The Differences between Groups and Teams. A Comparative Conceptual Analysis and Practical Implications E-Book

Christoph Rosenthal

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Sport - Sport Psychology, London School of Economics, language: English, abstract: Groups are inherent to the existence of human beings. The well-known Aristotelian statement about men being social animals by nature encapsulates the importance of groups in that grouping is a fundamentally social phenomenon. Human beings and their animal ancestors have always been grouping in order to fullfil needs of social bonding, reproduction and to survive. Whereas survival is not their primary purpose anymore, different kinds of groups are still present in contemporary societies. One variety of groups that has gained increasing attention in organisational and academic realms is the team. The concepts of group and team have unwarily been used as seemingly interchangeable without a clear conceptual differentiation . In the literature on leadership in teams, for example, it has been argued that leaders in teams ought “to do, or get done, whatever is not being adequately handled for group needs”. Likewise, in organisational contexts, it has been claimed that “teams and groups are really just the same thing”. Tackling the absence of a clear conceptual and practical distinction between the two terms, the essay at hand forges a comprehensive synopsis of the key differences between groups and teams in the broader field around social psychology. It argues that differentiating between these concepts is of crucial importance both in organisational and scholarly contexts mainly because teams function on the micro rather than the macro level. After a brief overview of the dissimilar appearances of groups and teams in the literature, the two terms are related conceptually before a comparative analysis through the concept of leadership illuminates further key differences. Subsequently, a discussion of potential implications for organizational and academic contexts precedes the final conclusion.

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Content

Introduction

The Differences between Groups and Teams

Groups and teams in social psychology

Leadership in groups and teams

Implications and Discussion

Conclusion

References

Introduction

Groups are inherent to the existence of human beings. The well-known Aristotelian statement about men being social animals by nature encapsulates the importance of groups in that grouping is a fundamentally social phenomenon (Thibaut, 1959; Wetherell, 1996). Human beings and their animal ancestors have always been grouping in order to fulfil needs of social bonding, reproduction and to survive (Tomasello, 1999). Whereas survival is not their primary purpose anymore, different kinds of groups are still present in contemporary societies.

One variety of groups that has gained increasing attention in organisational and academic realms is the team. The concepts of group and team have unwarily been used as seemingly interchangeable without a clear conceptual differentiation (e.g. Ellemers, De Gilder, & Haslam, 2004). In the literature on leadership in teams, for example, it has been argued that leaders in teams ought “to do, or get done, whatever is not being adequately handled for group needs” (Hackman & Walton, 1986, p. 5). Likewise, in organisational contexts, it has been claimed that “teams and groups are really just the same thing” (Paulus & Van der Zee, 2004, p. 477).

Tackling the absence of a clear conceptual and practical distinction between the two terms, the essay at hand forges a comprehensive synopsis of the key differences between groups and teams in the broader field around social psychology. It argues that differentiating between these concepts is of crucial importance both in organisational and scholarly contexts mainly because teams function on the micro rather than the macro level. After a brief overview of the dissimilar appearances of groups and teams in the literature, the two terms are related conceptually before a comparative analysis through the concept of leadership illuminates further key differences. Subsequently, a discussion of potential implications for organizational and academic contexts precedes the final conclusion.

The Differences between Groups and Teams

Groups and teams in social psychology

It is useful to first establish an understanding of the different research traditions and literatures surrounding groups and teams. Teams usually involve field studies in real-world and organisational settings, whereas group studies are conducted in controlled research laboratories, often using experimental designs (Paulus & Van der Zee, 2004). Popular press has echoed this division by juxtaposing empirical group literature in opposition to popular angles on teams (Kayser, 1994). In the social psychology literature, chapters on groups and group dynamics rarely cover teams (e.g. Baron & Kerr, 2003; Thibaut, 1959). Likewise, organizational and management literature hardly features group chapters (e.g. Swezey & Salas, 1992). While this tendency certainly paints an imbalanced and mutually exclusive picture, it is true that teams mostly occur in organizational settings, whereas groups naturally form in various other contexts apart from the organizational one, such as religious faith groups or sports fans.

From a social psychological perspective, a group can be defined as “two or more individuals who are connected to one another by social relationships” (Forsyth, 2010, p. 3). The size of a group ranges from very small numbers of people, such as dyads, to very large collectives, such as crowds, communities and nations (McGrath, Arrow, & Berdahl, 2000; Simmel, 1902). Most groups tend to have between two and seven members (Forsyth, 2010; Hare, 1976). The web of social, interpersonal relationships at the heart of a group is based on connectional links between the individual members of that group (Forsyth, 2010; Levi, 2011). Accordingly, even though many groupings of people or collections of individuals may seem highly distinctive and unique at first sight, the links conjoining the individual group members embody the critical element that all groups have in common.

One particular form of a group is referred to as team. In general terms, teams are designated groups of individuals, which are supposed to form a unit that works together toward a common goal (Franz, 2012; Salas, Cooke, & Rosen, 2008; West, 2004). More specifically, a team is “a distinguishable set of two or more people who interact, dynamically, interdependently, and adaptively toward a common and valued goal/object/mission, who have each been assigned specific roles or functions to perform, and who have a limited life-span of membership” (Salas, Dickinson, Converse, & Tannenbaum, 1992, p. 4). Teams vary in size, but generally remain rather small and do not exceed 15 individuals (Guzzo, & Dickson, 1996; Salas et al., 2008). These general definitions serve as an expedient point of departure for the following comparative examination of how groups are different from teams.

On a first note, teams possess important properties of a group in that they feature interpersonal relationships between the individual team members. However, in terms of orientation and function, teams can be considered a special kind of group, which has the function of making its members work together and is oriented primarily toward collectively achieving a particular goal or task (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006; Sundstrom, De Meuse, & Futrell, 1990). By contrast, a group might form based on general similarities of group members, who do not necessarily collaborate toward a shared task (Levi, 2011).

The structured, goal-oriented and task-focused nature of teams becomes clear when considering the example of a team of surgeons, surgical assistants and nurses trying to save a patient’s life in the operating theatre (e.g. Catchpole, Mishra, Handa, & McCulloch, 2008; Undre, Sevdalis, Healey, Darzi, & Vincent, 2006). Here, a relatively small set of people come together and “dynamically, interdependently, and adaptively” (Salas et al., 1992) interact and react in concert according to the patient’s situation. Saving the patient’s life is the team’s shared goal and upon its successful or unsuccessful completion, the team dissolves again. On the contrary, a family exemplifies the idea of a group in that the family is not necessarily working towards a specific common goal with an expected outcome. In a prehistoric context, families might be seen to have had the goal of surviving together and producing offspring. Thus, there might have been a shared, pragmatic goal but no higher entity or institution that expected a certain outcome of the group, as it is generally the case with a team (Franz, 2012).

Following this, an additional important difference between groups and teams emerges as teams often are subject to or part of a superior entity that defines goals and expects certain outcomes (Guzzo, & Dickson, 1996; Ilgen, Hollenbeck, Johnson, & Jundt, 2005). Sometimes, the team itself resembles this superior entity, for example when a group of independent journalists or artists comes together to start a project without any commissioner or contracting authority. Even in this case, there is a sense of expected outcome due to the very fact that the team has been formed in the first place. In addition to such formalized expectations, teams can experience varying performance episodes (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001), whereas groups are more stable and rarely have to ‘perform’ under time pressure. This illustrates the importance of the time factor in teams (Levi, 2011).

Leadership in groups and teams

Groups and teams alike are contingent on certain kinds of leadership. Inextricably related to both groups and teams, yet different in nature and applicability to either one of them, the concept of leadership serves as an expedient device since the differences between groups and teams are not merely outlined descriptively, but further elucidated through a concept relevant to, yet differently manifested in, both. On the one hand, large societal groups, such as nations or organisations, are generally characterised by broad, macro-scale leadership. For example, a nation is lead as a group by the president, chancellor or head of that nation. Leading a group thus involves more indirect leadership since large numbers of people are led by one or a few individuals with little direct interpersonal contact. On the other hand, teams are based on micro-level leadership, which typically involves direct interpersonal contact (Morgeson, DeRue, & Karam, 2010), even with laissez faire or identity-focused team leaders (Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & Van Engen, 2003). Rather than managing a group through charisma and discourse (Cheney, Christensen, Zorn, & Ganesh, 2011), a team leader capitalizes on the ability to directly communicate with team members (Hackman & Johnson, 2013). In comparison, the different kinds of leadership show that relationships among members of groups – with the exception of families and similar small groups – may exist through macro collectivism, whereas team members tend to be connected interpersonally.

The power and authority that a leader has over a societal group at the macro level is also different from the kind of power leaders have over the individual members of a team. Depending on the situation, team leaders may employ a task- or people-focused approach, but are always in direct interpersonal contact with the members of the team (Morgeson et al., 2010). Hence, the micro leadership in teams revolves more around small-group management with a collective focus on the task at hand (Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2006) and the development of interpersonal relationships among the team members, whereas group members are often physically separate from one another, being indirectly connected through an ideological or mediated social relationship (Thibaut, 1959; Wetherell, 1996). Furthermore, team leaders ideally “share decision-making responsibilities, let team members take the initiative in their areas of expertise, and are active participants in the work” (Hackman & Johnson, 2013, p. 218). Group leaders, on the other hand, refrain from outsourcing decisions and focus on forging a controllable atmosphere of shared identity and belonging (Levi, 2011).

Finally, teams in organisations often have to perform on the spot, potentially pressured by the leader and the authority overseeing the team, whereas organisational groups are not always physically subject to the leader’s influence and tend to have less performance pressure (Kozlowski & Bell, 2003; Sundstrom et al., 1990). Moreover, team leaders actively help team members solve tasks for the team to become more efficient (Levi, 2011), while group leaders passively assign tasks and give orders (Hackman & Walton, 1986). For example, while belonging to the same group, a marketing specialist at the lower level of a large organisation rarely receives direct orders by the CEO, who is the marketing specialist’s leader at the group level. However, the leader of the marketing team constantly helps and is in direct contact with the marketing specialist. Besides showing the difference between groups and teams in an organisation, this also illustrates that teams can exist within groups since an organisation can be seen as a group of teams with respective leaders under the direction of the CEO. Thus, teams can be subject to both group and team dynamics.

Implications and Discussion

Comparisons in this essay take simplified ideal types of groups and teams as a basis and thus largely exclude potentially more complicated real-world scenarios. Nonetheless, a number of useful points can be made based on the theoretically rigorous comparison. In terms of performance, groups do not have to perform as a coherent whole. It is simply the individual members of the group who are linked to each other by a shared identity, space, or institution, who have to perform individually. In contrast, team members have to function in concert and their output can be greater than the sum of the individual parts. This encapsulates the idea of team synergy (Cheney et al., 2011), where collaboration produces a team outcome which would not be possible by combining individually finished parts into one final piece of work. This characteristic of teams embodies one advantage over groups. Teams are working together, i.e. with one another, in and as a team, as opposed to individuals working individually in a group (Burke, Stagl, Salas, Pierce & Kendall, 2006).

In this guise, teams could be seen as more productive and efficient than groups (Paulus & Van der Zee, 2004) since they are comprised of individuals working together rather than a group of persons working individually (Cheney et al., 2011; Burke et al., 2006). This could be considered an obvious, highly important difference between groups and teams. However, the effectiveness of collaboration in the form of teams has been subject to extensive critique. Research on brainstorming has shown that teams produce fewer ideas and sometimes do worse compared to groups of independently working individuals (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987; Furnham, 2000; Paulus, Dugosh, Dzindolet, Coskun, & Putman, 2002). In this area of research, teams are neither more productive nor more efficient, but merely have the illusion of higher team productivity (Paulus, Dzindolet, Poletes & Camacho, 1993; Paulus, Larey, & Ortega, 1995). Hence, echoing Buys’s (1978) contention that organisations are better off without groups, the argument can be put forth that teams are not necessarily more efficient and productive than groups or sets of individuals.

Extrapolating the aforementioned debate, this means that organisations have to be highly reflective and carefully make decision on whether teams are the better choice over group or even individual work. Moreover, in an organisational setting, it can be argued that all teams are groups, but not all groups are necessarily teams (Hackman & Johnson, 2013; Katzenbach & Smith, 2002). Scholars have simplistically reasoned that teams can be considered as working groups (Hackman, 1990; Ilgen et al., 2005; Salas et al., 1992). However, this argument fails to make an important distinction in terms of what teams and working groups, respectively, produce in an organisation.

 On the one hand, members of a working group occasionally meet to discuss work in progress, communicate new information and decide on further project-related steps. Besides the fact that they are being evaluated in terms of individual efforts, there are no performance measures assessing the success of the working group as a whole (Hackman, 1990; Hackman & Johnson, 2013). Instead, working groups are judged against the backdrop of the organisation’s overall performance (Kozlowski, & Bell, 2003). Finally, while members of a working group collectively share the organisational values and follow the mission statement, they do not collectively work on a shared task (Katzenbach & Smith, 2005).

On the other hand, an organisational team’s individual members actively collaborate toward a cooperative outcome, such as a PR campaign or a market analysis. Other than a working group, a team has a particular set of goals and a distinctive, temporarily-restricted purpose (Katzenback & Smith, 2002). For example, a team of Human Resource specialists may have the task to hire 25 new metallurgical specialists by the end of the fiscal year. In contrast, a group has a broader outline of general tasks and responsibilities and member’s work processes and needs are largely independent (Kozlowski, & Bell, 2003).

Even though it is subtle, the difference between working groups and teams is an important one in an organisational context and implies that teams have certain advantages over working groups and vice versa. The flexible nature of teams allows organisations to more efficiently manage change, which is an important aspect in today’s volatile business world with an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions. Moreover, teams can create more individual working contexts for employees and might serve as a measure against group think and organisational stagnation (Hackman & Johnson, 2013).

Likewise, working groups have less potential for mutual learning and individual development due to the lack of continuous interpersonal contact as well as less individual responsibility and decision-making power (Kozlowski & Ilgen, 2006; Sundstrom et al., 1990). However, a team-approach does not always afford organisational structure, vision and employee identification. Another downside of teams is the cost that comes with them. Sometimes hard to implement and potentially costly to establish, teams should only be chosen over working groups if the return outweighs the investment. Some employees might have difficulties adapting to new environments and colleagues, which potentially decreases productivity and motivation. Likewise, change and team lengthy team formation can have disruptive effects on organisational workflow and time spent on actual task (Ilgen, 1999; Kozlowski & Bell, 2003).

Finally, it can be argued that making and being aware of the difference between groups and teams does matter especially in an organisational context since teams are focused on an organization’s micro-tasks (the actual creative development of a marketing campaign), whereas groups are more concerned with the organization as a whole (the group of an organisation’s managers coordinating the different departments). Both micro tasks as well as macro tasks are important for organisations to function. It is also important to note that if teams are deployed after a careful consideration has found teams to be the right option, they should be trained and supported adequately. Else, training and development resources might just as well be spent on individuals if teams are not the appropriate option since the benefits of groups or individuals are higher in certain situations because they are less expensive and require fewer changes (Paulus & Van der Zee, 2004). Here, the distinction again should be made between an organisation’s micro-level and macro-level problems and tasks. Teams tend to be able to better be able to solve former, whereas groups are more suitable for the latter.

Conclusion

Contributing to further developing terminological accuracy in the literature, this essay has shown the conceptual and practical differences between groups and teams. A comparative analysis, partly through the concept of leadership, has shown that while both are based on social relationships, groups function at the macro level, whereas teams function at the micro level. Correspondingly, it has been argued that there are important differences to be made between groups and teams, both on a conceptual level as well as in organisational settings. Moreover, the present essay is one of the few comparative investigations in the field of social psychology that specifically juxtaposes groups and teams (exceptions include Hackman & Johnson, 2013; Paulus & Van der Zee, 2004), while simultaneously outlining potential integrative approaches and their affordances.

An inclusion into future research of the theoretical differentiations and practical implications put forth in this essay may afford more rigorous inquiry and open up new avenues of investigations previously unrecognized due to theoretical and conceptual imprecision. Especially in an organizational context, where the differentiation between groups and teams has been widely absent, a focus on the different natures of groups and teams may advance the field and the functioning of both in organisational settings. Besides contemplating their differences, however, one should also critically approach the manifestations and connotations of groups and teams in organisations and academia. Contrary to their popularity in organisations and their “invulnerable image of superiority” (Paulus & Van der Zee, 2004, p. 475), teams have sometimes proven to be less efficient and productive than groups of independently working individuals (e.g. Furnham, 2000; Paulus et al., 2002). It is therefore important not to fall into the pitfall of blindly attributing utility value to groups or teams without substantive evidence.

Finally, making the difference between groups and teams is of critical importance in order to further corroborate specific research into groups and teams, respectively, while simultaneously advancing the interdisciplinary collaboration between group and team researchers. Groupand team research have a lot to learn from one another. An interdisciplinary approach could afford many advantageous and valuable insights for both strands. Capitalizing on previous experiences, research of long-term teams could provide insightful angles on the difficulties and affordances of groups in organizational and real-world settings. By the same token, teamwork could be enhanced in organizational settings by leveraging findings from laboratory research on groups and group processes. Procedures and systematic approaches to small-group processes could yield a new perspective on how to make sense of problems arising in teams. In this reconciliatory guise, even though there are fundamental, important differences to be made between groups and teams, they must not be seen as irreconcilable antipodes.

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