Group Cohesiveness: A Critical Review and Some New Directions

Since its introduction in the early 1950s the concept of group cohesiveness has been modified so that it now accounts for the social group largely in terms of interpersonal attraction. Although widely criticized and no longer a major focus of mainstream social psychological research, group cohesiveness remains an important concept in applied social psychology. This chapter summarizes the still unresolved conceptual controversies surrounding group cohesiveness. It is argued that the chief problem with group cohesiveness is that it is a reductionist concept. The major part of the chapter proposes and evaluates a new, non-reductionist perspective—that of social identity and self-categorization—on cohesiveness.