Discuss the effect of group norms on a group’s development
Discuss the effect of group norms on a group’s development
Identify positive sentiments, as well as challenges, associated with group norms
Discuss ways in which group norms may be enforced
Identify processes for challenging and changing group norms
A new vice president heads an organization. At the end of her first weekly meeting with her staff members, she tossed a Nerf ball to one of them and asked the person to say how she was feeling. When that person finished, the vice president asked her to toss the ball to someone else, and so on, until everyone had expressed himself or herself. This process soon became a regular feature of the group’s meetings.
In our earlier section on group life cycles, you learned about Bruce Tuckman’s model of forming, storming, norming, and performing. Along with roles, status, and trust, which we’ll encounter in the next chapter, norms are usually generated and adopted after a group’s “forming” and “storming” stages.
As a group moves from “forming” toward “performing,” then, norms help guide its members along the way. Whether we see them or not, norms are powerful predictors of a group’s behavior (LibreTexts, 2020).
What Norms Are1
Group norms are rules or guidelines that reflect expectations of how group members should act and interact. They define what behaviors are acceptable or not; good or not; right or not; or appropriate or not (O’Hair & Wieman, p. 19).
Norms may relate to how people look, behave, or communicate with each other. Tossing a Nerf ball around a circle of workers is perhaps a peculiar way to start a meeting, and it probably doesn’t contribute directly to achieving substantive goals, but it did represent a norm in the vice president’s group we described—which, by the way, was a real group and not a product of imagination!
Some norms relate to how a group as a whole will act—e.g., when and how often it will meet, for instance. Others have to do with the behavior of individual group members and the roles those members play within the group.
By defining what social behavior lies within acceptable boundaries, norms can help a group function smoothly and face conflict without falling apart (Hayes, p. 31). Thus, they can constitute a potent force to promote positive interaction among group members.
Origin of Norms
In a new group, norms may arise organically as members settle into their relationships and start to function together. Decisions need to be made and time needs to be taken for diverse activities such as identifying goals, determining tasks, and allocating human and tangible resources. Who will take the lead in these areas of the group’s behavior has to be determined.
Further questions need to be answered as the group gets off the ground. Here are some examples:
What topics are and are not appropriate for the group to discuss?
How and to what degree will members respect and attend to each other’s statements and viewpoints?
How and when, if ever, will the group behave casually?
What mechanisms w