Does a Social Network Media Group Follow a Fixed Sequence of Group Development Process? A Study of Group Development Process of a Social Network Media Group

Abstract

The use of social media for forming social groups and networking is increasing day by day. The most popular websites of social media are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. As human being is a social animal, with the today's busy lifestyle, people wish to get connected and share the interests and information in the fastest way which is location free. Also like to keep in touch with their loved ones or for the professional contacts. The social media groups are formed, connect together for some common interests and objectives or just for fun!

So the researcher was curious to study the process of group development of social network media groups and its behavior and significance.

The objectives of the study:1. Does the social network media group follow a fixed sequence of group development stages?2. Is there any variation in these stages? 3. If there is any variation, is it initial or contextual condition?

To study these objectives, researcher felt that it would be challenging to study a social media network group as it has a unique feature of an informal group using social media to network. The group selected was an informal group, on a social media, LinkedIn, formed a year ago, by a HR Professional, has 4238 members from all over the world. The profiles of the group members are from various professional areas. Being a member of this group, the researcher was involved in all the developmental stages of the group, had an opportunity to actually be a part and study it with context of the research.

The researcher classified this group as an informal group using social network media as a platform for the interaction. So the features or the characteristics of this group were discovered as the combination of the features of a social media, social network and an informal group. A set of the combination of the definitions of these three terms were applied to understand the features of this group. Almost all the group development theories talk about the stages of development and group processes and interactions of the formal groups or groups in the organizational settings. As the group studied by the researcher is an informal group so it was difficult to apply a particular stage development theory and study the group. The equilibrium model of group development, created by Robert Bales was taken as the base for analyzing the group development stages of this group, as this theory was proposed as a study of the manifestation and incidence of task-oriented and socio-emotional behaviors within groups.

To study developmental process and each stage of this group, the researcher focused the research on 1. Collecting the data about the features /Characteristics of the group 2. Collecting the data about the profiles and the shares/ posts by the group member's a periodic analysis 3. Collecting the data about the member's profiles 4. A structured interview of a subset of the group which has emerged as a subgroup eventually in the course of time

The key findings revealed that the group followed the stage development sequence proposed by Bales up to the evaluation stage. The group is still very much inactive in terms of task oriented behaviors as well as not showing socio emotional behavior significantly. But there is an emergence of a subgroup which was initiated by a member other than owner of the group, invited members of a particular location and formed the group, (n=27). The researcher studied this group through a structured interview of the group members, which revealed that the need was felt to meet personally to activate and progress of the motto and objective of this group. Which shows that some initial conditions like the percentage response for professional / recruitment shares, lack of regular communication, involvement or of only few members, nothing new shared as an interest for which the group has formed. The response to the initiative of a Bangalore location member initialized the emergence of a subgroup which is not as per the Equilibrium model.

So this study indicates and concludes that the social network media groups may not follow the fixed sequence of stages of group development. There is a variation in the sequence of stages which likely to emerge as a result of the initial conditions of the group as well as the contextual conditions.

The findings of this study are limited to one group, studied for a period of one year. A comparative study of such more groups on different social network media, with different context and objectives will provide more insight to the group development study and theories. There is a further scope to study such groups with different contexts, perspectives and objectives, which in turn can be used for making these groups effective and significant.