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Group Dynamics

Many of the interpersonal relationships that link people to one another are initiated by and organized within groups. Cliques, teams, crews, families, gangs, peer groups, military squads, professional associations, clubs, congregations, and the like are all groups, for they are networks of interdependent individuals with relatively well-defined boundaries and stable memberships. Groups, in many cases, are the wellsprings of relationships, for by joining a group, one becomes linked interpersonally to the other members of that group. These relationships, however, are rarely static. Just as the dynamic processes that occur in groups—communication among members, shifts in influence and power as members vie for social status, pressures put on individual members to adhere to the group's standards, the eruption of conflict and discord as members find that others do not share their beliefs or interests—change the group, so they also change the relationships among members that the group sustains. This entry examines the role groups play as a source of enduring and significant human relationships, as well as the significant impact of group dynamics on those relationships.

Memberships as Relationships

The basic unit of analysis in relationship research is the dyadic pairing—the one-to-one link of one person to another. Individuals in a dyadic relationship—a father and son, two lovers, a leader and a follower, a teacher and student, two best friends—are interdependent: Their actions, affect, and cognitions are causally interconnected. These causal connections, or ties, may be strong emotional bonds, such as the links between members of a family or a clique of close friends. The links may also be relatively weak ones that are easily broken with the passage of time or the occurrence of relationship-damaging events.

When two people join in a dyad, an elemental group comes into existence. Although many of the features of larger groups, such as coalition building, shifting exclusions, and hierarchy, are necessarily absent in such groups, the dyad nonetheless includes many defining features of a group: interaction between the members; interdependence as members influence other's thoughts, actions, and emotions; patterning of behaviors over time and situations; shared goals; and a sense of inclusiveness.

As groups grow in size, the number of relationships that sustain the group increases. The maximum number of relationships within a group, where everyone is linked to everyone else, is given by the equation n (n − 1)/2, where n is the number of people in the group. Only one relationship is needed to create a dyad, but the number of links in a group increases exponentially with increases in group size. Ten links, for example, are needed to join each member of a 5-person group to every other member, 45 for a 10-person group, and 190 relationships for a 20-person group. In consequence, many ties between members in groups are indirect. Persons A, B, and C might all be group members, but A's influence on C is always mediated by person B. In groups, too, members may feel as though they are tied to specific members, to smaller cliques of members, and to the group as a whole.

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