Effective Management by Understanding Group Behavior
Managing people is one of the most challenging tasks in life, whether needed part of doing business, sports, social activities, politics or others. It often results in a permacrisis for many managers. This challenge stems from the difficulty in understanding and predicting people, on top of adapting and satisfying them. Human behavior is complex, changing and becoming more challenging when addressing the enigma of collective behavior of groups and ultimately bigger social groups (mass behavior).
People’s mass behavior, in its basic form, is related to what is called by scientists, collective behavior, which is a voluntary activity, whereby several people are engaged in a group or crowd action. There are different types of crowds;
Casual (they happened to be at same place but not interacting), Expressive (Social events), Conventional (come together on scheduled times), Acting (protesting crowd), Public (unorganized but share ideas) and Mass crowd (large number with common interest). Several theories emerged, trying to explain this phenomena, such as: the emergent-norm perspective, which is putting emphasis on social norms in mass behavior. The third theory is the assembling perspective which focuses on actions rather than behavior, the value-added theory, is a functionalist perspective stating that several preconditions must be in place for collective behavior to occur such as awareness, interest etc. A new concept emerged with high connectivity of modern technologies, called “flash mob”, whereby messages are issued to people to gather at certain location and time for certain action/s and or purpose. Considering the effective communication means, accessibility, huge reach and ease of use, these made flash mob, the modern face of collective or mass behavior.
Though such evolution, driven by technology has brought with it several positive things, however, it also brought bad things. Furthermore using qualitative methods to understand and analyze social behavior may be good but with recent evolution of technology and its impact on social behavior, it becomes more challenging, hence new methods and theories may be needed to understand and predict human collective behavior, using more deterministic and scientific quantitative methods as discussed in my book, Human Model (https://issamwadi.ampbk.com). Understanding human behavior and understanding it in a robust way, has big positive impact on motivating people, adapting them, building teams, addressing & resolving group problems, which all serve successful leadership & management. Needless to mention success in social activities, symbiotic relationships, sports and in politics.
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