Introduction to Group Dynamics
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Introduction to Group Dynamics
Lesson 3 of 4
25 min
In 1938 Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White set up after-school clubs for 10- and 11-year-old boys in Iowa, in the United States, where the boys made masks, painted murals and built model aeroplanes. Adult leaders were trained to lead in one of three ways, and they swapped clubs every six weeks so that each club met each style:
Under autocratic leaders, boys worked hard while the leader was in the room but stopped when he left, and there was more hostility or apathy, including picking on a scapegoat. Under democratic leaders they produced slightly less but more original work, kept working when the leader left and were friendlier. Laissez-faire groups did the least and poorest work. Nineteen of the twenty boys said they preferred the democratic leader.
Definition
Leadership: the process by which one member of a group influences the others towards a shared goal.
Leadership style: a leader’s typical way of making decisions and treating group members.
Power: the capacity to influence others’ behaviour, whether or not it is used.
Group development: the changes a group goes through over time, from first meeting to the end of its task.
In 1965 Bruce Tuckman reviewed about fifty studies of groups and proposed four stages; with Mary Ann Jensen in 1977 he added a fifth. Follow a new inter-school Kiswahili drama troupe preparing for a festival:
Figure 1. Tuckman’s stages shown as steps (schematic, not measured data).
| Stage | What happens | In the drama troupe |
|---|---|---|
| Forming | Members are polite and uncertain; they depend on the leader. | Students from four schools meet; nobody wants to suggest a script. |
| Storming | Conflict over roles, ideas and leadership. | Two students both want the lead role; arguments over the play’s ending. |
| Norming | Agreed rules, roles and trust develop. | They agree on rehearsal times and rotate the lead role between scenes. |
| Performing | Energy goes into the task; members solve problems together. | Rehearsals run smoothly; actors improvise fixes when someone forgets a line. |
| Adjourning | The task ends; members feel pride or sadness and separate. | After the festival, they hold a farewell meal and exchange contacts. |
Evaluation. The model is easy to remember and useful for leaders. But it came from a review of studies mostly about therapy and training groups, not from new observations of many kinds of groups. Real groups can skip stages, return to storming when a new member arrives, or repeat the cycle. Susan Wheelan’s integrated model (1994) proposed similar stages and tested them with questionnaires: groups that had been meeting longer were more often found at the later, more productive stages, which supports the general direction of the model while still allowing groups to move back.
| Approach | Key idea | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|
| Trait approach | Leaders are born with special qualities (intelligence, confidence). | Traits predict who emerges as leader better than who leads well. |
| Behavioural (style) approach | What leaders do matters: autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire; or task-focused versus people-focused. | No single style is best everywhere. |
| Contingency approach (Fiedler, 1967) | The best style depends on the situation: task-focused leaders do best when the situation is very easy or very hard to control; people-focused leaders in between. | Hard to measure “situational control” reliably. |
| Transformational leadership (Burns, 1978; Bass, 1985) | Leaders inspire with a vision, set an example and develop each member. | Can slide into dependence on one charismatic person. |
| Social identity approach (Haslam, Reicher and Platow, 2011) | Followers trust leaders who are seen as “one of us” and who work “for us”. | Explains influence better than technical skill. |
John French and Bertram Raven (1959) identified five bases of social power; Raven later added a sixth.
| Base of power | Source | School example |
|---|---|---|
| Legitimate | An official position | The head teacher |
| Reward | Ability to give benefits | A teacher who awards bonus marks |
| Coercive | Ability to punish | A prefect who can report latecomers |
| Expert | Special knowledge or skill | The student who is best at French |
| Referent | Being liked, admired and identified with | A popular senior student others want to resemble |
| Informational (Raven, 1965) | Holding useful information | The class representative who knows the exam timetable |
Coercive and reward power produce compliance that tends to stop when the leader is absent, just as the boys stopped working when the autocratic leader left. Referent and expert power produce change that lasts.
Economics from Home: “Kurt Lewin’s Leadership Experiments - Laissez-faire, Democratic & Autocratic style”. Watch for how each style is defined and what happened when the leader left the room.
Important
Evaluate the leadership-style study. It was one of the first experiments on group atmosphere, and rotating leaders across clubs meant that differences came from style rather than from particular boys. But the sample was tiny (a handful of clubs of about five boys each), the leaders knew what the researchers hoped to find, and the study took place in the United States just before the Second World War, when its authors openly wanted to show the value of democracy. Later research found that directive leadership can work well in emergencies or with inexperienced groups, so the “best” style depends on the situation.
Warning
Common mistake: describing the storming stage as a failure. Some conflict over roles and ideas is normal and can improve the final product; the danger is a group that never moves on to norming.
Tip
Memory hook for French and Raven: “Leaders Really Can Exert Real Influence”: Legitimate, Reward, Coercive, Expert, Referent, Informational.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the tables, Figure 1 and the exercises.
