نطق سوم

Lecture 3:

Listen to part of a lecture in a sociology class.

Okay. So I’m sure every one of you has worked in a group of one form or another.

You know maybe a group project you’ve done for school or some kind of planning for an extracurricular activity. Anyway, I bet you’ve got at least an intuitive sense of what makes groups successful or not.

Well, today I want to talk about one attempt to formalize those intuitions a little to pin down what it is that makes groups successful. And I think we should start by looking at a study done by a sociologist named Bales. It is usually referred to as the Bales Experiments.

So Bales’ idea was to put small groups of people together. Well, he actually just used undergraduate males. You know, he was at a university and they were just handy. So Bales put these guys together who by the way had never met each other and he gave them various problems to solve. Then as the students interacted, Bales and his assistants classified each aspect of their behavior, or what Bales called their various acts, into different categories.

So after observing lots of group interactions, Bales hypothesized that every single act, basically everything that the participants did fit into one of two basic categories. Each act was either what he called instrumental or expressive.

Now Bales defined instrumental acts as any activity which was directly concerned with solving whatever problem the group is faced with, such as giving information, making a suggestion, anything that could directly contribute to the completion of the task, so you know, saying something like…I think we should look at this factor, why don’t we try this or that solution.

These are instrumental acts. Or, well, taking notes for example is instrumental, or even writing up a report.

Expressive acts, on the other hand, are pretty much everything else. They are all the comments and behavior that are not specifically designed to solve the problem at hand. Something like, hey, that was a great suggestion, or I appreciate you guys doing such hard work. These are expressive comments. Or jokes, for example, are expressive. And then there are negative expressives too, showing disagreement or dissatisfaction, such as you are totally wrong.Okay, so now that we’ve got Bales’ categories down, we can talk about his conclusions.

Bales was primarily concerned with what ratio of instrumental and expressive acts caused a group to be most effective.Now before I read his results, I expected that the group with the highest percentage of instrumental acts would be the most successful group. You know, the more instrumental acts, the more the group would be working on its objective and well, the more productive it would be. But that in fact is exactly what did not happen. Groups that had the highest percentage of instrumental activity weren’t very productive at all.

Now, here’s how Bales explains this. He says that positive expressive acts, they grease the wheels, you might say. They make things flow more smoothly. If everybody in the group acts instrumentally, if everybody that is, is offering different suggestions on how to proceed and everybody is coming up with their own plan, then all the group members are basically just butting heads. Nothing gets done and everybody is at odds.

Positive expressive acts, on the other hand, help people get along, removing the tension or hostility that might have developed among the members of the group as a result of instrumental activity.

Of course, at the same time, a group with too much expressive activity is also unproductive. If all of the group’s acts are expressive, then the group isn’t doing anything to further their goals.So Bales’ major finding is that the most successful groups were those that had about 50% instrumental acts and 50% expressive acts.

Of the expressive acts, about 2/3 were positive and 1/3 negative.

Bales also observed a recurring pattern in the sequencing of activity. He found that in successful groups, group leaders usually began the session by exchanging information about the problem, what the problem is, who are the people involved in the problem, etc.

After exchanging information, they devoted some time to the exchange of opinions, opinions about why the problem might have occurred, what went wrong, things like that, before moving on to making suggestions as to how to solve the problem.

Now some of the groups he observed, they didn’t define the problem, they sort of reversed this order and instead started off with making suggestions for solutions, they ended up having a long period of dissension filled with negative responses, negative expressive acts, and wasted a lot of time before moving on.

follow.