Group Consensus and Psychological Well‐Being: A Large Field Study¹

Abstract

Models of group process propose that stressful social environments develop when there is a lack of consensus among group members about issues of relevance to the group. Based on these models, we expected that levels of consensus would be positively related to the average levels of psychological well‐being in naturally occurring work groups. An examination of data from 3,546 respondents within 73 work groups revealed that levels of consensus about leadership and peer relations were positively related to the average psychological well‐being of the group members, even after controlling for absolute level effects and covariates. In contrast, levels of consensus were not related to the average psychological well‐being of group members when identical analyses were conducted using pseudogroups.

Military leadership: A context specific review

“…Consequently, a failure to agree about unit leadership may be indicative of a poorly functioning team. Bliese and Halverson (1998) and Bliese and Britt (2001) both provide evidence showing that poor agreement about leadership is related to low well-being among group members. Presumably, poor agreement about leadership would be related to poor ratings on group process variables such as communication and to unit outcomes as well.…”

The teacher as leader: Effect of teaching behaviors on class community and agreement

“…It explored aspects of the CoI that are seldom studied: the effect of aggregated class-level perceptions of teaching presence, agreement about that level in the class, and the interaction of both class level and agreement in the online class community. It found that, much as effective leaders create both high levels and consensus among work groups (Bliese & Halverson, 1998;Feinberg et al, 2005), effective teachers also create both high levels and consensus. Further, the average level and within-group agreement about teacher behavior have interactive effects on the class environment and outcomes (Cole et al, 2011a;Cole et al, 2011b;Dineen et al, 2007).…”

“…The SD was chosen because it is a fairly robust measure of agreement (Roberson, Sturman, & Simons, 2007), and it is frequently used as an index of attitude dispersion and its converse, agreement, in composition research (Cole et al, 2011a;Dineen et al, 2007;Ford & Seers, 2006;Schneider et al, 2002). Multiplying the SD by -1 simplified interpretation and created an index of agreement rather than dispersion (Bliese & Halverson, 1998;Cole & Bedeian, 2007).…”

Boundary conditions of the emotional exhaustion-unsafe behavior link: The dark side of group norms and personal control

“…These aggregated scores then were assigned to individuals in dataset B and hypotheses were tested based on this dataset, so that the group-level variable (i.e., unsafe behavior nonns) is from another source. Since Bliese and Halverson (1998) demonstrated that the biases in using aggregate scores diminished with groups of eight or more employees, and in line with Ostroff et al (2002), we conducted the following way to randomly split the sample through STATA software. For those groups whose sizes were 16 or more, we randomly split the sample in each group into half of the respondents to dataset A and half to dataset B.…”

“…For those groups whose sizes were less than 16 but greater than eight, we randomly chose e ight individua ls into dataset A for aggregation, and the remaining samples individuals were assigned to dataset B. For those groups whose sizes were eight or less than eight, we randomly chose one individuals into dataset B, and put the remaining into dataset A to let there are as many individuals as possible for aggregation (Bliese & Halverson, 1998;Ostroff et al, 2002). For example, if a group had eight individuals, one individual was selected into dataset B while the remaining (i.e., seven) individuals were selected into dataset A, and these seven respondents were then used for aggregation.…”