Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

322 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

Such networks provide fora both for ideas and information and to heighten awareness of the position of women in organisations. Their capacity for social transformation is dependent not only on the extent and nature of the contacts they build up, but also on the extent to which they empower women to develop strong individual and group identities. On this basis, such groups are often more than promotional or defensive interest groups, in that they act to foster the recognition and selfdevelopment of the capacities of all women. ‘Our purpose is to help women to develop their potential – not to foster elitism’ (North-West Women into Management, 1987).

The recognition of group identity by members and those outside group boundaries will be a major determinant of the kinds of responses groups will make to threats to their identity. In addition, the social components of our identities are highly dependent on the meanings we ascribe to objects, persons and events, and which we assimilate through our interaction with and accommodation to ‘reference persons and groups’ whose behaviour and attitudes have particular ‘salience’ for us. The importance of groups, according to Hosking and Morley, lies in the fact that ‘social actions are inherently ambiguous’ (1991: 98), and what we get from such persons and groups are systems of evaluative belief including attitudes and ideologies which:

focus our attention on the need to justify our actions, so that they appear reasonable to members of our reference groups. This would generate modes of behaviour that are more consistent, more selective, and more characteristic of the person considered as a member of that group. (Hosking and Morley, 1991: 98)

The better-defined the identity of a group, the greater the value of the group to its members as a source of social support, comparison and evaluation. The more effective these processes are, the greater the range of external pressures which can be perceived as affecting the group, and thus the more likely that some kind of collective response will be demanded. Haslam (2000: 305) notes that ‘identification with a group increases an individual’s sensitivity to injustices against it’. Likewise, the stronger the identity of a particular group, the more the likelihood of other competing groups perceiving its members and their actions as sources of threat, and thus the more likely that competitors will take action which once more demands some form of response.

An important factor is the extent to which group identity is constructed around a coherent set of values: common instrumental strategies for maximising extrinsic rewards or the needs and desires of group members for affiliation and interaction. This is most visible in the contestation over control of the labour process between management and workers, but that conflict is also manifested within intergroup relations. Thompson and Bannon (1985) show that the instrumental and anti-authoritarian attitudes of the better paid ‘high-flying’ groups in their case study of telecommunications workers caused friction not only with management, but with lowly-rewarded and traditional craft workgroups. Each group identity was strengthened by the conflict, and the prime target of resentment was more often other workgroups, rather than management. Individual identities can of course suffer in intergroup struggles, but this is a measure of the extent to which group membership provides powerful means of resisting pressures from outside. The pressure to conform can outweigh the pressure to secure oneself against uncertainty and damage. Brown confirms the above example, arguing that intergroup conflicts act to strengthen group

F R O M G R O U P S TO T E A M S • 3 2 3

and intra-group identities, and when groups do resist management, ‘the psychological satisfactions an individual may gain from his group membership may be more potent than the rewards (or threats) the management can hold out’ (1980: 167). For management, the problem of how to disrupt, short-circuit or redirect group identities is central for securing organisation goals, mobilising consent, exerting influence and promoting ‘motivation’ and organisationally-directed goals.

Group resistance and conflict

Group resistance needs to be considered in relation to groups as sites of socialisation and as technologies of action. Group reactions are often along the same lines as those available to individuals, but with the added facility of being able to join in cohesive coalitions where group identity can be secured or enhanced. Of course at the same time as such responses can enable us, they can also be utilised as the basis for managerial strategies for controlling workplace behaviour. Even when there is only a tacit, unacknowledged sense of group identity, the stereotyped judgements of power-holders about particular groups may lead them to form sub-cultural units. They are likely to be based around resistance to managerial activities rather than in a coherent ideology of their own. Individual cohesion within such a group may be low, and resistance may not be co-ordinated in any sense. It may not even be visible as such, but manifested in jokes at the expense of superiors, general stubbornness and lack of co-operation (Nichols and Beynon, 1977). At this level, pressure on individual identity may be no more than disapproval at not joining in or, at worst, definition as being somehow different. Over time, the benefits of belonging to such a group in terms of access to sources of meaning may cause it to coalesce into a true subculture with the ability to protect members against threats to identity.

Haslam (2000, chapter 7) explores a similar theme on social identity in intergroup negotiation and conflict management. He introduces a wide range of evidence to show that identification with sub-groups, for example same sex groups, can be beneficial in negotiation and conflict situations. By bringing conflict out into the open, sub-groups have the potential to:

•explore issues fully (clear the air rather than paper over the cracks)

•identify parties’ real concerns

•consider more options

•avoid false optimism

•enhance feelings of empowerment and justice.

(Haslam, 2000: 205)

Such effects are dependent on the development of a superordinate social identity which ‘frames subgroup differences’ and provides social motivation to participants (Haslam, 2000: 205). This focus on superordinate identity reinforces the arguments in the section on cohesiveness and polarisation above, in that group processes are not necessarily of negative import. However, in the absence of a superordinate identity, conflict might escalate, and this where the skills of negotiators themselves come into play if the process is not to run out of control. Hosking and Morley discuss these skills at length (1991: 161–9), especially noting the importance of cognitive and political processes in avoiding unnecessary or unrealistic conflict. Cognitive processes ‘help negotiators to

324 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

match their intellectual capacities to the demands of the task’, and reduce unnecessary obstacles to agreement. Political processes ‘help negotiators to organize disagreement so that it is seen as a natural part of a business relationship’, rather than requiring a ‘defensive response’ (1991: 167). Once again, we have a process whereby potential contestation of issues is appropriated in such a manner as to place the responsibility on individuals and groups, rather than the organisation. Here informal processes are being transformed into formal relationships in negotiation.

Many informal organisational processes, including subcultural groupings, are generated within the free areas that groups and their members carve out for themselves within the division of labour. Whether formally or informally constituted, such groups have to in some fashion reduce the possible internal tensions that might develop out of any contradictory goals and identity concerns of their members. The internal dynamics of groups have been seen to consist largely of role-based mechanisms and processes directed at the maintenance of the group, and according to Breakwell, ‘group dynamics are the most frequent sources of threats to identity. These threats need not be personalised: they are directed at the individual as a group member, a cipher in a social category, not as a personality’ (1986: 128). The detailed operation of such processes will be group-specific. But like the actions of individuals, it will be oriented towards identity-securing strategies. Just as the construction of individual identities depends in part on competition with others for sources of meaning, the production of group identities depends on gaining access to symbols and resources or behaviour patterns which serve to distinguish the group from others. We will return to the issue of what distinguishes groups in behavioural terms after first exploring the area in which this issue is of most contemporary concern, teamworking.

Teamworking

As we saw in Chapter 13, there is little doubt that, in manufacturing at least, teams are replacing individuals as the basic unit of work organisation, and project teams are increasingly used as a means of co-ordinating managers and professionals. What is it that managers and management writers see as particularly advantageous in teamwork? Much of the enthusiasm for teams and teamwork can be traced back to the fashion for reorganising production processes into semi-autonomous work groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Such work groups, based on notions of job enrichment and redesign (see Chapter 19), gave employees some latitude of decision-making over operational matters, and integrated different levels of production-related skills into more flexible working on more ‘natural’ units of work. This effectively turned production-line assembly into a semblance of unit or small-batch production. Wall et al. (1986), in a long-term study of autonomous work groups, identified the justifications underlying their implementation as being in their assumed effects in increasing intrinsic motivation to work. These included enhancing employee satisfaction, improving group performance and reducing labour turnover, as well as suggested increases in organisational commitment and improvements in mental health.

The results of this study indicated that ‘employees clearly appreciated the autonomous work system. On balance managers did too, though clearly there were costs in terms of personal stress arising from the difficulties involved in managing and maintaining the system’ (1986: 298). Of the assumed effects, only intrinsic job satis-

F R O M G R O U P S TO T E A M S • 3 2 5

faction and productivity were significantly increased, along with reported perceptions of increased autonomy. Labour turnover actually increased, through increased dismissals of those who could not or would not fit in to the new systems. The enhanced productivity was not due to employees working any harder. If anything, their individual productivity was lower in comparison with those working on more traditional lines. Improvements largely flowed from reduced indirect labour costs, due to decreases in the need for direct supervision of the work groups. This organisational benefit can be seen as a gain at the expense of increased managerial effort, with greater responsibilities being generated in monitoring and managing the new system.

In part, then, companies have been persuaded of the ‘bottom-line’ advantages of teamwork: less a case of enhancing the quality of working life and more that of enabling greater flexibility, problem-solving and continuous improvement. Yet behind these technical rationales lay further assumptions that teams can reproduce much of the dynamics of groups, while turning the goals and outcomes in a managerial direction. In other words, team members can be persuaded to think like managers by delegating responsibilities that were once the preserve of management. Supporters of teams, largely from an OB tradition, see this positively in terms of group cohesion facilitating co-operative and productive units (Eby and Dobbins, 1997); critics present this more negatively as peer pressure, and self-surveillance as socialisation into corporate identities (Casey, 1996; Sewell, 1998). Both, however, seem to accept that teams are effective sites for socialisation and vehicles for normative integration (Findlay et al., 2000). Restated in the language of group theory, teams can be sentient as well as task groups. This is a distinction drawn by Miller and Rice (1967), with task groups being based on the human resources necessary for work activity, while sentient groups are those to which individuals are prepared to commit themselves and on which they depend for emotional support (see ‘Groups versus teams’ below).

Re-engaging the worker

Most of the interventions to which members of organisations are periodically subject are based around either simple social facilitation or attempts to re-engage the intellectual level of learning (see Chapter 16). In current terms, teamworking interventions are among the most common attempts to re-engage the worker. They are often necessary due to the legacy of downsizing and flattening of hierarchies, with their concomitant increases in spans of control. This means that managerial skills (and what might be termed the organisational locus of control) need to be driven downwards in the hierarchy in order that control can be maintained.

A particularly influential article that appears to provide support for the above arguments, albeit from a critical perspective, comes from Barker (1993). We have already made reference to Barker’s work in Chapters 8, 11 and 12, but will recap and comment further here. Barker offers evidence that the values of control systems appear to be internalised by some groups of workers in specific circumstances. This is exemplified in the concept of concertive control taken from Tompkins and Cheney (1985). This fourth form of control:

represents a key shift in the locus of control from management to the workers themselves, who collaborate to develop the means of their own control.Workers achieve concertive control by a negotiated consensus on how to shape their

326 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

behaviour according to a set of core values, such as those of a corporate vision statement. (Barker, 1993: 411)

Here, though, it is both the organisation and its members that are seen to adopt a ‘new substantive rationality’ and a ‘new set of consensual values’. It would appear that this represents the translation of Hopwood’s (see Chapter 19) administrative controls into social controls, and thus the achievement of accommodation, assimilation, identification and finally internalisation. Barker’s case study was of ISE Communications, a small US manufacturing company which adopted a structure based on self-managed teams in the late 1980s. The structural changes in the company are detailed in Table 20.1.

The process by which concertive control came into being was first through the development of a value consensus based on the company ‘vision statement’, then the emergence of normative rules driven by the addition of new teams:

Members of the old teams responded to these changing conditions by discursively turning their value consensus into normative rules that the new workers could readily understand and to which they could subject themselves. (Barker, 1993: 424)

The final stage was the formalisation of these rules into a system that resembled in

TA B L E 2 0 . 1 S t r u c t u r e o f I S E b e f o r e a n d a f t e r t h e c h a n g e o f t e a m s

Before the change

1Three levels of managerial herarchy between the vice president and the manufacturing workers.

2Manufacturing assembly line organises the plant. Workers manufacture boards according to their individual place on the line.

3Line and shift supervisors form the first managerial link.

4Workers have little input into work-related decisions. Managers make all decisions and give all directions.

5 Management disciplines workers.

6Management interviews and hires all new workers.

After the change

1Managerial hierarchy extends directly from the manufacturing teams to the vice president.

2Team work areas organise the plant. Teams are responsible for complete fabrication, testing and packaging of their assigned circuit boards.

3 Teams manage their own affairs, elect one person to co-ordinate information to them.

4Team members make their own decisions within guidelines set by management and the company vision statement. Teams have shared responsibility for their own

production.

5 Team members discipline themselves.

6Team members interview, hire and fire their own members.

Source: J. R. Barker (1993) ‘Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: p. 417.

F R O M G R O U P S TO T E A M S • 3 2 7

some ways the old bureaucratic structure. The formalisation of abstract values into specific behavioural guidelines was seen to provide a sense of stability, and was not interpreted as the creation of a bureaucracy, in that though they represented a rational, rule-based system, the rules were formulated and enacted by the teams themselves. The teams were thus said to be ‘their own masters and their own slaves’ (1993: 433) and even though managing the concertive system produced a great deal of strain in team members, they were reluctant to give up their control of their working practices, uncommitted workers not lasting very long. Barker’s conclusion is that in the end even a self-managed rational apparatus only serves to bind employees further to Weber’s ‘Iron Cage’, resistance being at the cost of risking their human dignity by ‘being made to feel unworthy as a “team-mate”’ (1993: 436).

The self-managed responsibilities produced by the concertive system themselves begin to enact the construction of a rational apparatus, in that the formalisation of consensual values into rules could be seen as an adaptive mechanism to relieve the levels of stress induced by autonomous decision-making. Thus team members become, in Willmott’s (1994) terms, ‘responsible individuals’ who seek the stability of a rational apparatus in that they ‘are spared the anguish of choice because feelings of anxiety and guilt associated with this responsibility are contained within organisationally defined boundaries’ (1994: 26). However, here it is the uncertainty produced by the move to self-management which unfreezes team members to the point where corporate ideals can be identified with, rather than the generalised uncertainty Willmott associates with the ‘indeterminacy and finitude of human existence’ (1994: 26).

The Barker study demonstrates that re-engagement of the intellectual level of learning (see Chapter 16) can be achieved through collective obligations that guide adaptive behaviour in response to manufactured uncertainty. But once again the identification here is not directly to administrative controls and managerial values. Identification with the corporate mission is dependent on the continued abdication and transfer by management of responsibility and control to social consensus. Management has changed the context of control by changing the structures through which it is enacted, but the extent to which this represents any real measure of internalisation, rather than simple compliance to a new locus of control, must be questioned. What this form of self-management achieves are constant self-monitoring and environmental scanning by the team, and learned changes in behaviour that are not necessarily accompanied by increases in either general or specific job motivation. As indicated in Chapter 19, what appears to be important here is not genuine motivation, but the mobilisation of commitment. Even this is not commitment to intrinsic values, but to the expenditure of effort in required directions. The mechanisms for accomplishing this may rest on appeals to values and the construction of meaning, but their aim is the attainment of strategically-directed change.

Team dimensions

There are, however, grounds for scepticism about how far teams are sentient and characterised by high levels of normative cohesion. Part of the problem is that both advocates and critics of teams tend to present them as a ‘package’ in which task functions, value-orientations and capacity for self-governance are all mutually reinforcing. Along with other recent commentators on teamwork (see Proctor and Mueller, 2000), we prefer the view that teams can take many different forms dependent on context,

328 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

in part because teamwork has different components. A widely-used example of such an approach is the team dimensions model (Thompson and Wallace, 1996; Findlay et al., 2000). This uses a threefold distinction between the technical, governance and normative dimensions of teamwork. (See Figure 20.2.)

The technical dimension is at the heart of the current wave of managerial interest in teams, and is concerned with issues directly related to the actual tasks undertaken by team members (for example, problem-solving and flexibility). Teamwork must, however, also rest on changes in the normative (for example, socialisation of team members and changes in attitudes and behaviours), and governance dimensions (management of teams including increased responsibilities and decision-making). In turn, the dimensions are influenced by wider support systems such as reward and industrial relations arrangements.

A multi-dimensional approach enables the variety of managerial objectives and configurations of actual practices to be identified and more adequately understood. Two such trends have been identified in earlier discussions of teamworking (see Chapters 11 and 12). First, the overwhelming rationale for the introduction of teams is instrumental and pragmatic, focusing on benefits in the technical sphere such as functional flexibility. Second, only a small number of teams have a high degree of autonomy. Companies tend to initiate only that degree of involvement in decision-making

Support system 1		Support system 2
Whole organisation		Training and
decision-making process		development

Governance

Delegated	Team
powers	players

	Normative
Team	Cultural
leadership	cohesion

Flexibility

Integration

Knowledge

	Technical
Support systems 3	Support systems 4
Industrial relations	Selection, reward
	and appraisal

F I G U R E 2 0 . 2 T h e t e a m d i m e n s i o n s m o d e l

F R O M G R O U P S TO T E A M S • 3 2 9

necessary for more effective use of workers’ tacit knowledge and skills to improve efficiency. It follows that the precondition of an association between self-governance and positive normative behaviours, identified in parts of the OB and critical literatures, is not present or is underdeveloped in many contexts. There is no identifiable trend for teams acting like groups as effective sites for socialisation and normative integration, though this will vary considerably across and within particular companies and countries.

This is not to say that the normative dimension is absent or irrelevant. Even those organisations with limited, largely pragmatic objectives require that employees change some of their behaviours and attitudes in order to become better ‘team players’. Emphasis may be put on co-operativeness, willingness to listen and learn, or acceptance of collective responsibility and avoidance of a ‘blame culture’. Some companies therefore invest in soft skills training to back up these objectives, using teams as additional vehicles to spread awareness of business goals and conditions of competitiveness. In case studies in the Scottish spirits industry, Findlay et al. (2000a, 2000b) found that the two companies had some success in developing positive attitudes and normative competencies in areas such as communication. Team members were also more aware of business issues. However, they were far from simply internalising company values through teams. If anything their experience militated against it. Awareness of business made many them more critical of the gap between corporate rhetoric and shop-floor reality. Many team members felt disillusioned with teamwork, complaining of abuse of flexibility and intensification of work pressures. Most importantly, they were very aware of and sceptical towards any perceived attempt by the company to indulge in extensive socialisation through soft skills training or other means, labelling it ‘brainwashing’. Interestingly, similar reactions have been picked up in other case studies (Pollert, 1996; McCabe, 2000). More generally, many studies have found that team sub-cultures continue to provide sources of dissatisfaction, resistance and distancing from managerial objectives (Robertson et al., 1992; Stephenson, 1994; Sharpe, 1996).

What the above discussion reveals is that the different dimensions of teamwork may not only vary, but also pull against each other. If, however, the purpose of a multidimensional model is to identify different configurations of practices, we have to allow for the possibility that there are indeed a small number of companies that have much more ambitious normative agendas. They may even be more successful in the resultant social engineering. Even if Barker has identified the conditions for concertive control in his case study, he gives little consideration to the extent to which it is typical or generalisable from what may be a highly specific context. Even companies with similar ambitious agendas of socialisation and self-surveillance have found that they may unravel under employee suspicion and resistance (McKinlay and P. Taylor, 1996). We will briefly return to Barker in the next section, which examines our understanding of the compatibility of group and team dynamics.

Groups versus teams

This section attempts to reflect on and tie together some of the issues raised by our respective discussion of groups and teams. If groups are the building blocks of organisations and the ability of groups to modify individual behaviour is what in the end makes hierarchical organisation possible, then what of teams? Can we assume they

330 • W O R K O R G A N I S AT I O N S

have the same characteristics and psychological effects as groups, or are they a special case that is dependent on context for their specific functioning? Relating to the assumed effects of group membership, Brown (1992: 73) notes that the studies of the textile industry and coal mining associated with the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s recognised the difficulties of generalising conclusions on the benefits of reorganising groups on sociotechnical principles. These difficulties are what led to the Miller and Rice (1967) distinction between task and sentient groups discussed above.

The task/sentient distinction parallels the classic formal/informal group differentiation with the added dimension of identifying the sentient/informal group more strongly with the classic psychological group. The problem is that the boundaries of task and sentient groups often do not coincide in temporal, spatial or organisational terms, and it may prove impossible to bring them into alignment. There is no necessity for task groups to exhibit the attributes of emotional closeness accruing to the sentient group, and even if they do, this may result in resistance to change through attachment to existing structures and practices. Attitudes to participation, for example, are seen as determined by group membership rather than occupational category (Brown, 1992: 51). In addition to this, Haslam notes that:

in most of the situations where researchers have drawn inferences about the behaviour of individuals in groups, their research has failed to study groups that are psychologically real and engaging for those individuals. (Haslam, 2000: 271)

The major focus of concern with groups in labour process analysis has tended to be on their role in the restriction of output and in the production of group solidarity. Beyond the recognition that there are internal dynamics that alter behaviour, the tendency has been to treat groups as simple aggregates rather than as negotiated collectives with their own logics of conflict, control and resistance. Overall, consent, commitment and compliance are conceptualised as individual relationships, mitigating against accurate interpretation of how related practices are reproduced as a social phenomenon and how the rules of consent are communicated.

The acknowledgement of groups as sites of resistance and concomitantly as bearers of sectional and cultural interests has over time tended to reinforce the conception of groups as conveyors and communicators of oppositional values. Studies such as Thompson and Bannon (1985) and Egri (1994) typify the parameters of this treatment. Thompson and Bannon exemplify the task group as the site of sectional contentions within a factory culture, while Egri examines organic versus traditional farming, treating groups as social movements contesting the cultural transformation of work organisation both within a particular industry and in society at large. Because of links between sectional interests and wider identity groups, such distinctions can only be made in the account of particular cases, but they are repeated constantly within the labour process and wider sociological literatures.

The labour process collections on skill and consent (Sturdy, Knights and Willmott, 1992) and on resistance and power (Jermier, Knights and Nord, 1994) provide many good examples, notably in the studies by Yarrow, Sturdy and Collinson. Yarrow’s (1992) study of Appalachian coal-mining communities in particular highlights how concerns with ‘group unity’ and elementary notions of group socialisation are often incorporated into issues that mainly focus on gender competition and degradation of relative status (1992: 35–7). The hostility of male miners and managers to women

F R O M G R O U P S TO T E A M S • 3 3 1

coming into the mines during the 1970s is understood here in terms of male socialisation into the values of solidarity, competition, physical strength and courage. These produce psychological resistance to the degradation of status posed by women being able to do the work. But at the same time Yarrow reports that ‘miners have typically made accommodations to maintain the unity of the crew’ (1992: 36).

The most difficult thing to explain in this study is that there was any acceptance of women at all within groups where gender and class consciousness were so deeply embedded. But from the perspective of the working group, especially in a case such as this where Yarrow acknowledges that safety considerations acted to heighten the import of interpersonal dependence, it is understandable that women could quite quickly come to share in group unity. In such highly cohesive groups where effective collaboration and communication is paramount, the group exercises a power of its own. This harks back to Minard’s classic 1950s socio-psychological study where black and white mine workers lived segregated lives on the surface while co-operating and exhibiting group solidarity downshaft. The ability to demonstrate that members can effectively fulfil their role demands appears to outweigh other considerations during the performance of the task. In this sense the lack of preoccupation with group process leads to an undertheorising of why we might not exhibit resistance in the conditions of a particular labour process, which is surely as important to a holistic account as why we do!

If we consider now the converse of resistance as exemplified by worker commitment, Marchington’s (1992) analysis of consent and co-operation in labour relations highlights how the lack of a group perspective might make labour process analysis itself dependent on rational-cognitive explanation. Marchington notes (1992: 158–9) how a conception of individual relationships in terms of hierarchical position fails to account for personal motivations and objectives such as the more basic prospect of ‘doing a good job’. This is said to be central to much of our socialisation into work, and in support of this Marchington cites work as diverse as that of Peters (1986), Nichols and Beynon (1977) and Knights and Collinson (1985), who raise the notion that workers often voice critical appraisals of managers based on their mistakes, lack of understanding, commitment, and failures to communicate.

The theme of groups as regulating mechanisms is more familiar in labour process analysis than is the theme of the group as a medium of individual and collective expression. The debate around the latter conception was raised by Whyte (1957) in his analysis of the relations between individuals and groups. Whyte recognised that the concept of ‘groupness’ was often incidental in many situations (1957: 50) but that even where people might not think of themselves as a group, for example in a committee, the aggregate could still function as a ‘disciplining vehicle’ in the production of acquiescence. Whyte was sceptical of the role of the group as a creative vehicle, however, and referred to the false collectivisation characterised by managerial attempts to treat formally constituted groups as if they embodied the attributes of what have been later termed as mature collaborative groups. The often unwarranted managerial assumptions made about the effects of cohesiveness on group behaviour and group effects on performance levels almost appear as a form of ‘wishful groupthink’ in the desire to reproduce the illusion of unanimity in task groups.

This is typical of the uncritical approach to groups and the ‘common interests’ of organisational members taken in the HRM and quality literatures, in other words, the instrumental and socio-psychological functions of groups are taken as unilateral