Formal and an Informal Group

There are many differences between a formal and an informal group. A formal group normally consists of rules which shows that they are used normally used in professional circumstances as these rules will be the rules that need to be abided and followed in order for the business to function and the team to be cohesive and for the team to all be working towards to same outcome. Within a formal group each member will have roles that may have been assigned to them based upon their skills whereas within informal groups, roles may be picked up voluntarily so the informal groups are more likely to be a group of friends participating in a team based activity such as playing football. Formal groups usually have a specific purpose as to why the individuals have been brought together to fulfil a task or project, also new members can be brought in to the team to help the efficiency but these new members may also be counterproductive through group conflict and these members may not be accepted instantly within the group whereas within informal groups the level of acceptance will be lower. Informal groups may have a similarity to formal groups as both groups will have set tasks to perform in order for the group to be successful, a formal group may be working on a marketing campaign and each aspect of the campaign is accounted by the one person and for this to be successful the set tasks need to be achieved. In an informal group however, tasks can still be set for the team to be successful if they are competing such as friends playing within a football tournament so these tasks may be still be important and each person within the informal group will need to be effective in their chosen roles, the informal group will have less pressure than the formal group to succeed due the pressure within an organisation but the informal group may experience group conflict if for a mistake, the formal group can also experience conflict but the pressures of a mistake will be higher within the organisation. Synergy is when you put individual parts within a team together and they form better than expected and this is a major part of groups and for organisations this could be a successful function if the organisation manages the team correctly. Team cohesion is the total field of forces which act on members to remain in a particular group. People will usually refer to their group as cohesive if the members get along, are loyal and united in the pursuit of goals. It is usually harder for formal groups to establish good team cohesion as J. Stewart Black (1999) suggests that,

"Research has shown that friendship groups do socialise more; however, they also spend more time discussing the task, are more committed and more cooperative with each other." This reference explains that informal groups have better team cohesion due to their relationships; some formal groups may have small informal groups within them so this could be effective when the team are given the set tasks and the small informal groups may work together and a strong relationship through personality similarity will help them to channel each other's ideas so the organisation should try to apply this function when defining roles with the workforce or selecting new employees.

The study of Belbin's team roles can be useful to the managing director but have drawbacks which may cause damage to the team rather than help develop it. Belbin's Team role identifies patterns within people and their personalities and places them into team roles. Belbin identified the team roles to be: Implementer, co-ordinator, shaper, plant, resource investigator, monitor evaluator, team worker and complete finisher, each role is identified to have typical features, positive qualities and allowable weaknesses but a weakness that one role has is made up with positive qualities of another, for example: Plants are known to have imagination whereas monitor evaluators are lacking inspiration but bring good judgment which plants will appreciate as their weakness is that their heads are in the clouds so this judgement will give the plants more freedom to explore their imagination as they know the monitor evaluators will judge the ideas accurately, this is a positive because in a team you will need different roles as it will benefit rather than the same type of people with no imagination or no leaders . The negative that can be drawn upon Belbin's Team Roles are the differences of answers that participants will give during the completion of the questionnaire, these answers will differ due to the time/ date and environment. If a task has just been completed by a team and then asked to complete the Belbin questionnaire they might draw upon their participation within the group rather than their general personality traits. The second negative of Belbin's Team Roles is that it is difficult to score yourself as many of the statements may apply and may depend on the situation or the environment that the participant is placed within as Jon Billsberry (1996) suggests,

"The scores obtained don't justify the division of roles into the eight which

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