Group Cohesiveness

In trying to understand what makes work groups and teams effective, an important question for theory and practice is: What keeps a group together, or what leads the members of a group to stay committed to the group? The term group cohesiveness (or cohesion) was coined by Leon Festinger and colleagues to refer to the social glue that binds group members together. Thus, group cohesiveness refers to the result of all the forces acting on members to remain in the group or simply to group members’ attraction to the group.

The concept of group cohesiveness has a wide appeal in research in applied psychology in such diverse areas as organizational behavior, social psychology, military psychology, sport psychology, educational psychology, and counseling. Much of this interest is ...