Shane R. Thye University of South Carolina
SES-0957982 Edward J. Lawler Cornell University
This project investigates why collaboration may not occur among group members even when the conditions for collaboration are present such as common interests and shared identities. The investigators contend that affective ties of people to the group are critical, and these develop from jointly solving tasks that give people a sense of shared responsibility. They hypothesize that in a cooperative group setting, people with common interests and common identities develop affective group ties only if they are involved in joint tasks that give them a sense of shared responsibility. When this occurs, people are more willing to act in the collective interests. The hypothesis is tested in two lab experiments that combine interactions around a task (low or high in jointness) with (a) common interests (experiment 1) or (b) common identities (experiment 2). In the experiment, groups of four people engage in individual and joint tasks that involve well-known survival scenarios, such as "lost on the moon," where participants rank the importance of several items to their survival.
BROADER IMPACTS: The project addresses an important and pervasive problem, that is, how to create and sustain social order (cooperation, collaboration, etc.). The issue takes on new relevance in the contemporary world given globalization and associated economic and political changes. People interact with more people at greater distance, all of which make group ties even more important as a source of collaboration and cooperation. This research develops a way to produce and sustain such ties and, thereby, promote individual sacrifices for the group or collective benefit. It has broad implications for how social divides can be crossed or bridged to create new group affiliations.
This project questions the prevailing view that common interests and shared identities are necessarily a basis for effective groups. Members of groups often fail to collaborate effectively or work together well even when it is in their best interest to do so. We propose that having people interact around joint tasks is more important and can bridge many differences among them. The reason is that joint tasks produce both positive feelings and a sense of shared responsibility for the results, and these conditions, in turn, promote emotional ties to the group. Emotional ties to groups motivate greater sacrifices for the group than instrumental ties. Two experiments compared a condition where four people work on a truly joint task in which they submit a single (collective) response versus a condition in which they work alone and submit individual responses. The main findings are that groups with truly joint tasks had the following effects: (1) members saw the group as a cohesive unit; (2) they perceived greater shared responsibility for the task outcomes; (3) when this sense of shared responsibility was combined with feelings of pleasure or excitement from the task, people gave their group more credit for these positive feelings and became more emotionally attached to the group; finally, (4) such groups performed better at the task. The intellectual merit of this work is to demonstrate how joint tasks produced stronger group ties and more effective task performance because of shared responsibility and positive feelings from the task. Further, we discovered that the impact of joint tasks overwhelmed the effects of differential interests or identities. In terms of the broader impact, our results suggest that in the design of teams, committees and other work units, it is important to create truly joint tasks that generate both positive individual feelings and a sense of shared responsibility. Human resource and business professionals emphasize the importance of aligning employee’s and employer’s material interests in order to motivate and maximize performance. Our research indicates that such efforts have weak effects unless there is an emotional component. The products of this project include several papers to be published in scientific outlets, a coding scheme for analyzing human interactions that can be used by other scientists who study group dynamics, and a large data set of videotapes for each group we studied suitable for analyzing other dimensions of human interaction.
