Role Differentiation in Small Groups

SMALL group research provides a most fruitful meeting-ground for psychological and sociological thinking. Few fields of study lend themselves so easily to this dual perspective. The concept of holds a potentially strategic position in this rapprochement, but its use in empirical studies has thus far left this potentiality unexploited. We might define a role as a more or less coherent and unified system of items of behavior. With even this minimal definition it becomes apparent that role performance in the small group situation will have both consequences which are important to the functioning of the group in which the role is performed and personal consequences of importance to the individual who performs it. Similarly, an individual may be motivated to perform a role both by specific inducements offered by the group and by more general needs operating within the individual himself. The rather general failure to consider simultaneously both of these aspects of role performance has constituted a very real stumbling-block in small group research. This paper will attempt to illustrate the way in which consideration of both psychological and sociological factors may aid in the interpretation of tendencies for members of small experimental groups to behave in systematically differentiated ways. Our research in this area 1 has been centered around five problems: