Essentials of Organizational Behavior, 14/e

Group Property 1: Roles

Workgroups shape members’ behavior, and they also help explain individual behavior as well as the performance of the group itself. Some defining group properties are roles, norms, status, size, cohesiveness, and diversity. We’ll discuss each in the sections that follow. Let’s begin with the first group property, roles.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”11 Using the same metaphor, all group members are actors, each playing a role, a set of expected behavior patterns attributed to someone occupying a given position in a social unit. We are required to play a number of diverse roles, both on and off our jobs. As we’ll see, one of the tasks in understanding behavior is grasping ...