Last semester I took Psychology 301W and one of our assignments was to design a research study and construct a proposal for an area of psychology. I chose to study group dynamics and the effects of cohesion and discipline. Being an Honors Scholar at Penn State DuBois, I am required to conduct research before I graduate. Though we were not required to conduct our research design, I decided to pursue it further for my honors undergraduate research. Flash forward to the present, my experiment is currently underway and I will be able to collect and analyze the data by the end of the semester.
Based on this week’s discussion, I touched on the idea that too much cohesion can lead to less productivity in a group setting. In my experience with project groups, when a group gets along too well, we can be less focused on the goals. A study conducted about work groups found that “an inverse curvilinear relationship exists between social network measures (of which group cohesion is one) and team performance” (Wise, S. (2014)). This means that as cohesion increases, performance may go down. Of course, correlation doesn’t equal causation, it does provide interesting insights on how cohesion can sometimes harm the performance of a group. The idea that there can be too much cohesion also led me to think that there can be too much discipline in a group, in which if a member of the group punishes another for falling short or not accomplishing their part of the project, spillover costs can ensue and create a tension that limits effective performance (Levine, D. K., & Modica, S., 2016). Thus, I hypothesized that a balance of the two, discipline and cohesion, can lead to optimal group or team performance.
When designing the experiment I actually worked with the Professor of this class, Dr. Nelson, to help me hammer out the variables, and statistical analysis of the results. Because it was part of the class, I was able to learn the research process and how to create an effective experimental design. What I was able to construct was a 2×2 factorial design with two independent variables measuring one dependent variable. The independent variables were cohesion, measured through a project group having a team-building exercise or not; and discipline, measured by a group having strict deadlines or not; and combination of the two. Thus, there were four experimental conditions, one group with the combination of the two, one group solely with cohesion variable, one with just discipline variable, and one group with none (the control group). These four groups would be measured on performance which would be operationalized through a predetermined rubric set up by a professor for the quality of the project.
Moreover, since I chose to pursue this experiment for my honors research, I began to consider how to implement this study. Part of the undergraduate research process on my campus is to identify an advisor to help guide, provide input, and assist with the study. Fortunately, I found one who was willing to integrate this study into one of her classes. Due to the wide scope of applicability for my research (group projects are inevitable at this point), I was able to incorporate this study into her marketing class, where project groups would be subject to one of the four conditions. I was actually able to get two groups in each condition except the control condition. I feel that this will help amplify and reinforce the performances while being able to identify differences within the groups in the same condition. As of right now I am currently in the process of running the experiments over the semester. The groups are assigned seven marketing worksheets and once they are complete I will be able to gather the data and analyze the individual performance of each single worksheet and the average score of each group combined.
This study started out as an idea, then a research design project, and now an actual experiment in which meaningful results will hopefully be generated. I think that group dynamics are interesting to study because it is inevitable in today’s society; and in terms of cohesion, can have real life possibilities for intervention. Essentially, my research is a sort of intervention implementation to see what conditions would help project groups optimally perform. The evaluation of the performance will help me measure the effectiveness of the “intervention” and provide insights on how to optimize group performance.
References
Wise, S. (2014). Can a team have too much cohesion? the dark side to network density. European Management Journal, 32(5), 703-711. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2013.12.005
Levine, D. K., & Modica, S. (2016). Peer discipline and incentives within groups. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol 123, 19–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.12.006