Intergroup Influences

So far I have discussed about the paradoxes of intragroup influences in group life. It’s interesting wow we can see those same thing as a phenomenon’s also between the groups, as intergroup influences.  In the text of Smith & Berg (1997) they present three paradoxes of intergroup influences: The Paradox of Scarcity, Perception, and Power. In the class it was very interesting when we started to reflect these paradoxes to the movies we have seen. How different things we saw happening in the movies. Of course we also saw similar things, but in the class I realized how important it is in adult learning to be able to share our thoughts and discuss in the class room. It’s probably the most effective way to learn, to share and discuss in groups and teams.

But what comes to these paradoxes of scarcity, perception, and power they relate very strongly to cooperation, competition, and communication, to the topics we had a chance to use in our lesson couple weeks ago. In my opinion the paradox of scarcity is about the competition between the teams, “we want to have it all” or “we want to be the best and most praised”. As we taught in our lesson, too much competition takes something away from effective cooperation and communication. Cooperation and communication plays an important part also in the paradox of perception. As Smith & Berg (1997) says in the text book, every individual sees things differently around the world. And the whole world is divided into various groups. If we don’t cooperate or we don’t have the skills to communicate with other groups or teams, we will face the paradox of perception because every group has to work on two forms of integration; 1. It must learn how to bring its members together so that a group can act as a unified whole and 2. A group must develop ways of integrating itself with other groups. By saying that I mean that it’s not only if “we”, the individuals in our group play well together and find the mutual way to interact, we also need to have perception to the bigger picture how to interact between the groups and teams. Power, in the end, combines it all; cooperation, competition, and communication. We need to loose our competitive side of ourselves and our group and be able to share the power to achieve the greater good. It also means we need to cooperate. Without cooperation we might face the situation of the paradox where we have two sides: the powerful and the powerless, the haves and the have-nots. “In this sense, power is an attribute of the relationship between groups, rather than of any group itself” (Smith & Berg, p. 197). Leadership plays important role in this picture, it creates the boundaries that are the life and the death of the group.