Chapter 10: Leadership and Decision Making in Groups

Individual Performance

One of the most important assessments you can make is about yourself and what predispositions you bring to the group. According to Keyton and Frey (2002), grouphate is the extent to which you detest (or otherwise feel negatively about) working in groups. To assess grouphate, group members are asked a series of questions about the degree to which they like or dislike working in groups:

I like working in groups.
I would rather work alone.
Group work is fun.
Groups are terrible.
I would prefer to work in an organization in which teams are used.
My ideal job is one in which I can be interdependent with others.

To what extent to you agree or disagree with each of these questions? Your basic orientation to group interaction can influence your communication. It is not always easy to work with others but it is a fact of organizational (and academic) life. This process of self-introspection will foster personal growth and learning.

Conversely, your group can also benefit from systematic assessments of team members. Simple evaluation forms can be created and used to evaluate team members on a variety of qualities. For example, you can rate your team members on the quality of their contributions. Specific questions pertaining to a team member could include the following:

Was the team member prepared for meetings and well informed?
Did the team member meet individual responsibilities and deadlines?
Was the team member respectful and tactful with fellow team members?
Did the team member listen to, understand, and follow the group’s discussions?
Were the team member’s comments relevant and well timed?
Was the team member open-minded?
Did the team member deal with conflict appropriately and effectively?

Both self-assessment and peer evaluations can provide information that can benefit the group by identifying areas of concern or deficiency and suggest specific areas for improvement. This information will only help improve the group process and decision making. In sum, assessment is healthy for the life and success of a group.

BACK TO

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

At the beginning of this chapter, we took a look at Captain Ray Holt, the fictional commanding officer at a New York police precinct on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Let’s take a look at Holt’s leadership in light of what we’ve learned in this chapter.

In the NYPD, there is a clear hierarchy of legitimate power. As commanding officer, Captain Holt has authority over all of his detectives, but even a captain must defer to the chiefs who outrank him. For Holt, that meant “being a good soldier” and working in the public affairs office for many years. Although that job did not align with Holt’s career goals, it helped the department to meet other goals: having a gay (and African American) captain in a high-profile role helped the department to change its image and improve recruitment.
Holt’s power is rooted not only in his rank as captain (legitimate power) but also in his experience as a veteran officer who knows how to solve major cases (expert power). As commanding officer, he also has coercive and reward power—he can reward or punish his detectives based on their performance. His personal story, too, affords him an additional degree of referent power: over the course of his long career, Holt overcame prejudices within the department and played a central role in changing the face of the NYPD, something his young, diverse squad might have taken for granted.
In a police squad room, there is an expectation of a directive style of leadership—supervisors lay out clear instructions, and officers are expected to follow those instructions. But Holt knows that, despite their hijinks, his detectives are capable and competent. For this reason, he can take a more achievement-oriented approach, setting goals and providing guidance for meeting those goals.