Exam 9: Foundations of Group Behavior

Michael is devout and very active in his church. He is also a very dedicated employee. His manager offers him a promotion but the new role will require him to work Sundays. Michael would like the promotion, but realizes that it would force him to miss some church activities. In this situation, Michael is most likely to experience ________.

Status is a characteristic under the social identity theory that reflects the ________.

________ refers to the degree to which members are attracted to each other and motivated to stay in the group.

Discuss the impact of brainstorming on the possibility of groupthink.

Which of the following represents the acceptable standards of behavior within a group that are shared by the group's members?

According to the status characteristics theory, what are the three sources of status? 1. The power a person wields over others. Because they likely control the group's resources, people who control the outcomes tend to be perceived as high status. 2. A person's ability to contribute to a group's goals. People whose contributions are critical to the group's success tend to have high status. 3. An individual's personal characteristics. Someone whose personal characteristics are positively valued by the group (good looks, intelligence, money, or a friendly personality) typically has higher status than someone with fewer valued attributes.

In the context of the social identity theory, distinctiveness refers to the ________.

If a group is highly cohesive then it will be highly productive even with low performance norms.

Which of the following statements is true regarding brainstorming?

Which of the following represents the second stage in the five-stage group development model?

Group decisions are generally less accurate than the judgments of the most accurate individual in the group.

The ________ norms dictate behavior such as with whom group members eat lunch and friendships on and off the job.

Role expectations at work are often conveyed through the psychological contract.

During the third stage of group development ________.

The important groups to which an individual belongs or hopes to belong are known as ________ groups.

Like many other marketing strategy specialists, Mark Fritz relies heavily on creativity and originality. Members of his team are selected on the basis of their ability to think divergently, and Mark often conducts activities to ensure that this ability is developed. For instance, before any new project, Mark invites his team to sit together and churn out possible ideas about the new product, its theme, and ways in which it can be projected best in the market. These sessions usually provide him with a bank of potential ideas from which the team selects some strong concepts and develops them into a campaign. To encourage freedom in these sessions, Mark has a no-evaluation policy. This is an example of ________.

Sonia Soans is corporate trainer. One of her favorite ways to start a training program is to present a case study and encourage members to think of the case in depth and discuss it amongst each other. Using the results of the activity she understands the baseline measures of the group's functioning. During one of her recent sessions, she observed that the group came to a consensus very quickly. However, when asked to present their views, the team members were not too confident and appeared to be under an illusion of unanimity. From the scenario, we can say that this group experienced ________.

Tabby Tolman is a project coordinator at Tristar Solutions. Whenever a new project comes her way, she holds a project meeting and follows it up with repeated meetings to address any concerns the team may have and to monitor their progress. However, with the peak of the business season arriving, she has been holding just one project initiation meeting for every project to save on time. She has become increasingly worried about the team's progress with no inputs coming from the members and she has had no time to check with them. With two weeks left to go for a high priority project of a month's duration, she has now begun to see some work coming through and is relieved. This development reflects that the group is at the stage of ________.

When faced with a number of tight deadlines, Mandy Moore often delegates work collectively. Recently she chose some fairly experienced employees to work on a high-priority project. She was heartened to see that the selected group of employees was having numerous meetings and working hard. However, when she went to check on their progress at the halfway mark in the project schedule, she was shocked to see how little the team had done in the past three weeks. This scenario reflects ________.

Amy Jones has to come up with a strategy to regulate the excessive use of the Internet by her employees in such a way that they accept and commit to the solution themselves. It is advisable for her to use group decision making, rather than individual decision making in this situation.