Humans are driven to form groups. The basic needs discussed in Chapter 3 cannot be fully satisfied without other people. It’s easy to see that our inher-ent need for sex, belongingness, love, and human contact requires the pres-ence of other people. A group is also essential for the satisfaction of power and freedom needs. While everyone wants some freedom, it’s impossible to enjoy freedom from control without having a group whose control you can be occasionally freed from (but not so free that it’s not there to provide support when you need it). Thus, inborn individual needs provide a powerful drive to form groups.
On a more basic level, the compulsion to form groups was naturally selected by a harsh environment that weeded out those who did not success-fully form groups—individuals or even a small group could not survive long on their own. Therefore, every healthy human being alive today is compelled by genetics to need to be a part of a group, whether or not his or her “I” agrees or he or she likes it. This compulsion, if properly focused, can be a powerful mechanism to support leadership’s objectives and enrich employees’ lives.
If human nature is allowed to take its natural course, people will generally form groups of fewer than nine people. Most often, the groups will be four to seven. This number makes it easy for all members of the group to interact with one another and be close enough to give and receive subtle nonverbal cues as well as to feel as though they can reach out and touch one another. It is said in much of the small-group literature that the ideal number of group members is five to nine, often stated as seven plus or minus two. As groups get larger than three people, they are increasingly likely to break into smaller groups. It doesn’t matter if a larger group is the official group (as with departments, sec-tions, teams, or committees in an organization). When people are faced with a large group, they quickly form smaller groups within the larger group so that they can communicate more intimately and thereby obtain more belonging-ness and satisfaction.
This phenomenon is at work in every organization every day. There may be 20 people in the customer service department, but those 20 people will invariably form several smaller, much more tightly knit groups in order to
provide each group member with sufficient need satisfaction. When people are required to work in a larger group (such as a project team of 25 people), performance will suffer because the inevitable informal, smaller groups will not communicate everything they know to the other small groups. People are, by design, not able to develop close bonds within such a large group. If forced to always interact as a single large group, the result will be more withdrawal, contempt for the group, conflict, and poor communication when compared with a smaller group.
The only way to get small group dynamics to work for you is to formally design a project or a department around teams of five to nine people. If the project requires 25 individuals, create five teams of 5 (or three of 6 and one of 7, for example), give each team specific tasks, and set up a formal process so that the teams can easily and frequently exchange information. In this way, there is little tendency for poorly defined small groups to do things that don’t fit well with the big picture.
The same dynamics work with intact work groups (IWGs). An IWG con-sists of people who spend most of their day together working on similar tasks.
Examples are groups such as the 6 people in the purchasing department, the 20 people working in production, the 15 engineers in the new products design group, and the 8 people working in human resources. To generate maximum effectiveness, each of these areas must be organized into teams of fewer than 10 individuals. For example, the 20 people in production could be formed into teams of 7, 7, and 6, and the 15 engineers could be formed into either three teams of 5 each or two teams, one with 7 and one with 8. These smaller groups provide much more opportunity for the IWG members to both obtain greater need satisfaction and take greater ownership of their jobs and assigned work areas/processes.
PrOPInqUITy
Propinquity (pro-pin-qwi-tee) is the name given to the mechanism by which people tend to like things that are closer to them compared with things that are further away. The “thing” can be appearance, religious belief, nationality, economic status, political allegiance, neighborhood, type of car driven, and so on. Physical distance is the most powerful driver of propinquity simply because people who are nearby offer more opportunities for help, protection, need satisfaction, and information than do people who are farther away. In the past, the closest people were also likely to be members of the same group as well as close genetic relations.
It’s easy to see propinquity in operation. For example, in our highly mobile society, many people do not know their neighbors very well. Yet, when they are driving down their street, most will not hesitate to wave at people in nearby yards because they assume that they are neighbors. And the neighbors, assum-ing that the waver is a fellow neighbor, wave back. Three blocks from their home, people hardly ever wave to others. Yet, if you live way out in the coun-try, where there are comparatively few neighbors, people will routinely wave at other drivers on country roads a mile or more from their homes because they assume that the others are neighbors who are close by their standards. The same mechanism works to foster feelings of kinship within departments and sections of an organization. People in functional departments share the propin-quity of not only physical proximity but also objectives, jargon, and leaders.
These forces work to create strong feelings of identity and loyalty, even if most people are not aware of them.
Propinquity works (along with other dynamics discussed shortly) to strengthen group ties and enable the group to view itself as more significant and “better” than the overall organization. This enables the group to better satisfy its individuals’ needs. However, at the same time, this process reduces communication and cooperation with other groups. A key challenge of leaders is to have strong, self-respecting groups that also have a clear understanding, driven by explicit metrics and instructions, about how they can each serve the overall organization and “nearby” groups from the comfort of their “home”
groups. Do not make the mistake of thinking that so-called process-centered work groups and/or matrix-organizations as they are commonly practiced can be used to get the best of both worlds. It is a false hope that defies the facts of human nature.
A process-centered work group is one in which personnel from various tra-ditional functional areas (such as product design, customer service, planning, operations, sales, and the like) are assigned to work as a team or department that focuses on one process or product. This is done to encourage the individu-als to work together more efficiently and harmoniously than they did when they resided in discrete departments. It’s a great idea in concept but rarely works in practice. Even if the people in the group report to the process or product man-ager of their new department, they know where their long-term career health is determined—the functional area they came from. Since so few organizations use process-centered work groups and those who try them tend to give up after a short time (remember, human nature is always pushing for more powerful, need-satisfying, and therefore more distinct and more homogeneous groups), employees know that the arrangement is most likely temporary. And there’s
still the issue of getting a specific process-centered work group to play nicely with other groups in the organization. It will also fall victim to the tendency to suboptimize (improve its status and outcomes at the expense of other groups and the greater organization).
Matrix-organizations are even worse. In these arrangements, personnel are lent or assigned by their home functions to participate on task forces, cross-functional teams, product groups, and the like. With excellent coaching and true leadership, these ad hoc groups can function well, but that is true of any group in any environment. However, such coaching and guidance are usu-ally not provided in meaningful amounts. People still “belong” to their home departments and depend on them for career advancement and pay increases.
There are all of the problems of process-centered groups and none of the ben-efits. The majority of matrix-organizations are simply traditional functional organizations that wish to appear as though they have more resources available than the organization is actually capable of providing. It’s not uncommon for individuals in matrix-organizations to be on four to five “matrix” processes/
projects at the same time as they hold down their regular job. Guess which responsibility gets the most attention?