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Chapter 10: Working Groups - Performance and Decision Making

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    217785
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    Chapter Learning Objectives

    1. Understanding Social Groups

    • Define the factors that create social groups and perceptions of entitativity.
    • Define the concept of social identity, and explain how it applies to social groups.
    • Review the stages of group development and dissolution.

    2. Group Performance

    • Describe the situations under which social facilitation and social inhibition might occur, and review the theories that have been used to explain these processes.
    • Outline the effects of member characteristics, process gains, and process losses on group performance.
    • Summarize how social psychologists classify the different types of tasks that groups are asked to perform.
    • Explain the influence of social loafing on group performance.

    3. Group Decision Making

    • Explain factors that can lead to process gain in group versus individual decision making.
    • Explain how groupthink can harm effective group decision making.
    • Outline the ways that lack of information sharing can reduce decision-making quality in group contexts.
    • Explain why brainstorming can often be counterproductive to sound decision making in groups.
    • Describe how group polarization can lead groups to make more extreme decisions than individuals.
    • Explore important factors that lead juries to make better or worse decisions.

    4. Improving Group Performance and Decision Making

    • Review the ways that people can work to make group performance and decision making more effective.
    • Explore the role of motivating people to perform better due to self-interest.
    • Outline ways to improve communication and information sharing in groups.
    • Review research on setting effective group goals.
    • Outline the benefits of challenges of diversity in regards to group performance and decision making.


    Chapter 10: Working Groups - Performance and Decision Making is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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