Everyone has had experience with dyads. The first social experience of anyone's life is a dyadic relationship - that between a mother and her unborn child. This parent-child relationship continues once the child is born. Overall, dyads are the most common social group; they are seen everywhere, in personal, academic and business relationships.
To decide if a dyad is the best group size for your needs, it is again important to focus on the purpose of the group. A number of interesting characteristics of dyads - some benefits and some limitations - make them unique from triads and other larger group sizes, among them:. There have been some academic studies [ Taylor ] that suggest that it's easier to be open and share within dyads. The research has shown that people feel safer about revealing personal and intimate information in a dyad than they do when a third person is added to the group.
As a result, disclosure rates increase when people are put into dyads as compared to triads. Furthermore, adding a third person to a group causes its members to be more socially conscious, making it harder for members to listen to the conversation and at the same time be aware of their own thoughts. Together it's this trust level allowing for disclosure and this focus level allowing for better listening that make dyads much stronger for emotional support than triads or larger teams.
If the intent of a group is to have an intimate and fully open space, or if the work of the group is emotional in nature, this might make dyads a better choice. Though dyads are clearly more effective for providing emotional support, triads can still offer that as well under the right conditions. This intimacy and confidentiality of a dyad helps its members to build strong team dynamics relatively quickly.
The two individuals not only will have formed a trust bond more easily than three or more individuals could, but they generally will have a better ratio of time to performance outcomes compared to groups of larger sizes, in part because less time is spent maintaining the team relationship itself.
In a triad or larger group, the group would need to put effort towards team work over task work and thus less time is put towards performing the task. In other words, more resources would be spent on relating to a teammate than on finishing a project. The most unique element of dyads is that they are the only group size in which one voice is paired against another voice equally.
When was the last time you were in dyad in which you did not agree on an issue? Most likely, you and the other individual spent some considerable time trying to convince the other of your reasons, and the outcome was one of two things: you either both stuck with your opinion and walked away, or one of you changed your mind after hearing the other's ideas and opinions.
Because members can't 'vote', a dyad is either in agreement or disagreement, which forces a longer deliberation for tasks when consensus is required. There are times when you want a small group to deliberate deeply, and dyads are ideal for this. Though dyads have several advantages, they can also bring with them a few additional problems - one of which is a power inequality of knowledge that would be detrimental within some teams.
For some tasks, this could offset the benefits of having a more intimate small group. For my BGIedu groups, I was concerned that it might prevent some students from benefiting academically from the study exercise.
This topic has been addressed in a study [ Day ] that compared homogeneous teams that were entirely high-ability or low-ability to heterogeneous dyads of mixed abilities. The study found that while high-ability people tested better individually after learning the material in a dyad with another high-ability team mate, low-ability people did not gain much benefit from studying in a dyad with a high-ability team member. This was somewhat surprising. A student with more knowledge of a subject should be able to mentor a student with less knowledge, therefore creating a true dyad study partner.
However, this study showed that this was not the case. The study also argued against another common conception. One might assume that two high-ability team members could learn more together, when they could bounce ideas off of each other, than they could alone.
However, this was again not the case: high-ability individuals performed better after learning alone than after learning with another high-ability team member! Only homogeneous low-ability teammates performed better after being in a dyad than alone.
This study pushed me toward triads for study teams at BGIedu, as dyads would not be large enough to guarantee high performance outcomes; the teams would always consist of one higher performing student and one lower performing student.
Another disadvantage of dyads shows up in the area of accountability. Elyn, my teaching assistant, interned in a high school in Seattle while working towards her Master's in Teaching. Her experiences highlight this problem. In today's educational model, collaborative learning is highly valued, and Elyn worked to incorporate in-class group work into many of her lessons.
When assessing the students' group projects, however, she found that it was difficult to determine if the students shared the work equitably or if some of the students rode on the hard work of their partners.
In some cases, Elyn doubted that the work was split equally. In particular, she found that if she let the students choose their own partners, the students were more likely to say that 'both' did the work, rather than tell the teacher their friend slacked off on the assignment. A recent study [ Alkaslassy ] supports Elyn's experience. In it, students working on a paired group assignment were asked to allocate the percent of work done between the pair.
At a surface level, one could presume that each party performed half the work and was honest in their assignment of credit. However, Elyn and I believe that in some dyadic relationships, friendship can become an overriding factor and that in those situations, students are more likely to allocate equal credit because of this friendship, not because of true equity.
In the psychological field, this relates to a well-known cognitive bias called the egocentric bias , where an individual will claim more responsibility for group action then an independent observer would credit them.
Although this is most often discussed for larger groups, in dyads a member might rate their own efforts as being half of the effort when in fact is it is less. Thus in academic group projects, it can sometimes be more effective to have the students rate their peer rather than themselves.
Though group accountability can be a disadvantage for dyads, it improves when you have triads, thanks in part to a triad's inability to devolve. This, as it turns out, would be another comparative advantage that helped me choose triads over dyads for BGIedu.
There are a number of interesting characteristics of triads that make them different from dyads and also from small 'working team' groups. I'll talk about three of them in this article:. We all have experienced what happens when a party gets too busy or too noisy - the size of the conversation groups get smaller.
If you are having an informal dinner for seven, sometimes the conversation will include the entire table. However while people are eating the conversation will typically devolve into smaller groups: four people at one end of the table will being having one conversation, while the remaining three will be talking at the end other.
Sometimes one person will be left out of any conversation, but studies show that with small groups this is less likely to happen. We have a natural tendency not to want to exclude or reject individuals unjustly, so such a singleton will usually find a place in one conversation or another. Working teams also have this natural tendency to devolve when confronted with external challenges of which noise is one of the simpler ones or internal challenges such as differences of opinion , only reuniting when those challenges are resolved.
A team of six can devolve gracefully a number of different ways: a three and a three; a four and a two; or three groups of two. Teams of five can devolve into teams of two and three. A team of four can devolve into two teams of two. In all of these cases the devolution does not exclude any individual's voice.
However, a triad can not devolve without excluding someone. Triads thus have a lot of subtle pressure to try to keep the group together, so that no individual is explicitly rejected - except for a good reason.
This leads to more accountability for the individuals in the group, compared to teams of two where the dyadic nature of the group can override liability. A dyad's inability to vote was an advantage of that group size, and thus issues that require deeper deliberation are often better with dyads. However, you sometimes don't want as much deliberation.
You want fast action. I find that we unconsciously gauge each others' opinions in a small group very quickly, and even more so with a triad. This means that a triad seems to be able to come to at least some decision very fast. There are many cases where this can be very useful - if that is the intent of your team. As an personal example, I saw a presentation in the early s from the Apple Human Interface Group HIG about their survey of how users colored "folders" on the Macintosh.
The result was that there was little commonality - everyone colored folders differently for different reasons. Afterward, I met with the team and suggested that that if they instead asked teams of three to decide how to color code folders that they used together, then the results from all the different teams would have much more commonality. This suggestion ended up getting me a consulting job with Apple HIG, and shows how a triad can quickly create successful performance outcomes.
Triads are not the only group size that can vote easily - all odd size groups can - but I believe the voting of a triad to be fundamentally different because the voting can be so unconscious and informal that the members are not even aware of it. This can be useful, but it can also cause problems. Theirs was a good partnership; they had very different but complementary skills and worked well and profitably together.
As a fellow entrepreneur, I was a peer to both them, and we were developing a new product line together. However, when I worked with them on this product line, I saw that I'd changed their very successful dyad to a triad, and I thus became a tiebreaker in many of their business decisions - including business decisions on issues that had nothing to do with our joint product.
This was caused by a shift in power: one partner might ask me a question about marketing rather than asking his partner who knew marketing , and then it would become our opinion against the remaining partner's.
Conversely, I found the marketing partner asking me to side with him on development questions. I found this quite troubling; a more manipulative person could have controlled or broken that relationship by always breaking the ties in their own favor. In our case, we never shipped the product line and went our separate ways. I couldn't help but think it might have been because my unofficial "vote" was causing problems in their partnership.
When getting a result is the purpose of a team, a triad is better than a dyad as it allows for this voting to take place. As I mentioned to BGIedu, a triad can have a two-to-one vote, allowing a better chance at task accomplishment.
Task accomplishment is also achieved because triads stay on topic better than dyads due of this voting ratio: if one member of a dyad decides to go off topic, it is easy for the other to follow his or her lead. In a a triad, two out of the three members would need to 'agree' to follow an unrelated discussion. One final advantage of triads when compared to dyads is that the knowledge base of the group is larger.
I saw this issue clearly in my recent Social Web for Social Change class at BGIedu, where I changed the team size from two to three, and immediately saw a growth in elemental diversity that benefited the groups. In this class, I have the students participate in an exercise on personal branding. I originally had the students pair up in teams of two, effectively giving each student a 'branding buddy' to help them form their personal brand and to give and receive feedback.
In the last year, however, I decided to change this dyad to a triad. At first, these groups followed the same methods I used for dyads: one person would self-brand themselves to a second person in the group, who would then echo back what they thought they heard the first person say, using their own words.
However, it is difficult for two people to really hear the similarities and differences between what they said and what they heard. Or perhaps a group joins with other groups as part of a movement that unites them. These larger groups may share a geographic space, such as a fraternity or sorority on the same campus, or they might be spread out around the globe.
The larger the group, the more attention it can garner, and the more pressure members can put toward whatever goal they wish to achieve. At the same time, the larger the group becomes, the more the risk grows for division and lack of cohesion. Often, larger groups require some kind of leadership. In small, primary groups, leadership tends to be informal. In secondary groups, leadership is usually more overt.
There are often clearly outlined roles and responsibilities, with a chain of command to follow. Some secondary groups, like the military, have highly structured and clearly understood chains of command, and many lives depend on those. After all, how well could soldiers function in a battle if they had no idea whom to listen to or if different people were calling out orders? Other secondary groups, like a workplace or a classroom, also have formal leaders, but the styles and functions of leadership can vary significantly.
Leadership function refers to the main focus or goal of the leader. An instrumental leader is one who is goal-oriented and largely concerned with accomplishing set tasks. We can imagine that an army general or a Fortune CEO would be an instrumental leader. In contrast, expressive leaders are more concerned with promoting emotional strength and health, and ensuring that people feel supported.
Social and religious leaders—rabbis, priests, imams, directors of youth homes and social service programs—are often perceived as expressive leaders. There is a longstanding stereotype that men are more instrumental leaders, and women are more expressive leaders. And although gender roles have changed, even today many women and men who exhibit the opposite-gender manner can be seen as deviants and can encounter resistance.
Despite the stereotype, Boatwright and Forrest have found that both men and women prefer leaders who use a combination of expressive and instrumental leadership. In addition to these leadership functions, there are three different leadership styles.
Democratic leaders encourage group participation in all decision making. They work hard to build consensus before choosing a course of action and moving forward. This type of leader is particularly common, for example, in a club where the members vote on which activities or projects to pursue. Democratic leaders can be well liked, but there is often a danger that the danger will proceed slowly since consensus building is time-consuming. A further risk is that group members might pick sides and entrench themselves into opposing factions rather than reaching a solution.
An example of this kind of leader might be an art teacher who opens the art cupboard, leaves materials on the shelves, and tells students to help themselves and make some art.
While this style can work well with highly motivated and mature participants who have clear goals and guidelines, it risks group dissolution and a lack of progress. As the name suggests, authoritarian leaders issue orders and assigns tasks.
These leaders are clear instrumental leaders with a strong focus on meeting goals. Often, entrepreneurs fall into this mold, like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Not surprisingly, the authoritarian leader risks alienating the workers. There are times, however, when this style of leadership can be required. In different circumstances, each of these leadership styles can be effective and successful. Consider what leadership style you prefer.
Do you like the same style in different areas of your life, such as a classroom, a workplace, and a sports team? Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton drew fire for her leadership style. The presidential election marked a dynamic change when two female politicians entered the race. Democratic presidential candidate and former First Lady Hillary Clinton was both famously polarizing and popular.
She had almost as many passionate supporters as she did people who reviled her. On the other side of the aisle was Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The former governor of Alaska, Palin was, to some, the perfect example of the modern woman.
She juggled her political career with raising a growing family and relied heavily on the use of social media to spread her message. According to some political analysts, women candidates face a paradox: They must be as tough as their male opponents on issues such as foreign policy, or they risk appearing weak.
However, the stereotypical expectation of women as expressive leaders is still prevalent. Harsh, but her approval ratings soared afterward. While she has benefited from the efforts of feminists before her, she self-identified as a traditional woman with traditional values, a point she illustrated by frequently bringing her young children up on stage with her.
So what does this mean for women who would be president, and for those who would vote for them? On the positive side, a recent study of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old women that asked whether female candidates in the election made them believe a woman would be president during their lifetime found that the majority thought they would Weeks And the more that young women demand female candidates, the more commonplace female contenders will become.
Women as presidential candidates may no longer be a novelty with the focus of their campaign, no matter how obliquely, on their gender. Some, however, remain skeptical. This gag gift demonstrates how female leaders may be viewed if they violate social norms. We all like to fit in to some degree. Likewise, when we want to stand out, we want to choose how we stand out and for what reasons. For example, a woman who loves cutting-edge fashion and wants to dress in thought-provoking new styles likely wants to be noticed, but most likely she will want to be noticed within a framework of high fashion.
Conformity is the extent to which an individual complies with group norms or expectations. As you might recall, we use reference groups to assess and understand how to act, to dress, and to behave. Not surprisingly, young people are particularly aware of who conforms and who does not.
A high school boy whose mother makes him wear ironed button-down shirts might protest that he will look stupid—that everyone else wears T-shirts.
Another high school boy might like wearing those shirts as a way of standing out. How much do you enjoy being noticed? Do you consciously prefer to conform to group norms so as not to be singled out? Psychologist Solomon Asch — conducted experiments that illustrated how great the pressure to conform is, specifically within a small group Would you speak up?
What would help you speak up and what would discourage it? In , psychologist Solomon Asch sat a small group of about eight people around a table. Only one of the people sitting there was the true subject; the rest were associates of the experimenter. However, the subject was led to believe that the others were all, like him, people brought in for an experiment in visual judgments.
The group was shown two cards, the first card with a single vertical line, and the second card with three vertical lines differing in length. The experimenter polled the group and asked each participant one at a time which line on the second card matched up with the line on the first card.
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