Chapter 9: Communicating in Groups

Characteristics of Groups

BANDMATES such as the members of Vampire Weekend must share a sense of identity, communicate interdependently, and collaborate to achieve their shared goal of creating music. Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

We consider a collection of individuals a group when there are more than two people who share some kind of relationship, communicate in an interdependent fashion, and collaborate toward some shared purpose. When we break that definition down, we can identify three key characteristics:

A shared identity. Members of a group perceive themselves as a group. That is, they share a sense of identity: they recognize other members of the group, have specific feelings toward those individuals, and experience a sense of belonging. People may identify themselves, for example, as members of the student council, a park cleanup crew, a baseball team, or a string quartet.
Common goals. Members of a group usually identify with one another because they have one or more goals in common. Goals may be very specific—coming up with an ad campaign for a new project or organizing a fund-raiser for your soccer team—or they might be more general, such as socializing. In either case, a shared sense of purpose helps define a group, even when there is some disagreement about specific goals or ways of achieving them.
Interdependent relationships. Members of a group are connected to one another and communicate in an interdependent way. Simply put, the behavior of each member affects the behavior of every other member. This interdependence is fostered by the way that group members adopt specific roles and collaborate to accomplish their goals.

Looking back at the examples at the beginning of this section, you can probably guess that your family or a group of coworkers constitutes a group. You share an identity with the other members and have feelings about them (for better or worse); you likely have common goals, and you are interdependent—that is, you rely on them, and they on you, for love, friendship, or professional accomplishments. This is not the case with the strangers in a pediatrician’s office. They might share a goal (seeing the doctor), but they do not interact with each other interdependently, and they do not share an identity. Note that it is not the number of people involved or their location that determines whether people are communicating in groups. Four friends chatting over coffee at your local Starbucks constitute a group; so do twenty mothers who’ve never met but who contribute regularly to an online parenting forum. In both cases, the individuals are joined by shared goals, shared identity, and interdependence.