FC Lokomotive Leipzig and SG Dynamo Schwerin fans enjoy each others company at a game in 1990.
(Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1990-0414-009 / Wolfried Pätzold / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Recap from Episode One
In the last episode we left the Eagles and the Rattlers fighting after the researchers set up a competitive environment that resulted in name calling, food throwing and the trashing of camp cabins. (If you need to go back and read episode one click here).
The competitive environment set up at Robbers Cave would certainly have contributed to the animosity between the two groups. In the workplace competitive environments can lead to (Dos Santos et. al, 2023):
Staff unwilling to provide advice
Poor information exchange between groups
Increased negative behaviours
A feeling of ostracism for some staff
Constant arguments over how things should be done.
The other things we covered in Episode One were:
Group rivalry, and hence bias, can develop very quickly, even when groups haven’t met each other
This intergroup bias can lead to us inflating our own performance and downgrading that of the other group.
Team cohesion can lead to negative behaviours and favouritism
We want our teams to be as cohesive as possible as it is a characteristic of a high performing team. The downside of a cohesive team is that they can become isolated and mistreat other teams. Cohesive teams may work so well together they feel they don’t need other groups. They can start to distance themselves from others and can be hostile towards other groups and start to develop a groupthink mentality particularly when competing for resources, power or authority (De Dreu et. al., 2022; Brewer, 1999)
Sometimes our bias is more about favouring our group, than direct hostility towards another group. The maxim “we look after our own first” isn’t always a bad thing but it can lead to unfair favouritism in recruitment opportunities, promotions and budgets. In organisations this favouritism can lead to greater levels of conflict, stress (Kwon, 2006) and reduced job satisfaction (Kwon, 2006; Özler and Buyukarslan, 2011).
The connection we experience within our team can cloud our judgement about how good we are and how bad the others are. Some workplace examples include when two teams merge from different departments (“THEY used to do everything wrong, that’s why they’ve come and work with us.”), the night and the day shift (“do those people do anything or do they leave it all to us?”) or the perennial divide between head office and other locations (“They have no idea what it’s like in the real world, sitting in their ivory towers”).
Groups can cause us to drop our moral standards
Once an ‘us and them’ situation is created, the importance of pleasing our group will often supersede our own moral standards and values. We have a tendency to lose the ability to refer to our own morals when we’re standing up for our group (Cikara et. al., 2014). When we are in a situation where there is an ‘us and them’ mentality, the region of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (the bit that does the sensible thinking) shows reduced activity, so we’re less in control of our emotions and we’re more willing to cause or wish harm on others (Cikara et. al, 2014).
The reason we manage to suddenly drop our moral standards and act in a relatively immoral way, is that when we are strongly aligned to a team or group we (Cikara et. al. 2014):
Believe we are serving the greater good (“I didn’t want to leave out that important information when I met with finance but it will help us achieve our aims and that’s a good thing overall”)
Have a reduction in our sense of personal responsibility due to the relative anonymity of the group and there is a spreading of the responsibility (“Yeah I did make that slightly aggressive comment in the chat but messages were flying everywhere and I was just saying what everyone was thinking. And it’s all for the greater good anyway (see 1 above).”
Experience a reduction in our own moral standards, which can drop down the ladder of importance and the group needs go to the top. This is where we switch off our medial prefrontal cortex and, as mentioned above, it’s the part that does the sensible thinking. (“Ok I got caught up in the moment, I wouldn’t normally raise my voice like that at the project team, in fact I haven’t done it before but everyone was putting their opinion forward and it had to be said, it’s all for the good of our team and the project (see 1 and 2 above)).
It’s not that everyone who aligns to a group or team turns into a rampaging lunatic, but it explains how your polite, mild mannered neighbour who keeps to themselves inexplicably takes part in mob violence or becomes a cyber bully. It also explains why perfectly reasonable people from other work teams are rude, withhold information or behave in a negative way towards others outside their team, even though they are part of the same organisation. Sometimes our actions are for the greater good but sometimes we’re using ‘the greater good’ to justify something subconsciously we know we shouldn’t have done.
One of the participants in an earlier attempt to conduct the Robbers Cave experiment recalled in an interview nearly 50 years later (Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2013), having a physical fight with one of his rivals and he can’t remember why. He does remember it being totally out of character “I remember getting into a fight…I remember somehow getting a hold of a T-Shirt of his and cutting it up with a pocket knife. This is unlike me, I’ve never done something like this again”. Such is the control that group rivalry and hence bias has over our emotional regulation, we’ll do things we later deem to be “out of character” or justify it under the guise of being for the greater good.
Sport allegiance as an example of group influence
Sometimes it’s not so much a dislike of the other group but our desire to please our group which motivates our ingroup bias. A group of rival football (soccer) fans were monitored as to how they would react to an injured stranger. The fans were more likely to help the stranger if they were wearing the shirt of the team they supported and less likely to help if the stranger was wearing a rival team’s shirt or a neutral shirt (Levine, 2005). The study concluded it was not necessarily through a dislike of the rival team but more a desire to help their fellow supporters.
The researchers concluded:
“It is when participants are able to see the signs of common group membership in a stranger in distress that intervention is most likely”.
So we're more likely to step in and help when we identify the ‘other’ as one of our own. Organisations that promote and create a real sense of unity, will more likely get cooperation and support across teams and work units. It’s also important to admit when things are getting on top of us or we’re not coping. Like the sports fans, team members will step in and help a colleague under pressure, especially when there’s a sense of unity.
We look around us to see how to behave
One of the psychological principles that guide workplace culture is the principle of social proof. According to Dr. Robert Cialdini, currently Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University, we look to others to be guided by what is appropriate behaviour and we are more influenced by ‘others’ if we see them as similar to ourselves (Cialdini, 2009).
As an example, Cialdini refers to the bystander effect, which states that we are less likely to intervene to help an individual when there are other people around. Cialdini quotes the research of Latane and Nida (Latane and Nida, 1981) who found that when a person was placed on the street and feigned a seizure, people stopped to help 85 per cent of the time when there was a single bystander. They only stopped 31 percent of the time when there were five bystanders close by. When we see others doing nothing, we tell ourselves everything is ok otherwise they would have intervened first. When we see no one else around we take it on ourselves to help. This demonstrates we are influenced by other groups of people even when that group is temporary, such as a bunch of bystanders.
This demonstrates how work cultures evolve. We look around to see what the ‘done thing’ is.There may be values written on the wall or we’ve attended some training, but if staff are behaving differently in the workplace, particularly influential ones, that will be the cue for others to follow. The resulting cultural norm can be either positive or negative.
Many organisations struggle against this principle when they are trying to eliminate negative behaviours such as bullying and harassment. Organisations implement campaigns along the lines of “if you see something, say something” which aim to encourage bystanders to take action when they witness bullying or harassment. One of the reasons bystanders don’t take action is because of a fear of victimisation themselves. One study of nurses in a Spanish public hospital concluded “Fears of their own victimization at the hands of the perpetrator” stopped the bystanders from taking action (Baez-Leon et. al., 2016). The unwritten norm here could be “don’t speak up or else”, and any campaign that aims to encourage staff to speak up is working against this workplace norm.
Group identity influences behaviour
The groups we are part of, inside and outside of work, help us define ourselves and our identity (Abrams, 2021). Work teams that can establish a positive identity (e.g. “we treat each other with respect”) will be more effective and able to resist any negative influence of outside groups and negative behaviours within. Sometimes when we join a team we take on the characteristics and identity of the team (i.e. “We’re professional and hard working”). Other times we see a group that shares some characteristic(s) with us and we attach ourselves to that group because “they are like me” (van Stekelenberg et al. 2013).
The identity of a team can be overt, because it has been discussed, or it could be written down in the form of a charter or a set of values and behaviours. If these values and behaviours aren’t written down the group will still have an identity. It’s just that there’s a good chance there’ll be as many views on what the team identity is, as there are people in the team .
The Eagles and Rattlers had identities although nothing was written down. The Rattlers considered themselves ‘tough’, so there was excessive swearing and when encountering a minor injury (e.g. a bruise) they would go on without complaint. The Eagles considered themselves ‘good sports’ and so refrained from bragging when they defeated the Rattlers in a game. They also went easy on the swearing and considered the Rattlers such “bad cussers” (swearers) that it was suggested they shouldn’t talk to the Rattlers at all.
We protect our group identity with vigour. In their book ‘The Power of Us’ by Jay Van Bavel, Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University and Dominic Parker, Professor of Psychology at Lehigh University, explain that a group member that speaks against what their own group are doing can often come in for criticism and ostracism. The reason is that the dissenter is seen to threaten the group's identity. Think of a whistleblower or an ombudsman who speaks out against potential corruption, they are often derided as out of touch or after their own interest. What happens according to Van Bavel and Packer is that these dissenters “threaten people’s identities…the threat is to group members’ personal sense of self” (Van Bavel and Packer, 2021).
How do we get a sense of unity in organisations and between teams? We’ll cover the ways of doing this in detail in a later episode but a good place to start is Gordon Allport’s principles of reducing prejudice between groups. This concept has been extensively tested and found to be effective under organisational settings (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006). One of the principles is creating common goals for the groups to work on, specifically goals which require effort from both groups to be completed.
Group identity and purpose can also provide clarity and certainty and relieve a lot of the stress that comes about from working out who does what. Some questions that can initiate such a discussion are:
Why are we here individually and collectively?
Who and what is important to us?
What behaviours move us towards the team we want to be?
Team members need an alignment of their own identity with that of the team and the organisation. This is often through a values statement, and the organisation and team have to be able to demonstrate they act in accordance with any values espoused. When this consistency between espoused values and the values in practice start to widen, researchers call it a breach of psychological contract. This mismatch between what an organisation says it does and what it actually does can lead to lower levels of trust and commitment towards the organisation and reduced job satisfaction (Topa et.al., 2022).
Summary
Cohesive teams can be more productive but they can also isolate themselves from other parts of the organisation and mistreat other groups.
Our morals and values can take a back seat when we’re closely aligned to our group or team and we’ll rationalise our actions by stating “it’s for the greater good”.
We prioritise our group and team over others and will behave more favourably towards our group (i.e. potentially favour them in a recruitment process).
Behavioural norms help create workplace cultures as we look to others on how to behave and these behaviours can override training and policy expectations.
A groups conscious or unconscious identity will influence behaviour as individuals try and maintain consistency between the group identity and how they behave.
An intervention that includes developing an agreed identity and common goals can improve relationships between teams.
Coming up in future episodes:
The Eagles and Rattlers are still at each other, what did the researchers do to bring them together and did it follow any of Allport’s principles?
We know competitive work environments can have a negative effect on workplace culture, are there other environmental conditions that have a negative effect?
References
Abrams, D., Lalot, F., & Hogg, M. A. (2021). Intergroup and intragroup dimensions of COVID-19: A social identity perspective on social fragmentation and unity. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 24(2), 201–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430220983440
Australian Broadcasting Commission (2013) Inside Robbers Cave
ABC Radio National broadcast
Báez‐León, C., Moreno‐Jiménez, B., Aguirre‐Camacho, A., & Olmos, R. (2016). Factors influencing intention to help and helping behaviour in witnesses of bullying in nursing settings. Nursing inquiry, 23(4), 358-367.
Brewer, M. B. (1999). The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love and Outgroup Hate? Journal of Social Issues, 55(3), 429–444. Portico. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00126
Cialdini, R. B. (2008). Influence (5th ed.). Pearson.
Cikara, M., Jenkins, A. C., Dufour, N., & Saxe, R. (2014). Reduced self-referential neural response during intergroup competition predicts competitor harm. NeuroImage, 96, 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2014.03.080
De Dreu CKW, Gross J, Reddmann L. 2022 Environmental stress increases out-group aggression and intergroup conflict in humans. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377: 20210147.
dos Santos, M.d.C.C., Coelho, F. & Gomes, J.F.S. (2023) Competitive psychological climate, conflict and psychological contract breach. European Management Review, 20(3), 561–575. https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12556
Kwon I (2006) Endogenous favoritism in organizations. Topics in Theoretical Economics 6(1): 1–24.
Latané, B., & Nida, S. (1981). Ten years of research on group size and helping. Psychological Bulletin, 89(2), 308–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.89.2.308
Levine M, Prosser A, Evans D, Reicher S. Identity and emergency intervention: how social group membership and inclusiveness of group boundaries shape helping behavior. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2005 Apr;31(4):443-53. doi:10.1177/0146167204271651. PMID: 15743980.
Özler DE, Buyukarslan A (2011) The overall outlook of favoritism in organizations: A literature review. International Journal of Business and Management Studies 3(1): 275–285
Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751
Topa, G.; Aranda-Carmena, M.; De-Maria, B. Psychological Contract Breach and Outcomes: A Systematic Review of Reviews. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19,15527. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192315527
Van Bavel, J. J., & Packer, D. J. (2021). The power of us: harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony. First edition. New York, Little, Brown Spark.
van Stekelenburg, J., & Klandermans, B. (2013). The social psychology of protest. Current Sociology, 61(5–6), 886–905. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392113479314
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