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 inspired by the widely shared recognition that keeping groups together is important to the successful functioning of systems relying on group work. Aside from a concern with what leads group members to remain with a group, the interest in group cohesiveness is also inspired by the assumption that more cohesive groups function better, at least in part because members of more cohesive groups presumably are more willing to exert themselves on behalf of the group. Evidence for this proposition is mixed, however. To clarify this issue, multiple attempts have been made to meta-analytically integrate the results of many studies on the relationship between group cohesiveness and group performance. The consistent conclusions are that group cohesiveness may better be viewed as a construct with different aspects and that the aspect of cohesiveness that has to do with group members’ commitment to task performance and goal achievement is the most important in predicting group performance. Complementing these findings, there is also evidence suggesting that whether group cohesiveness is conducive to group performance is contingent on the extent to which the group embraces high performance goals and norms. If not, high cohesiveness may in fact be associated with lower performance.