MediaSpace Wiki

Group Roles

The nature of roles in small groups

• A "role" is a recurring pattern of behavior
  • The most obvious use of "role" is a acting part in a play, movie, or television show
    • highly scripted behavior that coordinates with the behavior of others
  • Social roles aren't so heavily scripted
    • But they often are highly scripted
    • And they occur in every kind of routine social structure
      • Including communication systems: RolePlayersWithinMedia
• Roles in small groups can be formal or informal
  • Formal roles are recognized by the group
    • Common examples: Chairperson, Secretary, Treasurer
  • Informal roles are emergent in group interaction
    • For better or worse, they simply happen
    • They sometimes emerge from
      • the personality or preferences of group members
      • or from relationships between group members
    • More often, they emerge to serve the needs of the group
  • The literature generally recognizes three kinds of group role
    1. Task or task-oriented roles
    2. Maintenance or social-maintenance roles
    3. Self-serving or dysfunctional roles
  • Clearly the first two sets of roles are functional
    • They help the group to succeed.
    • One set helps the group achieve its task goals
    • The other helps the group to get along
  • We'll briefly look at these role variants in a few minutes
    • But I've done quite a bit of research on roles recently
    • and will first put group roles into a larger context
• Most communication systems involve a variety of roles
  • I've identified 20 core roles (see EmergentRoleComplexityInMedia)
  • Not all occur in every medium of communication
  • But many recur, sometimes in very different forms, in different media
    • Including group media
  • The following figure depicts the relationship between media based on their role distribution:

From Emergent Complexity and the Role Attributes of media. See http://evolutionarymedia.com/papers/RoleAttributesOfMediaAndEmergentStructure.htm

• In this diagram we see:
  1. A dimension that reflects increasing "serial complexity"
     • Producers, people who enable content production, are important here
  2. A dimension that reflects increasing "contention"
     • As people compete for scarce resources
       • Like the floor in a group discussion
     • Directors, people who constrain and coordinate the activities of others, are important here
  3. A core dimension, Parallel Complexity
     • that reflects media that involve many roles
     • In the leftmost extreme, usually mass media
  4. Many roles that are leadership roles
  5. And an increase in the need for formal leadership as the number of distinct roles increases
• What we have is two different kinds of leadership role
  1. Coordination and Control Skills
     • The director role
     • Co-ordinating the activities of many people
       • so that they complete their tasks together
         • or in the required sequence
     • Controlling the floor
       • Deciding who speaks when
     • In effect, an activity coordinator
     • This is a conventional view of leadership
       • for which transformational leadership is an extreme
  2. Enablement Skills
     • The producer role
     • Finding resources
     • Bringing them together
     • In effect, a resource coordinator
     • A less common way of thinking about leadership
       • "Removing obstacles" (following Gouran)
       • "Organizing" (following Barge)
• As we examine small group roles, keep in mind that
  • Some are leadership roles
  • Some are non-leadership roles
  • But all matter and provide ways of expressing leadership within the group

1. Task or task-oriented roles
   • Group oriented functional roles
   • Aid the group in accomplishing its goals

Barker and Barker, 1993	Adler, 1991	Benne and Sheets, 1948
Task-Oriented Roles	Task Roles	Task Roles	Description
Idea Person	Initiator/Contributor	Initiator/Contributor	Many groups form because someone has an idea and brings a group together to work on it.
Analyzer	Orienter/summarizer	Orienter	Orientation to the task/problem is an essential starting point. People who can digest and explain the task/problem are a critical early resource.
Information or Opinion Seeker	Information Seeker	Information Seeker	With the task understood, information about the task/problem and alternatives becomes critical. Asking good questions is important at this stage.
	Opinion seeker	Opinion seeker	Recognizing and asking good questions about alternatives becomes important as the group needs to digest information.
Information or Opinion Giver	Information giver	Information giver	People who have useful information and alternatives to share are particularly important to a group at this point.
Elaborator/Clarifier	Elaborator/Clarifier	Elaborator	Some people have a particular skill for digesting information and putting things together in new ways.
	Opinion giver	Opinion giver	As a group develops information, it will often discover alternatives. Some people have a particular talent for sorting out alternatives and helping groups reach decisions
	Evaluator/critic	Evaluator/critic	A particularly important role which you will encounter, in your discussion of Groupthink, as the Devil's Advocate.
Expediter	Coordinator	Coordinator	Once decisions are made, group efforts often need to be coordinated. Coordinator is a leadership role that can take two distinct forms: producer or director. The coordinator may not be formally recognized as a leader, but functions as one.
	Secretary	Recorder	Keeping track of a group's deliberations and decisions can be particularly important, especially as group membership changes.

• Other task roles associated with the typologies include:
  • Diagnostician
  • Procedure developer
  • Energizer

1. Maintenance or social-maintenance roles
   • Relationship oriented functional roles
   • Help group members to work together effectively

Barker and Barker, 1993	Adler, 1991	Benne and Sheets, 1948
Maintenance Roles	Social/Maintenance Roles	Social/Maintenance Roles	Description
Active Listener	Supporter/encourager	Encourager	People who explicitly listen and encourage others to contribute help a group to cohere. Active listening, in particular, is a precondition of being an effective elaborator or critic.
Gatekeeper	Gatekeeper	Gatekeeper	Most larger groups are composites of subgroups. Gatekeepers/liasions interconnect these subgroups. Gatekeepers/bridges connect the group to other groups and the larger organization.
Harmonizer	Harmonizer	Harmonizer	Some people have a particular skill in diffusing conflicts and resolving tension within a group.
Compromiser	Conciliator	Compromiser	Some people have a particular skill in finding alternatives that resolve disagreements.

• Other roles that are identified as maintenence oriented include
  • Game Leader
  • Tension reliever
  • Public Relations - Front Person
  • Group Commentator
  • Feeling Expresser
  • Follower
  • Standard Setter

1. Self-serving or dysfunctional roles
   • Patterns of behavior that groups find challenging
   • If not controlled, can cause groups to
     • fail
     • not cohere
     • feel dissatisfied with the group

Barker and Barker, 1993	Adler, 1991	Benne and Sheets, 1948
Self-Serving Roles	Dysfunctional Roles	Dysfunctional Roles	Description
Monopolizer	Dominator	Dominator	Ideas and information are great, but groups work best when everybody's ideas are heard.
Aggressor	Aggressor	Aggressor	Approaches to the group task are important, but groups work best when everyone keeps an open mind about alternatives. Aggressively promoting a particular point of view not only restricts options, but may turn the group off.
Blocker	Blocker	Blocker	Blocking the ideas of others can be even more damaging. Indeed, effective blocking can set up the pattern of self-censorship that leads to Groupthink.
Withdrawer	Deserter		People who stop participating in a group damage the groups prospects for successfully completing the task.
	Recognition Seeker	Recognition Seeker	Groups that accomplish things together function best over the long term if they share the credit for their accomplishments. Individuals that seek to take credit for the groups accomplishment damage the group over the long term.

• Other roles that have been identified as dysfunctional include:
  • Special Interest Pleader
  • Joker
  • Competor
  • Playboy
  • Self-Confessor
  • Help-Seeker

• None of the functional roles outlined here is "necessary" to a groups success
  • Groups can succeed without leadership
  • Groups can succeed without any individual taking the lead in idea generation, evaluation, etc.
  • But all of the roles I have focused on a often useful
• The boundary between formal roles and informal roles is fluid
  • Any informal role can be formalized
  • Indeed, formalization of the evaluator/critic or Devil's Advocate role is a key solution to the problem of groupthink.
  • More notably, all of these roles can be learned EITHER FORMALLY OR INFORMALLY