice-monthly updates on average, as before, but may have S =0 so as to better capture i 's background, not just successful projects.) We estimate the experience E of a team of size M as

and the experiential diversity D as

where the sums and union run over the M members of the team. Note that D ∈[1/ M ,1). Experience measures the quantity of projects the team works on while diversity measures how many or how few projects the team members have in common, the goal being to capture how often the team has worked together. Lastly, someone is a lead when, for at least one project they work on, they contribute more work to that project than any other member. A non-lead member of team j may be the lead of project k ≠ j . The number of leads L k in team k of size M k is

where L ij =1 if user i is the lead of team j , and zero otherwise. The first sum runs over the M k members of team k , the second runs over all projects j . Of course, the larger the team the more potential leads it may contain so when studying the effects of leads on team success we only compare teams of the same size (comparing L while holding M fixed). Otherwise, E and D already account for team size.

We began our analysis by measuring team success S as a function of team size M , the number of primary contributors to the team's project. As S is, at least partially, a popularity measure, we expect larger teams to also be more successful. Indeed, there was a positive and significant relationship ( p <10 −10 , rank correlation ρ =0.0845) between the size of a team and its success, with 300% greater success on average for teams of size M =10 compared with solos with M =1 ( figure 1 ). This strong trend also holds for the median success (inset). While this observed trend was highly significant, the rank correlation ρ indicates that there remains considerable variation in S that is not captured by team size alone.

Larger teams have significantly more success on average, with a 300% increase in S as M goes from 1 to 10. This correlation may be due to more team members driving project success or success may act as a mechanism to recruit team members. Error bars here and throughout denote ±1.96 s.e. (Inset) Using the median instead of the mean shows that this trend is not due to outliers.

Our next analysis reveals an important relationship between team focus and success. Unlike bibliographic studies, where teams can only be quantified as the listed coauthors of a paper, the data here allow us to measure the intrinsic work or volume of contributions from each team member to the project. For each team we measured the contribution w r of a member to the team's ongoing project, how many times that member updated the project (see Material and methods). Team members were ranked by contribution, so w 1 counts the work of the member who contributed the most, w 2 the second heaviest contributor and so forth. The total work of a team is W = ∑ r = 1 M w r .

We found that the distribution of work over team members showed significant skew, with w 1 often more than two to three times greater than w 2 ( figure 2 a ; electronic supplementary material). This means that the workloads of projects are predominantly carried by a handful of team members, or even just a single person. Larger teams perform more total work, and the heaviest contributor carries much of that effort: the inset of figure 2 a shows that w 1 / W , the fraction of work carried by the rank one member, falls slowly with team size, and is typically far removed from the lower bound of equal work among all team members. See the electronic supplementary material for more details. This result is in line with prior studies [ 51 ], supporting the plausibility of our definition of a team and our use of pushes to measure work.

Teams are focused, and top teams are more focused than other teams of the same size. ( a ) The average fraction of work w r / W performed by the r th most active member, where W is the total work of the team, for different size teams. Larger teams perform more work overall, but the majority of work is always done by a small subset of the M members (note the logarithmic axis). Inset: the fraction of work performed by the most active team member is always high, often larger than half the total. The dashed line indicates the lower bound of uniform work distribution, w r / W =1/ M . ( b ) A team is dominated when the most active member does more work than all other members combined. Top teams are significantly more probably to be dominated than either average teams or bottom teams for all M >2. ( Top team : above the 90th percentile in S ; average team : greater than the 40th percentile of S and less than or equal to the 60th percentile of S ; bottom team : at or below the 10th percentile of S .) ( c ) The effective team size m (see Material and methods), a measure that accounts for the skewed distribution of work in ( a ), is significantly smaller than M . Moreover, top teams are significantly more focused, having smaller effective sizes, than average or bottom teams at all sizes M >1. This includes the case M =2, which did not show a significant difference in ( b ). The dashed line denotes the upper bound m = M . ( d ) Success is universally higher for teams with smaller m / M , independent of M , further supporting the importance of focused workloads. The solid lines indicates the average trend for all teams 2≤ M ≤10. These results are not due to outliers in S ; see the electronic supplementary material.

This focus in work activity indicates that the majority of the team serves as a support system for a core set of members. Does this arrangement play a role in whether or not teams are successful? We investigated this in several ways. First, we asked whether or not a team was dominated , meaning that the lead member contributed more work than all other members combined ( w 1 / W  > ½). Highly successful ‘top’ teams, those in the top 10% of the success distribution, were significantly more likely to be dominated than average teams, those in the middle 20% of S , or ‘bottom’ teams, those in the bottom 10% of the S ( figure 2 b ).

Can this result be due to a confounding effect from success? More successful projects will tend to have more external contributors, for example, which can change the distribution of work. For example, in one scenario a team member may be a ‘community manager’ merging in large numbers of external contributions from non-team members. To test this we examined only the 57.7% of teams that had no external contributions ( W ext =0) and tested among only those teams whether dominated teams were more successful than non-dominated teams. Within this subset of teams, dominated teams had significantly higher S than non-dominated teams (Mann–Whitney U test (MWU) with continuity correction, p <10 −8 ). The MWU is non-parametric, using ranks of (in this case) S to mitigate the effects of skewed data, and does not assume normality. We conclude from this that external contributions do not fully explain the relationship between workload focus and team success.

Next, we moved beyond the effects of the heaviest contributor by performing the following analysis. For each team we computed its effective team size m , directly accounting for the skew in workload (see Material and methods for full details). This effective size can be roughly thought of as the average number of unique contributors per unit time and need not be a whole number. For example, a team of size M =2 where both members contribute equally will have effective size m =2, but if one member is responsible for 95% of the work the team would have m ≈1.22. Note that M and m are positively correlated ( ρ =0.985).

Figure 2 c shows that (i) all teams are effectively much smaller than their total size would indicate, for all sizes M >1, and (ii) top teams are significantly smaller in effective size (and therefore more focused in their work distribution) than average or bottom teams with the same M . Further, success is significantly, negatively correlated with m , for all M ( figure 2 d ). More focused teams have significantly more success than less focused teams of the same size, regardless of total team size.

Further analyses revealed the importance of team composition and its role in team success.

Team members do not perform their work in a vacuum, they each bring experiences from their other work. Often members of a team will work on other projects. We investigated these facets of a team's composition by exploring (i) how many projects the team's members have worked on, (ii) how diverse the other projects are (whether the team members have many or few other projects in common) and (iii) how many team members were ‘leads’ of other projects.

An estimate of experience, E , the average number of other projects that team members have worked on (see Material and methods), was significantly related to success. However, the trend was not particularly strong (see the electronic supplementary material) and, as we later show via combined modelling efforts, this relationship with success was entirely explainable by the teams' other measurable quantities.

It may be that the volume of experience does not contribute much to the success of a team, but this seems to contradict previous studies on the importance of experience and wisdom [ 37 , 38 ]. To investigate, we turned to a different facet of a team's composition, the diversity of the team's background. Successful teams may tend to be composed of members who have frequently worked together on the same projects in the past, perhaps developing an experiential shorthand. Conversely, successful teams may instead have multiple distinct viewpoints, solving challenges with a multi-disciplinary perspective [ 54 ].

To estimate the distinctness of team member backgrounds, the diversity D was measured as the fraction of projects that team members have worked on that are unique (see Material and methods). Diversity is low when all M members have worked on the same projects together ( D =1/ M ), but D grows closer to 1 as their backgrounds become increasingly diverse. A high team diversity was significantly correlated with success, regardless of team size ( figure 3 ). Even small teams seem to have benefited greatly from diversity: high- D duos averaged nearly eight times the success of low- D duos. The relationship between D and S was even stronger for larger teams ( figure 3 , inset), implying that larger teams can more effectively translate this diversity into success. Even if the raw volume of experience a team has does not play a significant role in the team's success, the diversity of that experience was significantly correlated with team success. See also our combined modelling efforts.

Teams whose members belong to more diverse sets of other teams tend to be more successful, regardless of team size. The dashed line denotes the average success of all teams. (Inset) The rank correlation ρ between diversity and success grows with team size. Teams above the 99th percentile in S were excluded to ensure the trend is not due to outliers.

Considerable attention has been paid recently to collective leadership, where decision-making structures emerge from the mass of the group instead of being imposed via a top-down hierarchy [ 34 , 36 ]. The open collaborations studied here have the potential to display collective leadership due to their volunteer-driven, self-organized nature. The heaviest contributor to a team is most likely to occupy such a leadership role. Further, as teams overlap, a secondary member of one team may be the ‘lead,’ or heaviest contributor to another. This poses an interesting question: Even though teams are heavily focused, are teams more successful when they contain many leads, or few? A team with many leads will bring considerable experience, but most of its members may also be unable to dedicate their full attention to the team.

To answer this, we measured L , the number of team members who are the lead of at least one project (1≤ L ≤ M , see Material and methods) and found that teams with many leads have significantly higher success than teams of the same size with fewer leads ( figure 4 ). Only one team member can be the primary contributor to the team, so a team can only have many leads if the other members have focused their work activity on other projects. Team members who are focused on other projects can potentially only provide limited support, yet successful teams tend to arrange their members in exactly this fashion. Of course, the strong focus in work activity ( figure 2 ) is probably interrelated with these observations. However, we will soon show that both remain significantly related to success in combined models.

Teams with more leads have higher success than teams of the same size with fewer leads. A lead is someone who contributes more work to at least one team he or she belongs to than any other members of that team. Outliers in S were removed as before.

Expanding on this observation, table 1 illustrates the extreme case of teams of size M with a single lead ( L =1) compared with teams of the same size composed entirely of leads ( L = M ). The latter always displayed significantly higher success than the former (MWU test, see table 1 ), independent of team size, underscoring the correlations displayed in figure 4 . Often the difference was massive: teams of size M =7, for example, averaged more than 1200% higher success when L =7 than when L =1.

Teams composed entirely of leads ( L = M ) are significantly more successful (MWU test on S ) than teams of the same size with one lead ( L =1), regardless of team size M . Teams above the 99th percentile in S were excluded to ensure the differences were not due to outliers.

a When M ≥8, the number of teams with L = M is too small ( N <20) for us to reasonably conclude the difference in S is significant, despite the small p -values.

These results on team composition cannot be easily explained as a confound with success or secondary contributions as they study specific features and projects of the individuals who comprise a team, those features are not related to the successes of other projects an individual may work on, and they strictly control for total team size M (e.g. we only compare teams with different values of L when they have the same value M ). These results further amplify our findings on team focus, and augment important existing research [ 3 , 4 , 36 , 37 , 54 ].

Taken together, our results demonstrate that successful teams tend to be focused ( figure 2 ), successful teams tend to be experientially diverse ( figure 3 ) and successful teams tend to have many leads ( figure 4 ). We have found that teams tend to do best when optimized along all three of these dimensions. Of course, it is necessary to explore the joint effects of quantities, to see if one relationship can be explained by another, which we will do with multivariate statistical models.

4. Combined models and confounds

One important aspect of the individual team measurements is that they do not exist in isolation. For example, successful teams also have high work activity (high W ). This can correlate with effective team size m as the potential inequality between team members can grow as their total activity grows. In other words, we need to see how our team measures relate to success together .

To understand the relative effects of these team composition measures, we fitted a linear regression model of success as a function of all explored measures ( table 2 ). Not only did this regression allow us to determine whether a variable was significant or if it was confounded by the other measures, but the coefficients (on the standardized variables) let us measure the relative strengths of each variable. We also included the age of a project T (measured as the time difference between the recorded creation time of the project and the end of our data window; see Material and methods) as this may also be a potential confounding factor (older projects have had more time to gain members and to gain success).

OLS regression model on team success, S = α + β M M + β m m + β W W + β E E + β D D + β L L + β T T . Outliers (above the 99th percentile in S ) were filtered out to ensure they do not skew the model.

a Variables are standardized for comparison such that a coefficient β x implies that increasing a variable x by one standard deviation σ x corresponds to a β x σ S increase in S , holding other variables fixed.

Examining the regression coefficients showed that the number of leads L was the variable most strongly correlated with team success. Team age T , effective team size m and team size M play the strongest roles after L in team success, and all three were also significant in the presence of the other variables. The coefficient on m was negative while for M it was positive, further underscoring our result that, while teams should be big, they effectively should be small. Next, the diversity D of the team, followed by the total work W done on the project, were also significant measures related to success. Finally, overall team experience E was not significant in this model ( p >0.1). We conclude that, while S and E are correlated by themselves, any effects of E are explained by the other quantities.

What about secondary contributions, those activities made by individuals outside the primary team? We already performed one test showing that dominated teams are more successful than non-dominated teams even when there are no secondary contributions. Continuing along these lines, we augmented this linear model with two more dependent variables, M ext and W ext . Regressing on this expanded model (see the electronic supplementary material for details) did not change the significance of any coefficients at the p =0.05 level; E remained insignificant ( p >0.1). Both new variables were significant ( p <0.05). Note that there were no multicollinearity effects in either regression model (condition numbers less than 10). We conclude that secondary contributions cannot alone explain the observations relating team focus, experience and lead number to team success.

5. Discussion

There has been considerable debate concerning the benefits of specialization compared with diversity in the workplace and other sectors [ 39 ]. Our discoveries here show that a high-success team forms a diverse support system for a specialist core, indicating that both specialization and diversity contribute to innovation and success. Team members should be both specialists, acting as the lead contributor to a team, and generalists, offering ancillary support for teams led by another member. This has implications when organizations are designing teams and wish to maximize their success, at least as success was measured in these data. Teams tend to do best on average when they maximize M ( figure 1 b ) while minimizing m ( figure 2 d ) and maximizing D ( figure 3 ) and L ( figure 4 ).

Of course, some tasks are too large for a single person or small team to handle, necessitating the need for mega teams of hundreds or even thousands of members. Our results imply that such teams may be most effective when broken down into large numbers of small, overlapping groups, where all individuals belong to a few teams and are the lead of at least one. Doing so will help maximize the experiential diversity of each sub-team, while ensuring each team has someone ‘in charge’. An important open question is what the best ways are to design such pervasively overlapping groups [ 14 ], a task that may be project- or domain-specific but which is worth further exploration.

The negative relationship between effective team size m and success S (as well as the significantly higher presence of dominated teams among high success teams) further belies the myth of multitasking [ 39 ] and supports the ‘surgical team’ arguments of Brooks [ 17 ]. Focused work activity, often by even a single person, is a hallmark of successful teams. This focus both limits the cognitive costs of task switching, and lowers communication and coordination barriers, as so much work is being accomplished by one or only a few individuals. We have provided statistical tests demonstrating that the relationship between focus and success cannot be due to secondary/external team contributions alone.

Work focus could possibly be explained by social loafing where individual members of a group contribute less effort as part of the group than they would alone, yet loafing does not explain the correlation between e.g. leads and success ( figure 4 ). Likewise, our team composition results on group experience, experiential diversity and the number of leads cannot be easily explained as a confound with success or secondary contributions: they study specific features of the individuals who comprise a team, those features are not related to the successes of other projects an individual may work on, and they strictly control for total team size M (except for the number of leads L , so for that measure we only compared teams with the same M ). The measures we used for external team contributions, M ext and W ext , may be considered measures of success themselves, and studying or even predicting their levels from team features may prove a fruitful avenue of future work.

Lastly, there are two remaining caveats worth mentioning. We do not specifically control for automatically mirrored repositories (where a computer script copies updates to GitHub). Accurately detecting such projects at scale is a challenge beyond the scope of this work. However, we expect most will either be filtered out by our existing selection criteria or else they will probably only have a single (automated) user that only does the copying. The second concern is work done outside of GitHub or, more generally, mismatched assignments between usernames and their work. This is also challenging to fully address (one issue is that the underlying git repository system does not authenticate users). We acknowledge this concern for our workload focus results, but even it cannot explain the significant trends we observed on team composition such as the density of leads. Noise due to improperly recorded or ‘out-of-band’ work has in principle affected all quantitative studies of online software repositories.

Supplementary Material

Acknowledgements.

We thank Josh Bongard, Brian Tivnan, Paul Hines, Michael Szell and Albert-László Barabási for useful discussions, and we gratefully acknowledge the computational resources provided by the Vermont Advanced Computing Core, supported by NASA (NNX-08AO96G).

1 For examples, see https://github.com/showcases/science .

2 See https://github.com/blog/1840-improving-github-for-science .

Data accessibility

Authors' contributions.

M.K. participated in data collection and data analysis, and helped draft the manuscript; J.B. conceived the study, designed the study, carried out data collection and analysis, and drafted the manuscript. All authors gave final approval for publication.

Competing interests

We have no competing interests.

J.B. has been supported by the University of Vermont and the Vermont Complex Systems Center.

Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice

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Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice publishes original empirical articles, theoretical analyses, literature reviews, and brief reports dealing with basic and applied topics in the field of group research and application.

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Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice publishes original empirical articles, theoretical analyses, literature reviews, and brief reports dealing with basic and applied topics in the field of group research and application. We define group dynamics in the broadest sense—the scientific study of all aspects of groups—and we publish work by investigators in such fields as psychology, psychiatry, sociology, education, communication, and business.

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The introduction should be theoretically coherent and compelling, and any relevant literatures should be reviewed. The methods and measures used should be appropriate, the findings should be interpretable and statistically meaningful, and conclusions drawn should be suitable ones given the results obtained. Whenever possible, authors must report effect sizes, indices of model fit, as well as statistical significance. In the case of grouped and/or longitudinal data, authors must indicate how the data analyses accounted for possible dependence due to the hierarchically nested nature of the data.

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Unger-Aviram, E., Zeigler-Hill, V., Barina, M., & Besser, A. (2018). Narcissism, collective efficacy, and satisfaction in self-managed teams: The moderating role of team goal orientation. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice , 22 (3), 172-186.

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• Undergraduate students who were more narcissistic (entitled and lacking in empathy) tended to be less satisfied with their team. However, this was only the case for those teams that as a whole were primarily motivated to avoid failure and to avoid appearing incapable.
• Individuals who were more narcissistic rated their teams as more effective. However, this was only the case for those teams that as a whole were primarily motivated to succeed and to appear highly capable.
• Placing narcissistic individuals in a team that avoids failure and avoids appearing incapable could have negative consequences for the team's performance.
• Placing narcissistic individuals within a team that is motivated to succeed and to prove its abilities may be beneficial to the team's performance.

Thompson-Hollands, J., Litwack, S. D., Ryabchenko, K. A., Niles, B. L., Beck, J. G., Unger, W., & Sloan, D. M. (2018). Alliance across group treatment for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder: The role of interpersonal trauma and treatment type. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice , 22 (1), 1-15.

• Therapeutic alliance, or the collaborative relationship and bond between individuals and the group, increased across session of two types of group therapy for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
• Compared to participants who received group present-centered therapy (understanding the impact of the trauma on the patient's current life), those who received group cognitive-behavioral therapy (facing traumatic events directly and changing one's thoughts about them) showed faster growth in therapeutic alliance across group sessions.
• Cognitive-behavioral group activities that promote sharing hardships and challenges may result in quicker collaboration and bonding among group members.
• Facing traumatic events and reporting back to the group on their successes and failures quickly drew group members together and gave them a sense of purpose.

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Authors should review the updated APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) for quantitative , qualitative , and mixed methods research before submitting. These standards offer ways to improve transparency in reporting to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of the research and to facilitate collaboration and replication. For further resources, including flowcharts, see the Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) website .

Structured abstract and keywords

Manuscripts published in Group Dynamics will include a structured abstract of up to 250 words.

For studies that report randomized clinical trials or meta-analyses, the abstract also must be consistent with the guidelines set forth by JARS or MARS (Meta-Analysis Reporting Standards) guidelines, respectively. Thus, in preparing a manuscript, please ensure that it is consistent with the guidelines stated below.

Please include an Abstract of up to 250 words, presented in paragraph form. The abstract should be typed on a separate page (page 2 of the manuscript), and must include each of the following sections:

• Objective: A brief statement of the purpose of the study
• Method: A detailed summary of the participants (N, age, gender, ethnicity) as well as descriptions of the study design, measures (including names of measures), and procedures
• Results: A detailed summary of the primary findings that include effect sizes or confidence intervals with significance testing
• Conclusions: A description of the research and implications of the findings

After the abstract, please supply three to five keywords. Please consider carefully keywords that will help a reader to find and retrieve your article.

Participant description, sample justification, and informed consent

Authors are encouraged to include a detailed description of the study participants in the method section of each empirical report, including (but not limited to) the following:

• racial identity
• nativity or immigration history
• socioeconomic status
• clinical diagnoses and comorbidities (as appropriate)
• any other relevant demographics (e.g., disability status; sexual orientation)

In both the abstract and in the discussion section of the manuscript, authors are encouraged to discuss the diversity of their study samples and the generalizability of their findings.

Authors are also encouraged to justify their sample demographics in the discussion section. If Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) or all-White samples are used, authors should justify their samples and describe their sample inclusion efforts (see Roberts, et al., 2020 for more information on justifying sample demographics).

Authors are encouraged to indicate whether groups are homogenous or heterogeneous regarding composition (e.g., indicating whether groups are mixed gender or same gender).

The method section also must include a statement describing how informed consent was obtained from the participants (or their parents/guardians), including for secondary use of data if applicable, and indicate that the study was conducted in compliance with an appropriate Internal Review Board.

Display equations

We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

• Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.
• Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.

If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.

Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.

Computer code

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of your article in our production process. To that end, we request separate files for computer code.

In online supplemental material

We request that runnable source code be included as supplemental material to the article. For more information, visit Supplementing Your Article With Online Material .

In the text of the article

If you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. We will make an image of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.

Author contribution statements using CRediT

The  APA Publication Manual ( 7th ed. ) , which stipulates that "authorship encompasses…not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study." In the spirit of transparency and openness, American Psychologist has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to describe each author's individual contributions to the work. CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to a manuscript.

Submitting authors will be asked to identify the contributions of all authors at initial submission according to the CRediT taxonomy. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the CRediT designations will be published as an author contributions statement in the author note of the final article. All authors should have reviewed and agreed to their individual contribution(s) before submission.

CRediT includes 14 contributor roles, as described below:

• Conceptualization : Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
• Data curation : Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
• Formal analysis : Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
• Funding acquisition : Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
• Investigation : Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
• Methodology : Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
• Project administration : Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
• Resources : Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
• Software : Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision : Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
• Validation : Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
• Visualization : Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
• Writing—original draft : Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
• Writing—review and editing : Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision: including pre- or post-publication stages.

Authors can claim credit for more than one contributor role, and the same role can be attributed to more than one author.

Open science badges

Articles are eligible for open science badges recognizing publicly available data, materials, and/or preregistered plans and analyses. These badges are awarded on a self-disclosure basis.

At submission, authors must confirm that criteria have been fulfilled in a  signed badge disclosure form (PDF, 42KB)  that must be submitted as supplemental material. If the editorial team confirms that all criteria have been met, the form will then be published with the article as supplemental material.

For all badges, items must be made available on an open-access repository with a persistent identifier in a format that is time-stamped, immutable, and permanent. For the preregistered badge, this is an institutional registration system.

Data and materials must be made available under an open license allowing others to copy, share, and use the data, with attribution and copyright as applicable. Available badges are:

Note that it may not be possible to preregister a study or to share data and materials. Applying for open science badges is optional.

Academic writing and English language editing services

Authors who feel that their manuscript may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing support prior to submission are encouraged to seek out such services at their host institutions, engage with colleagues and subject matter experts, and/or consider several vendors that offer discounts to APA authors .

Please note that APA does not endorse or take responsibility for the service providers listed. It is strictly a referral service.

Use of such service is not mandatory for publication in an APA journal. Use of one or more of these services does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication in any APA journal.

Submitting supplemental materials

APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in APA PsycArticles ® database. Please see Supplementing your article with online material for more details.

List references in alphabetical order. Each listed reference should be cited in text, and each text citation should be listed in the references section.

Examples of basic reference formats:

Journal article

McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development. Psychological Review , 126 (1), 1–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000126

Authored book

Brown, L. S. (2018). Feminist therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000092-000

Chapter in an edited book

Balsam, K. F., Martell, C. R., Jones. K. P., & Safren, S. A. (2019). Affirmative cognitive behavior therapy with sexual and gender minority people. In G. Y. Iwamasa & P. A. Hays (Eds.), Culturally responsive cognitive behavior therapy: Practice and supervision (2nd ed., pp. 287–314). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000119-012

Use Word's Insert Table function when you create tables. Using spaces or tabs in your table will create problems when the table is typeset and may result in errors.

Preferred formats for graphics files are TIFF and JPG, and preferred format for vector-based files is EPS. Graphics downloaded or saved from web pages are not acceptable for publication. Multipanel figures (i.e., figures with parts labeled a, b, c, d, etc.) should be assembled into one file. When possible, please place symbol legends below the figure instead of to the side.

• All color line art and halftones: 300 DPI
• Black and white line tone and gray halftone images: 600 DPI

Line weights

• Color (RGB, CMYK) images: 2 pixels
• Grayscale images: 4 pixels
• Stroke weight: 0.5 points

APA offers authors the option to publish their figures online in color without the costs associated with print publication of color figures.

The same caption will appear on both the online (color) and print (black and white) versions. To ensure that the figure can be understood in both formats, authors should add alternative wording (e.g., “the red (dark gray) bars represent”) as needed.

For authors who prefer their figures to be published in color both in print and online, original color figures can be printed in color at the editor's and publisher's discretion provided the author agrees to pay:

• $900 for one figure
• An additional $600 for the second figure
• An additional $450 for each subsequent figure

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Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

• Download Permissions Alert Form (PDF, 13KB)

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For full details on publication policies, including use of Artificial Intelligence tools, please see APA Publishing Policies .

APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications.

See also APA Journals ® Internet Posting Guidelines .

APA requires authors to reveal any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).

• Download Full Disclosure of Interests Form (PDF, 41KB)

Ethical principles

It is a violation of APA Ethical Principles to publish “as original data, data that have been previously published” (Standard 8.13).

In addition, APA Ethical Principles specify that “after research results are published, psychologists do not withhold the data on which their conclusions are based from other competent professionals who seek to verify the substantive claims through reanalysis and who intend to use such data only for that purpose, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release” (Standard 8.14).

APA expects authors to adhere to these standards. Specifically, APA expects authors to have their data available throughout the editorial review process and for at least 5 years after the date of publication.

Authors are required to state in writing that they have complied with APA ethical standards in the treatment of their sample, human or animal, or to describe the details of treatment.

• Download Certification of Compliance With APA Ethical Principles Form (PDF, 26KB)

The APA Ethics Office provides the full Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct electronically on its website in HTML, PDF, and Word format. You may also request a copy by emailing or calling APA Ethics Office (202-336-5930). You may also read “Ethical Principles,” December 1992, American Psychologist , Vol. 47, pp. 1597–1611.

Other information

See APA’s Publishing Policies page for more information on publication policies, including information on author contributorship and responsibilities of authors, author name changes after publication, the use of generative artificial intelligence, funder information and conflict-of-interest disclosures, duplicate publication, data publication and reuse, and preprints.

Visit the Journals Publishing Resource Center for more resources for writing, reviewing, and editing articles for publishing in APA journals.

Incoming (2025) editor

(handling all new submissions in 2024)

Bryan L. Bonner, PhD University of Utah, United States

Incoming (2025) senior associate editor

Ernest S. Park, PhD Grand Valley State University, United States

Incoming (2025) associate editors

Aimee Kane, PhD Duquesne University, United States

Xu Li, PhD University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, United States

Torsten Reimer, PhD Purdue University, United States

Incoming (2025) editorial board reviewers

Paul Hangsan Ahn, PhD Hope College, United States

Michael R. Baumann, PhD The University of Texas at San Antonio, United States

Stephenson J. Beck, PhD North Dakota State University, United States

Wendy L. Bedwell-Torres, PhD University of Memphis, United States

Anita L. Blanchard, PhD University of North Carolina Charlotte, United States

Joseph A. Bonito, PhD University of Arizona, United States

Agostino Brugnera, PhD University of Bergamo, Italy

Gary M. Burlingame, PhD Brigham Young University, United States

James E. Cameron, PhD Saint Mary's University, Canada

Eric C. Chen, PhD Fordham University, United States

P. Niels Christensen, PhD Radford University, United States

Kathryn Coll, PhD University of Nevada Reno, United States

Angelo Compare, PhD University of Bergamo, Italy

Traci Y. Craig, PhD University of Idaho, United States

Donelson R. Forsyth, PhD University of Richmond, United States

Les Greene, PhD VA Connecticut Healthcare System and Yale University, United States

Verlin B. Hinsz, PhD North Dakota State University, United States

Thelma S. Horn, PhD Miami University, United States

Jay W. Jackson, PhD Purdue University Fort Wayne, United States

Michael D. Johnson, PhD University of Washington, United States

Anthony S. Joyce, PhD University of Alberta, Canada

Steven J. Karau, PhD Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, United States

David Kealy, PhD University of British Columbia, Canada

Dennis M. Kivlighan, PhD University of Maryland, United States

D. Martin Kivlighan III, PhD University of Iowa, United States

Jonathan Kush, PhD University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, United States

James R. Larson, Jr., PhD Loyola University Chicago, United States

Glenn E. Littlepage, PhD Middle Tennessee State University, United States

Gianluca Lo Coco, PhD University of Palermo, Italy

Robert B. Lount, PhD Ohio State University, United States

David K. Marcus, PhD Washington State University, United States

Cheri L. Marmarosh, PhD George Washington University, United States

Nathan Meikle, JD/PhD University of Kansas, United States

Bernard A. Nijstad, PhD University of Groningen, Netherlands

John S. Ogrodniczuk, PhD University of British Columbia, Canada

Jill D. Paquin, PhD Chatham University, United States

Craig D. Parks, PhD Washington State University, United States

Emily A. Paskewitz, PhD The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States

Andrew N. Pilny, PhD University of Kentucky, United States  

Ronald E. Riggio, PhD Claremont McKenna College, United States

Sonja Rispens, PhD Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands

Maria T. Riva, PhD University of Denver, United States

Luisa Ruge-Jones, PhD University of Dayton, United States

Donald F. Sacco, PhD The University of Southern Mississippi, United States

Daniel B. Shank, PhD Missouri University of Science and Technology, United States

Zipora Shechtman, PhD Haifa University, Israel

Christine M. Smith, PhD Grand Valley State University, United States

Kevin S. Spink, PhD University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Jennifer R. Spoor, PhD La Trobe University, Australia

Bernhard Strauss, PhD University Hospital Jena, Germany

R. Scott Tindale, PhD Loyola University of Chicago, United States

Lyn M. van Swol, PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States

Nathanial G. Wade, PhD Iowa State, United States

Rainer Weber, PhD University of Cologne, Germany

Eric D. Wesselmann, PhD Illinois State University, United States

Gwen Wittenbaum, PhD Michigan State University, United States

Ralf Wölfer, PhD University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Virgil Zeigler-Hill, PhD Oakland University, United States

Outgoing editor

(handling invited revisions only in 2024)

Giorgio A. Tasca, PhD University of Ottawa, Canada

Outgoing senior associate editor

Outgoing associate editors, outgoing editorial fellow.

Shanique G. Brown, PhD Wayne State University, United States

Outgoing editorial board reviewers

Abstracting and indexing services providing coverage of Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice

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• Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) Academic Journal Guide
• Current Abstracts
• Current Contents: Social & Behavioral Sciences
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• ERIH (European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences)
• Journal Citations Report: Social Sciences Edition
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Special issue of the APA journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 27, No. 3, September 2023. In this special issue five articles introduce novice small group researchers to cutting-edge data analytic techniques and provide researchers with examples and resources to use these methods themselves.

Special issue of the APA journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2022. This special issue offers perspectives that help explain the insurrection and related events, provides insights into how such events can be prevented, and describes how the social tensions that follow such events can be alleviated.

Special issue of APA’s journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 25, No. 3, September 2021. This special issue invited each former and current editor of the journal to reflect on a key topic of group dynamics and to provide a roadmap for current and future researchers.

Special issue of APA's journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 25, No. 1, March 2021. This special issue is devoted to theory, assessment, research, and practice regarding ruptures and repairs in group treatment.

Special issue of the APA journal Group Dynamics, Vol. 24, No. 3, September 2020. This special issue presents six articles that address aspects of how group dynamics and processes have been impacted by, and have the potential to impact, the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 pandemic.

Special issue of the APA journal Group Dynamics, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2016. The issue gathers 8 articles that are structured as tutorials for conducting statistical analyses that are appropriate to capture the unique and emergent properties of groups.

Special issue of the APA journal Group Dynamics, Vol. 14, No. 3, September 2010. Focusing on prevention groups, the issue includes articles about their history, effectiveness, and use in various populations and settings.

Special issue of the APA journal Group Dynamics, Vol. 12, No. 1, March 2008. Includes articles about social networks; group-level evolutionary adaptations; interpersonal and intergroup aggression; social exclusion; and cooperation in large-scale groups.

Special issue of the APA journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007. Includes articles about Glasser quality school; group approaches to reducing aggression and bullying; the efficacy of using music in children of divorce groups; student success skills; counseling and psychotherapy groups; and schools as team-based organizations.

Inclusive reporting standards

• Bias-free language and community-driven language guidelines (required)
• Impact statements (required)
• Participant sample descriptions (recommended)
• Sample justifications (recommended)

More information on this journal’s reporting standards is listed under the submission guidelines tab .

Pathways to authorship and editorship

Editorial fellowships.

Editorial fellowships help early-career psychologists gain firsthand experience in scholarly publishing and editorial leadership roles. This journal offers an editorial fellowship program for early-career psychologists from historically excluded communities.

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Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) Reviewer Recognition provides a visible and verifiable way for journals to publicly credit reviewers without compromising the confidentiality of the peer-review process. This journal has implemented the ORCID Reviewer Recognition feature in Editorial Manager, meaning that reviewers can be recognized for their contributions to the peer-review process.

Masked peer review

This journal offers masked peer review (where both the authors’ and reviewers’ identities are not known to the other). Research has shown that masked peer review can help reduce implicit bias against traditionally female names or early-career scientists with smaller publication records (Budden et al., 2008; Darling, 2015).

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• Read an interview with Editor Giorgio Tasca, PhD

Featured editorial

• What is group dynamics? Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice’s Editor Giorgio A. Tasca gives guidance of the journal’s expectations from submissions. (March 2020)

From APA Journals Article Spotlight ®

• Group psychology and the January 6 insurrection
• Sticking together: Creating cohesive collectives
• The 25th anniversary of Group Dynamics : Reviewing key topics in the field
• How do we make the invisible visible?
• Resisting health mandates: A case of groupthink?
• The group dynamics of COVID-19
• Does it make sense to say that groups are satisfied? Multilevel measurement models for group collective constructs
• Tabling, discussing, and giving in: Meeting dissent in three workgroups

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Home / Blog

4 Things to Know About Group Dynamics in the Workplace

September 20, 2016 

A sound understanding of group dynamics, and the role it plays in business, is a critical component of successful management.

When a good dynamic exists within a group working toward a common goal, each individual member will perform effectively and achieve goals set by the group.  Poor group dynamics  can adversely affect performance, leading to a negative outcome on the common goal or project.

Many variables contribute to a positive work dynamic. Below are four key points to help you understand group dynamics — and how to create and maintain a constructive and productive outlook in any group.

1. Strong leadership is important within a group

This doesn’t mean that a manager needs to bully or strong-arm the team to maintain control. A leader should guide the development of the group and the path to the goal that needs to be reached. They can do this by defining specific roles and responsibilities for members of the group, as well as a timeline for the common project so members can understand their role within the timeline.

2. Recognize how personalities affect team dynamics

Obviously, each person working in a group brings their own personality and skill set. Recognizing each person’s style of work, motivation, and level of aptitude can help a manager understand how that person fits in the group.

This practice can also provide an opportunity for managers to note any gaps in experience or behavior — and the necessary coverage with additional team members — for the group to accomplish its goal.

Along with members who contribute positively to the group, there may also be those whose behavior, attitude, or work style negatively affects the dynamics. Some may be obvious, such as an aggressive personality dominating and intimidating other group members, or a distracted person who is constantly off task. But some disruptive roles may not be as easy to pinpoint. For example, “social loafing” may occur, meaning some members of the group may exert less effort than they would if working alone.

A manager who recognizes and reacts quickly to these roles can influence the dynamic of the group in positive ways. A dominating or distracting member of the group may benefit from a separate conversation with the manager, addressing expectations of roles within the group. If each member of the group sees their contribution as valuable and accountable to the larger group, then social loafing is less likely among group members.

3. Understand the life cycle of a group

The way a group comes together can be demonstrated in five steps:

• Forming : The coming together of a group.
• Storming:  Members of the group seek out like-minded members. At this stage, conflicts between different sub-groups may arise.
• Norming:  Members become invested in the group as a whole and its common goal.
• Performing:  The members of the group now function as a unit, contributing to complete the task within the standards defined in the previous steps.
• Adjourning:  If the group has formed to meet a specific goal, then the group will disband after the completion of the task and any subsequent needed evaluation.

Consideration of where the group is within this cycle can provide perspective to all members of the group as they move through it.

4. Communication is key

How effectively a group communicates  can determine its overall success in reaching its goal. Many methods of communication may be used in groups working toward a common business objective.

Emails, project management software, group documents, and video/telephone conferencing are some of the many ways the traditional face-to-face group meeting is becoming less prevalent.

It’s imperative for all members of a group to understand and utilize the chosen methods of communication. Open and transparent communication builds and maintains a sense of trust within the group and helps maintain focus toward the goal. Side conversations via separate emails or instant messaging chat features can be detrimental to the group’s overall trust.

Additionally, the group’s manager should assure that all members can effectively communicate needed information to the group. This could require additional training on programs, or assistance in clearly presenting information so all members fully understand the information.

Diversity and  Cultural Sensitivity

According to  Entrepreneur  magazine, businesses with solid  diversity and inclusion  initiatives often lead the way in both creativity and innovation. That’s because diverse points of view can introduce new ways of thinking that can help streamline processes, eliminate redundancy, increase production, and improve satisfaction with both consumers and employees.

When it comes to diversity, there are many factors that influence the full and complete spectrum. Race, gender, and sexual orientation perhaps immediately spring to mind. However, other factors to consider can also include culture and age.

To create a truly positive group dynamic in a particular cohort, it’s important to make sure people from all backgrounds, identities, and views feel accepted and validated.

According to  Forbes , there are several ways to ensure you address diversity appropriately and effectively. It starts with considering diversity and inclusion from the onset of any project — not as an afterthought. This may involve updating your recruiting strategy to ensure you get a stronger sampling of backgrounds.

Some other tips  Forbes  recommends for creating an inclusive workplace are:

• Celebrate the differences and unique views your employees bring to your team
• Make sure you listen
• Be sure to provide opportunities for growth and development, especially focused on leadership
• Improve your own leadership skills through education, study, or practice
• Periodically evaluate your approach to diversity and inclusion to see where it can be updated or improved

Be a better manager with the right education

Organizational management serves as the foundational underpinning from which all businesses and organizations can ultimately thrive.

You can help increase your group dynamics in the workplace by earning your online business degree. Maryville University has several options to help you reach these goals, such as the  online bachelor’s in organizational leadership  and the  online MBA .

By developing your leadership skills, you’ll be better positioned to understand various points of view and transform the valuable input you receive into actionable strategy that can deliver results.

Chron.com, “Effective Group Communication Processes”

Forbes, “How Women Leaders Change Company Dynamics”

Entrepreneur Magazine, “Why You Need Diversity on Your Team, and 8 Ways to Build It”

MindTools, “Improving Group Dynamics: Helping Your Team Work More Effectively”

Bring us your ambition and we’ll guide you along a personalized path to a quality education that’s designed to change your life.

Take Your Next Brave Step

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ADCN 512 Group Dynamics

• Course Description

For information regarding prerequisites for this course, please refer to the  Academic Course Catalog .

Course Guide

View this course’s outcomes, policies, schedule, and more.*

*The information contained in our Course Guides is provided as a sample. Specific course curriculum and requirements for each course are provided by individual instructors each semester. Students should not use Course Guides to find and complete assignments, class prerequisites, or order books.

Persons involved in both professional counseling and helping ministries find that group work can be an important strategy for conducting their daily work. Therefore, knowledge of group theory and the development of group leadership skills are essential to their becoming more effective practitioners in either setting.

Note : This is the 8-week, online version of the ADCN 512 Group Dynamics course. It is intended for those students who already have experience working in the field of addiction with direct client contact, which includes the use of basic counseling skills and some type of group counseling experience.  Students are encouraged to take the intensive version of the course, especially if they do not have such experience

Course Assignment

Textbook readings and lecture presentations.

No details available.

Course Requirements Checklist

After reading the Course Syllabus and Student Expectations , the student will complete the related checklist found in the Course Overview.

Quiz: Advising Guide Acknowledgement

Discussions (3).

Discussions are collaborative learning experiences. Therefore, the student is required to provide a thread in response to the provided prompt. Each thread must be at least 400 words, incorporate at least 3 citations from course textbooks and 1 from the Bible in current APA format, and demonstrate course-related knowledge. In addition to the thread, the student is required to reply to the thread of at least 1 classmate. Each reply must be at least 200 words and include at least 2 citations of peer-reviewed scholarly journals or textbooks in APA format. APA formatted references lists are required for all posts.

Motivational Interviewing Techniques Assignments (2)

There will be specific group counseling videos that need to be reviewed and the skills used in the video reviewed. In addition, where skills are not used that could have been used needs to be discussed. You will complete a specific rating/review form for each of these assignments. More information can be found in the instructions for this assignment.

Group Proposal Paper: Topic Assignment

You will develop a topic proposal paper that clearly articulates what the focus of your Group Proposal Paper will be. Include specific information on what type of addiction group you will be planning (support, psycho-educational, or treatment type of addiction group). Also, discuss what population your group proposal will be focusing on (ex. Adolescents, court-mandated adults, offenders, parents, etc.) and the reason this type of group is needed. This assignment must consist of a 2 complete page rationale with citations included. See the instructions for more information.

Group Proposal Paper: Final Assignment

Submit a written substance use Group Proposal Paper for a group you would like to lead in the future. Included in this assignment is learning to describe leadership approaches, screening and selection of group members, selection and use of group methods. This group needs to be for 4 (1.5 hour) sessions. See the Assignment Instructions for more information.

The student will purchase a background check with fingerprints from CastleBranch and:

• Upload receipt of purchase in Module 1: Week 1 showing proof of purchase.
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• Upload a new Compliance Summary Report in Module 8: Week 8 showing submission of fingerprints to DTIS (Daon).

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This quiz covers Learn materials from all modules and requires students to rate themselves on the nine dispositions required for this program using the provided scale. This quiz will contain nine multiple-choice questions and one essay question, has a time limit of one hour, and allows one attempt.

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Ideas for Great Group Work

Many students, particularly if they are new to college, don’t like group assignments and projects. They might say they “work better by themselves” and be wary of irresponsible members of their group dragging down their grade. Or they may feel group projects take too much time and slow down the progression of the class. This blog post by a student— 5 Reasons I Hate Group Projects —might sound familiar to many faculty assigning in-class group work and longer-term projects in their courses.

We all recognize that learning how to work effectively in groups is an essential skill that will be used by students in practically every career in the private sector or academia. But, with the hesitancy of students towards group work and how it might impact their grade, how do we make group in-class work, assignments, or long-term projects beneficial and even exciting to students?

The methods and ideas in this post have been compiled from Duke faculty who we have consulted with as part of our work in Learning Innovation or have participated in one of our programs. Also included are ideas from colleagues at other universities with whom we have talked at conferences and other venues about group work practices in their own classrooms.

Have clear goals and purpose

Students want to know why they are being assigned certain kinds of work – how it fits into the larger goals of the class and the overall assessment of their performance in the course. Make sure you explain your goals for assigning in-class group work or projects in the course. You may wish to share:

• Information on the importance of developing skills in group work and how this benefits the students in the topics presented in the course.
• Examples of how this type of group work will be used in the discipline outside of the classroom.
• How the assignment or project benefits from multiple perspectives or dividing the work among more than one person.

Some faculty give students the option to come to a consensus on the specifics of how group work will count in the course, within certain parameters. This can help students feel they have some control over their own learning process and and can put less emphasis on grades and more on the importance of learning the skills of working in groups.

Choose the right assignment

Some in-class activities, short assignments or projects are not suitable for working in groups. To ensure student success, choose the right class activity or assignment for groups.

• Would the workload of the project or activity require more than one person to finish it properly?
• Is this something where multiple perspectives create a greater whole?
• Does this draw on knowledge and skills that are spread out among the students?
• Will the group process used in the activity or project give students a tangible benefit to learning in and engagement with the course?

Help students learn the skills of working in groups

Students in your course may have never been asked to work in groups before. If they have worked in groups in previous courses, they may have had bad experiences that color their reaction to group work in your course. They may have never had the resources and support to make group assignments and projects a compelling experience.

One of the most important things you can do as an instructor is to consider all of the skills that go into working in groups and to design your activities and assignments with an eye towards developing those skills.

In a group assignment, students may be asked to break down a project into steps, plan strategy, organize their time, and coordinate efforts in the context of a group of people they may have never met before.

Consider these ideas to help your students learn group work skills in your course.

• Give a short survey to your class about their previous work in groups to gauge areas where they might need help: ask about what they liked best and least about group work, dynamics of groups they have worked in, time management, communication skills or other areas important in the assignment you are designing.
• Allow time in class for students in groups to get to know each other. This can be a simple as brief introductions, an in-class active learning activity or the drafting of a team charter.
• Based on the activity you are designing and the skills that would be involved in working as a group, assemble some links to web resources that students can draw on for more information, such as sites that explain how to delegate and share responsibilities, conflict resolution, or planning a project and time management. You can also address these issues in class with the students.
• Have a plan for clarifying questions or possible problems that may emerge with an assignment or project.   Are there ways you can ask questions or get draft material to spot areas where students are having difficulty understanding the assignment or having difficulty with group dynamics that might impact the work later?

Designing the assignment or project

The actual design of the class activity or project can help the students transition into group work processes and gain confidence with the skills involved in group dynamics.   When designing your assignment, consider these ideas.

• Break the assignment down into steps or stages to help students become familiar with the process of planning the project as a group.
• Suggest roles for participants in each group to encourage building expertise and expertise and to illustrate ways to divide responsibility for the work.
• Use interim drafts for longer projects to help students manage their time and goals and spot early problems with group projects.
• Limit their resources (such as giving them material to work with or certain subsets of information) to encourage more close cooperation.
• Encourage diversity in groups to spread experience and skill levels and to get students to work with colleagues in the course who they may not know.

Promote individual responsibility

Students always worry about how the performance of other students in a group project might impact their grade. A way to allay those fears is to build individual responsibility into both the course grade and the logistics of group work.

• Build “slack days” into the course. Allow a prearranged number of days when individuals can step away from group work to focus on other classes or campus events. Individual students claim “slack days” in advance, informing both the members of their group and the instructor. Encourage students to work out how the group members will deal with conflicting dates if more than one student in a group wants to claim the same dates.
• Combine a group grade with an individual grade for independent write-ups, journal entries, and reflections.
• Have students assess their fellow group members. Teammates is an online application that can automate this process.
• If you are having students assume roles in group class activities and projects, have them change roles in different parts of the class or project so that one student isn’t “stuck” doing one task for the group.

Gather feedback

To improve your group class activities and assignments, gather reflective feedback from students on what is and isn’t working. You can also share good feedback with future classes to help them understand the value of the activities they’re working on in groups.

• For in-class activities, have students jot down thoughts at the end of class on a notecard for you to review.
• At the end of a larger project, or at key points when you have them submit drafts, ask the students for an “assignment wrapper”—a short reflection on the assignment or short answers to a series of questions.

Further resources

Information for faculty

Best practices for designing group projects (Eberly Center, Carnegie Mellon)

Building Teamwork Process Skills in Students (Shannon Ciston, UC Berkeley)

Working with Student Teams   (Bart Pursel, Penn State)

Barkley, E.F., Cross, K.P., and Major, C.H. (2005). Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R., & Smith, K. (1998). Active learning: Cooperation in the college classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company.

Thompson, L.L. (2004). Making the team: A guide for managers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.

Information for students

10 tips for working effectively in groups (Vancouver Island University Learning Matters)

Teamwork skills: being an effective group member (University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence)

5 ways to survive a group project in college (HBCU Lifestyle)

Group project tips for online courses (Drexel Online)

Group Writing (Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill)

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The secret to great group dynamics

Whether you’re a first-time project manager or an experienced team lead, we all have one thing in common: we want the people we’re leading to do well. You want your teammates to collaborate, communicate, and connect with one another, so they can do their best work as effortlessly as possible. But how can you unlock good teamwork if the people you’re managing aren’t getting along? 

That’s where group dynamics come in. When you understand what leads to good group dynamics, you can empower your group to communicate more clearly, collaborate more effectively, and get more high-impact work done together. 

What are group dynamics?

These dynamics don’t appear out of thin air—they grow out of the way people see themselves in relation to and among their peers. For example, you might have a positive group dynamic if your group is comfortable collaborating together. Alternatively, you might notice negative group dynamics if two people are trying to lead a project and aren’t listening to the other person’s input. 

At Asana, we believe that good group dynamics start with great organizational culture . When team members feel welcome to be their full selves at work, they’re able to collaborate and communicate more effectively. 

In order for all of our employees to do their best work and for us to achieve our mission, everyone at Asana must feel respected and valued and that they belong.”

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What is a group? 

A group is a collection of people who are working together. This can include formal groups—like teammates working under the same manager, a cross-functional project team, or members of an office—or informal groups—like coworkers who share common interests or identities. 

For example, at Asana, we’ve created informal groups called Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Over two thirds of our employee base belongs to one or more of these groups, which support various communities to create safe, positive, and inclusive spaces for our employees to come together across different functional groups.

How groups are formed

Bruce Tuckman first described how groups are formed in his 1965 theory Tuckman's stages of group development . According to Tuckman, there are five stages of group development:

Forming. This is when the group first gets together. If they’re working on a project, they may align on project goals or define their project plan . At this developmental stage, group members behave independently from one another—most of the conversations between group members are civil but distant.

Storming. The second developmental stage usually begins with a disagreement of some sort. This disagreement is the catalyst for group members to more actively share their opinions and be honest with one another. As a result of this honesty, group members begin to trust each other.

Norming. Once the group has resolved their initial disagreement or conflict, group interactions turn cooperative and friendly. During this developmental stage, the group will begin to establish group norms —even if they don’t discuss or record those norms. Unlike the independence from the Forming phase, group members in the Norming phase lean towards group decision-making and prioritize group cohesion. In fact, the danger of the Norming phase is that group members are too hesitant to share their opinions, which can lead to stagnation. 

Performing. This is when the group is at their best. Group members are able to execute independently or tackle problem solving as a group. Instead of worrying about how other group members perceive them, individual members are focused on the group’s goals. 

Adjourning or mourning. Tuckman added this stage in 1977 to describe the separation of the group once the project is over. If the group has been working well together, there can be a sense of loss when the group structure is dissolved.

Why group dynamics matter

Good group dynamics enable collaboration and communication because they reduce the barrier towards teamwork. When conversations flow easily, it can feel effortless to work together. But getting there takes time, practice, and support.

Group dynamics are a tool that can help you unlock better communication and collaboration. If you’re managing a group that isn’t moving forward the way you want them to, fostering positive  group dynamics can help you improve the group’s productivity so they can hit their goals.

The role communication plays in group dynamics

Too often, unclear communication can lead to confusion, strife, and negative group dynamics. By clarifying your communication expectations and channels, you can empower your team to communicate clearly and effectively . 

Start by creating a communication plan to clarify which channel team members should use and when, how frequently different details should be communicated, and who is responsible for each of the different channels. For example, at Asana, we use: 

Email to communicate with external clients or partners.

Slack for live communication about day-to-day updates and quick questions with team members.

Asana for asynchronous communication about work—like task details, project status updates , or key project documents.

Zoom or Google Meet for any team meetings, like project brainstorms. 

Resolving existing negative group dynamics

When a group has negative dynamics, group members can struggle to get things done. In extreme cases, negative group dynamics can lead to hurt feelings and require conflict resolution . If you’re managing a group that has negative group dynamics, first understand where those dynamics are coming from. Then, you can pinpoint what is causing those issues and work towards solving them.

Before you can resolve negative group dynamics, you first need to recognize the signs. Negative dynamics can look like different actions and behaviors depending on the group. Some signs to look out for include:

Frequent frustration among group members

Group members who aren’t comfortable around one another

Group members who are confused, conflicted, or have negative self-esteem in relation to their peers

Group members who aren’t collaborating or communicating 

Small groups, subgroups, or cliques that exclude other group members

Exclusive friendship groups 

Once you’ve identified negative group dynamics, you can work to resolve those issues based on what is causing them. Here are the most common causes for negative group dynamics and how you can resolve them among your group.

Perceived social loafing

Problem: Group members feel like a certain member or members aren’t pulling their weight.

Solution: Identify what is causing social loafing and support that group member. 

Social loafing is the perceived psychological phenomenon that some individuals put in less work when they’re collaborating as a group. If group members think another person isn’t pulling their weight, that can cause frustration and reduce group morale. If this seems to be the case, read our article to learn why social loafing is more about clarity than productivity —and what you can do to help.

Incompatible communication styles

Problem: Group members are using passive or aggressive communication styles, which is impeding good communication.

Solution: Help group members express themselves assertively, instead. 

Communication styles describe how group members interact and communicate. As you might imagine, some communication styles can create conflict in the workplace. For example, an aggressive communicator might make it hard for other group members to express their opinion. If a group member seems to be displaying a negative communication style, you can identify the root cause of why they’re communicating that way and help them communicate in a more assertive manner. Read our manager’s guide to communication styles to learn how.

Lack of creativity and innovation

Problem: Group members are struggling to creatively resolve problems.

Solution: Encourage co-creation and disagreement to spark good group collaboration and avoid groupthink. 

One risk during the Norming stage is that your group becomes so cohesive they stop challenging each other. Disagreement is actually a critical part of collaboration —in order to co-create the best solution, group members need to build an idea together. If you notice your group going with the flow instead of coming up with new ideas, challenge them to come up with a creative solution that might be better. 

Too much (or too little) autonomy

Problem: Your group seems stuck on the Storming phase of group development—they haven’t been able to successfully set and stick to group norms. 

Solution: Reassess your management style if necessary.

As the group lead, you want to give your group space to come up with their own ideas, be creative, and be innovative. But make sure you aren’t taking a completely laissez-faire approach to managing your group. On the flip side, make sure you’re giving your group enough space to develop group norms and connect with one another. There’s a fine line between guiding your group in the right direction but also letting them develop their own group processes. When in doubt, encourage your group to collaborate—but remember that you make the final decision if need be.

Turning your group into a team

Addressing negative group dynamics and helping your group work together more effectively can help you achieve your shared goals and improve group morale. But the best thing you can do to support group dynamics is to help your group see themselves as a team—instead of just a collection of people. 

The difference between a group and a team

A group is a collection of people who are working together. Even though these team members might work together during a project, they don’t necessarily see themselves as part of a whole. Typically, members of the group are loosely connected by a goal, but they likely don’t have a shared purpose or set of values to work with. 

Alternatively, a team is a group of people with a shared purpose and common goal. Team members are invested not only in their individual success, but also in the success of the team. Teams are more motivated and cohesive than groups, because team members see themselves as a part of something bigger. Team members share a specific goal that they focus on achieving together.

Going from group to team

How can you empower your group to see themselves as a team? This is easier in some cases—for example, you can transform a cross-functional group into a team by focusing on the goal of the cross-functional project. 

There are some situations that lack a clearly shared goal. For example, a group of people who share the same manager may be working on completely different projects with totally separate goals. The manager can use team building activities to bring their group members closer. But the easiest way to build a team is to share values.

Create shared values to spark team building 

Having shared values automatically puts everyone on the same team because they’re speaking the same language. With shared values, you can skip the Forming stage and get straight to high-impact work. 

Our values are our north star. And our people represent the touchpoints for programs, communications, and behaviors within the company itself. We strive to uphold a culture where all employees feel connected to one another and our mission, in an environment where they can thrive.”

Shared values are something you can establish on the team, department, or company level. Most companies already have shared values—and if yours does, make sure you’re bringing those values into everyday work. Reminding your group that they share these values can help skip the Norming phase because the shared values are the norm. Instead of struggling to learn to work together, team members can unlock collaboration because they all have the same values. 

How we use shared values at Asana

At Asana, we believe that our company values guide us to achieve our mission. Every global Asana shares the same set of nine company values :

Mission. We are purpose-driven people, dedicated to serving something beyond ourselves. Having mission as a value also allows us to continually ground ourselves in why we’re building Asana. 

Do great things, fast. We commit to being great at the things we do and doing them fast, without sacrificing one for the other. 

Clarity. Our product and culture aim to ensure that teams know who is doing what, by when, and why, which unlocks the best work experiences and outcomes.  

Co-creation. Great achievements are almost always the result of not one, but many. We bring our best, let go of egos, and work with empathy and trust to do great things together.

Give and take responsibility. Having integrity around our commitments means seizing exciting opportunities, and also owning it when we have to deprioritize something. We accept full ownership of our commitments, and empower and trust others to achieve theirs. 

Mindfulness. We focus on the present and aim to give ourselves time to reflect and space to integrate what we learn. These practices allow us to collectively learn from and improve all that we do, and to continually evolve our culture. 

Reject false tradeoffs. We stay curious, creative, and open to new perspectives. Choosing between two sides of an extreme results in losing the benefits of one, so we commit to searching for a third way that incorporates the truths of both.

Be real (with yourself and others). We know that our best work is tied to authenticity, which allows for growth and collaboration. We bring our whole selves to work and commit to building an inclusive environment in which all people feel safe and excited about being their full selves. 

Heartitude. We embrace what makes us human, take time to play and have fun, and create meaningful experience for their own sake. Why do we have a unicorn flying across our product when we mark a task complete? The real question is—why not?

Shared values build a core set of beliefs that everyone on the team buys into. For example, our shared values at Asana help us immediately establish how a group will interact—they should co-create solutions while also giving and taking responsibility. Similarly, when team members approach larger projects, they have a shared baseline of how they will do that—by rejecting false tradeoffs while doing great things fast. More informally, values like heartitude and mindfulness help us show up on our teams and in our offices every day. 

We know that great achievements are almost always the result of not one, but many. While our value Reject false tradeoffs represents our approach to building our culture, the way that we continue to do so makes me think of another core value: Co-creation. Every single employee has a role to play and a responsibility to contribute to upholding and growing Asana’s culture.”

Good group dynamics start with one person

You’ll learn to build good group dynamics over time. By employing good collaboration and communication soft skills , you can empower your team to get their best work done. Where possible, create shared values early and often to turn your group into a team.

To learn more, read our article about effective communication in the workplace .

Related resources

How to give and take constructive criticism

4 ways to establish roles and responsibilities for team success

Listening to understand: How to practice active listening (with examples)

Unmasking impostor syndrome: 15 ways to overcome it at work

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