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Facing the unceasing challenges of new technology, the use of virtual teams as the future organization structure has become more and more common. The objectives of this thesis are to investigate members¡¦ behavior in each stage of group development adopted from Tuckman¡¦s five-stages model, and to find out the impact of critical behaviors on virtual team¡¦s collaborative performance. This thesis selects nine learning-task oriented virtual teams composed by part-time graduate students in cyber university of NSYSU and probes into the theme of each groups¡¦ discussions by content analysis approach. SYMLOG is applied to observe group member¡¦s behavior and construct the categories of content analysis. According to the research results, the critical behaviors of initial stage are active (U) and friendly (P) behaviors. During the middle stage, the existence of encouragers and followers should improve group development towards high performance. In the final stage, group members shall be able to shift the communication focus from emotionally expressive (B) to instrumentally controlled (F) in order to reach superior effectiveness. Therefore, the findings of this thesis will provide some suggestions about member¡¦s behavior, facilitate group development, and improve virtual team¡¦s collaborative performance.

How does the status of a group influence the behavior of individuals within the group? This dissertation aims to answer this question by investigating the psychological and behavioral implications of membership in high- versus low-status groups, with a primary focus on the impact of membership in a high-status group. I propose that membership in high-status groups leads to self-oriented intragroup behavior, behavior that best suits members’ own interests regardless of the impact on group outcomes. In five studies, I test this idea and examine the psychological mechanism underlying this effect. The first three studies find that membership in a high-status group (a) decreases the resources allocated for the group as members attempt to ensure personal gain; (b) lowers the preference for a competent newcomer who may enhance group outcome but who may jeopardize personal gains; and (c) reduces the amount of voluntary information sharing during group negotiations, hindering group outcomes. The findings also reveal that reducing the conflict between group and personal interests via cooperative incentives encourages group-oriented behavior in high-status groups. The next two studies conceptually replicate these findings focusing on members’ information withholding – self-oriented behavior designed to prevent other in-group members from outperforming them. Specifically, results reveal that high-status group-membership increases intentional withholding of information, which in turn impairs group outcomes. However, this damaging pattern of intragroup behavior triggered by membership in a high-status group is alleviated when group members are led to believe that their group status is at stake. Taken together, this dissertation provides converging evidence that membership in high-status groups increases emphasis on personal interests within the group and that these concerns manifest in intragroup behavior that is distinct from that triggered by membership in low-status groups. The findings illuminate how the status of a group might shape the ways that members interact with other in-group members, as well as document the potential micro- and meso-level mechanisms through which status differences among social groups persist and change.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / L. Frank Weyher / Deadheads (fans of the Grateful Dead) created a durable culture that has lasted for over 50 years despite the death of several band members and the break-up of the band in 1995. What mechanisms account for the rise and persistence of this culture? This empirical question informs a theoretical question: what mechanisms are responsible for social cohesion? Social cohesion has been widely studied in sociology, but because these studies range from sovereign states to interpersonal interaction, the field lacks definitional consensus for the term. Instead of focusing on definitions, therefore, this study instead seeks to contribute to the understanding of underlying mechanisms that are responsible for the development and maintenance of social cohesion. This study employs a mixture of qualitative methods: I conducted seven years of face-to-face and online participant observation, conducted 22 semi-structured, informal face-to-face interviews with 39 interviewees, and collected 86 online, long-form surveys (combined n=125). This study uses both inductive and deductive approaches to analyze material gathered from a mixture of qualitative methods: ethnography, open and closed coding of interviews and surveys, and triangulation to the body of historical work on the Grateful Dead. The mechanisms that emerged from this study suggest that processes related to ritual, religion, and identity, all operating through emotion, are central mechanisms in the longtime cohesion evidenced in the deadhead community. Fan behavior at Grateful Dead shows is reminiscent of Durkheim’s description of tribal behavior in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and my research shows that fans create collective effervescence, sacred objects, and feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. Randall Collins builds on Durkheim in his theory of Interaction Ritual Chains, which informs the ways in which deadheads, through engaging collectively in intense rituals, create a long-term sense of community. Finally, I explore the structural symbolic interactionist school of identity theory with Stryker, McCall and Simmons, and Burke. When combined, these theories describe influences on deadhead group composition, explore the complex interaction between the individual and the group, and emphasize the role that emotion plays in that identity-work. Using an inductive approach and Hedström and Swedberg’s (1996) typology of mechanisms, I arrive at a number of mechanisms at work in deadhead cohesion: (1) situational (macro-level) mechanisms include internal and external constraint; (2) individual action (micro-level) mechanisms include self-transcendence, self-reinforcement, and self-talk; and (3) transformational (micro-level to macro-level) mechanisms include group maintenance and disruption. Future work should test these mechanisms using a group that shares characteristics with deadhead culture (such as transience, emergence, boundedness, motivation, and with little official structure) such as the grassroots political movement that emerged after the November 2017 national election, as well as hate groups that have existed for years but have recently become more active. Looking forward, more work is needed on meaning-making and the role of emotions in social cohesion. This work has implications for several sociological disciplines, such as group behavior, social movements, and culture, as well as social cohesion, religion, ritual, and identity theory.

We introduce basic behaviors as primitives for control and learning in situated, embodied agents interacting in complex domains. We propose methods for selecting, formally specifying, algorithmically implementing, empirically evaluating, and combining behaviors from a basic set. We also introduce a general methodology for automatically constructing higher--level behaviors by learning to select from this set. Based on a formulation of reinforcement learning using conditions, behaviors, and shaped reinforcement, out approach makes behavior selection learnable in noisy, uncertain environments with stochastic dynamics. All described ideas are validated with groups of up to 20 mobile robots performing safe--wandering, following, aggregation, dispersion, homing, flocking, foraging, and learning to forage.

Research around the implementations of human-like interactions during conversations with embodied conversational agents is currently at the forefront of Human-Computer Interaction as a field of science. In particular, conveying politeness through verbal and nonverbal behaviors is a significant challenge when modeling life-like virtual agents, as it underlies the conventional set of unspoken rules that govern human communication. In order to assess measures of perceived persuasiveness and politeness in human-agent interaction, in this study we compare six different politeness strategies - namely Baseline, Indirect, Asking, Proposing, Commanding and Pointing - to identify which combinations of verbal and nonverbal behaviors best persuade humans in joining a virtual conversational group while immersed in Virtual Reality (VR). 45 people were asked to walk towards the group with a specific scenario in mind, and answered questions on the perceived politeness of the agents inviting them. Results show that direct strategies are more persuasive than indirect ones, and the more imposing ones among them are perceived as more offensive, less friendly and inhibiting the interactant’s freedom of action. Additionally, strategies are less effective when participants feel more immersed in VR. We conclude that those giving the counterpart a higher freedom of action are most effective in conveying politeness, while those involving no behavior at all are least effective. / Forskning kring hur samtalsagenter kan förses med mer mänskliga beteenden under konversationer befinner sig i den vetenskapliga framkanten nar det galler människa-datorinteraktion. Det galler särskilt avseende att förmedla artighet genom verbala och icke-verbala beteenden hos realistiska virtuella agenter eftersom det finns en uppsättning bakomliggande oskrivna regler som styr mänsklig kommunikation. For att kunna utreda den upplevda förmågan att övertyga och att vara artig i människa-agentinteraktion sa har i denna studie sex olika strategier for artighet utvärderats, nämligen: Startläge, Indirekt, Frågande, Föreslående, Befallande och Utpekande. Ambitionen ar att kunna identifiera vilka kombinationer av verbala och icke-verbala beteenden som på basta satt övertygar människor att ansluta till en samtalande grupp i Virtual Reality (VR). 45 personer ombads att gå fram till en grupp med en särskild avsikt och därefter besvara frågor om den uppfattade artigheten nar de virtuella agenterna inviterade dem. Resultaten visar att direkta strategier uppfattas som mer övertygande an indirekta och de framfusiga som mer förolämpande, mindre vanliga och att de begränsar den interagerandes handlingsfrihet. Utöver detta sa ar alla strategier mindre effektiva i direkt förhållande till hur immersiv upplevelsen i VR ar. Vi kan sammanfattningsvis saga att de strategier som ger den interagerande större frihetsgrader ar mer effektiva att förmedla artighet, medan de som ar betydligt mer subtila ar minst effektiva.

Bullying and abusive discrimination in the workplace is a social global phenomenon that can lead to several consequences for those who are exposed. The purpose of this study is to investigate and increase our understanding of bullying in the workplace. We intend to fulfill the purpose by finding out how bullying in the workplace can be expressed, and how the exposed individuals through a group context experienced the bullying. Previous research shows that bullying in the workplace can include being socially excluded, having importan twork-related information withheld or rumor spreading. Mental illness such as anxiety or depression, or physical ailments such as muscle tension and migraine, are also some of the consequences of bullying. The theoretical framework for the study is Norbert Elias and JohnL. Scotson’s theory of established and outsiders, and Arlie Russel Hochschild’s concept of emotional labor and feeling as clue. This study is based on seven semi-structured interviews with people who, at some point in their professional lives, have been exposed to bullying att heir workplace. The result of this study show that bullying can manifest itself through abuse of power and social exclusion, which often affects the victim to a great extent. There spondents stated that their work motivation decreased, they felt anxiety, worry and a constant lack of energy, which also led to an impact on their private life. / Mobbning och kränkande särbehandling på arbetsplatsen är ett socialt globalt fenomen som kan leda till en rad konsekvenser för den som blir utsatt. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka samt öka förståelsen för mobbning på arbetsplatsen. Detta med hjälp av frågeställningarna om hur mobbning på arbetsplatsen kan ta sig uttryck samt hur den utsatte individen utifrån en gruppkontext har upplevt mobbningen. Tidigare forskning visar att mobbning på arbetsplatsen bland annat kan handla om att bli socialt utfryst, att bli undanhållen viktig arbetsrelaterad information eller råka ut för ryktesspridning. Psykiska problem i form av exempelvis ångest eller depression, eller fysiska besvär såsom muskelspänningar och migrän, är några av mobbningens konsekvenser. Det teoretiska ramverket för studien innehåller Norbert Elias och John L. Scotsons teori om etablerade och outsiders, samt Arlie Russel Hochschilds begrepp emotionellt arbete och känsla som ledtråd. Denna studie baseras på sju semistrukturerade intervjuer med personer som någon gång under sitt yrkesliv blivit utsatta för mobbning på sin arbetsplats. Resultatet visar att mobbning kan ta sig i uttryck i form av maktutövande och social exkludering, vilket ofta påverkar den utsatte i hög grad. Respondenterna uppgav att deras arbetsmotivation minskade och att de kände ångest, oro och en allmän orkeslöshet, vilket medförde att även deras privatliv påverkades.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Communication, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-45).

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<p>We are currently in an ongoing internationalisation period, demanding organizations to coordinate activities spanning geographically through time and traditional boundaries. Co-workers begin to work more frequently geographically dispersed from each other creating new challenges for leaders and organisations all over the world. The distance requires groups to use technology to cooperate, bringing both advantages and disadvantages. These changes demand organizations to go from traditional team formations to virtual. This leads us to our topic of research, investigating Marina Systems' experience with the previously stated work setting.What problems can be found at Marina Systems regarding their dispersed work setting and how can they be solved?The purpose of our research was to find the challenges and possibilities that Marina Systems perceive, as well as contributing with sustainable solutions for managing their distant teams. We conducted a qualitative case study with interviews. Different theories used in this case study regarded geographically dispersed teams, virtual teams, hybrid teams and distant leadership.The results found in the interviews showed that Marina Systems had some ofthe challenges and problems found in the theory chapter. They can become more successful in their planned expansion if they start considering their employees as members of a hybrid team and start adapting their leadership behavior to what such groups need. Areas of communication and a lacking reward system were some of the opportunities for improvement.</p>