Reference Groups, Formal Groups and Informal Groups

1Why were the slower-promoted soldiers happier?

During the Second World War, sociologists led by Samuel Stouffer surveyed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers (The American Soldier, 1949). One result puzzled them. In the Air Corps, promotion was fast; in the Military Police, it was slow. Yet the military policemen were more satisfied with their chances of promotion than the airmen.

Robert Merton and Alice Kitt (1950) offered an explanation. People judge their situation not against an absolute standard but against the people they compare themselves with. An airman who was not promoted compared himself with the many colleagues who were, and felt deprived; a military policeman compared himself with colleagues who were mostly not promoted either. Satisfaction depended on the reference group.

21. Reference groups

Harold Kelley (1952) identified two functions of reference groups:

• Normative function: the group sets norms and values that the person adopts, such as an S6 student who follows the study habits of the older students she admires.
• Comparative function: the group is a yardstick for self-evaluation, as with the soldiers above, or a student who judges her 70% as "poor" because her friends all scored over 80%.

Reference groups may be membership groups (you belong) or aspirational groups (you hope to belong, such as a pupil who wants to become an engineer and copies engineers' habits). A negative reference group is one whose values a person deliberately rejects ("I will never behave like them").

Evidence: the Bennington study

Theodore Newcomb (1943) followed students at Bennington College, a women's college in the United States, in the 1930s. Most came from conservative families, but the college community was strongly liberal. Over their years at college, many students' political attitudes became more liberal; the change was greatest among those who took the college community, rather than their families, as their reference group. A follow-up 25 years later (Newcomb and colleagues, 1967) found that most kept their new views, especially those who married and mixed with people who shared them.

32. Formal groups

Formal groups are created to achieve an organisation's goals. Common types:

• Command groups: a manager and the people who report to him or her, such as a head teacher and the deputy head teachers.
• Task groups or committees: people brought together for a specific job, such as a school's examinations committee, a cooperative's board, or an Abunzi mediation committee, which settles local disputes under the law.

43. Informal groups

Inside every formal organisation, informal groups grow: teachers who share lunch, workers from the same village, students who play football together after classes. They meet needs that formal groups often ignore: friendship, belonging, information (the "grapevine") and protection.

Evidence: the Bank Wiring Observation Room

In the Hawthorne studies at the Western Electric company near Chicago, researchers observed 14 men wiring telephone equipment in 1931–1932 (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). Management set output targets and paid more for higher output, yet the men produced a steady, lower amount set by their own informal norms: do not be a "rate-buster" (working too hard), a "chiseler" (working too little) or a "squealer" (reporting colleagues to supervisors). Workers who broke the norms were mocked or given a light blow on the arm, called "binging". The informal group's norms were stronger than the formal incentives.