Habitual Routines in Task-Performing Groups - CiteSeerX

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES 47, 65-97 (1990)

Habitual Routines in Task-Performing Groups

CONNIE J. G. GERSICK

University of California, Los Angeles

AND

J. RICHARD HACKMAN

Harvard University

Groups, like individuals, often develop habitual routines for dealing with frequently encountered stimuli. Although such routines are consequential for group life and work, little is known about them. This paper reconnoiters the territory of habitual behavior in groups that perform work within organizations. We offer a definition of group habits, identify their functions and dysfunctions, suggest how they develop and are maintained, and identify the circumstances when they are likely to be altered or abandoned. Throughout, we give special attention to the social nature of habitual routines in groups, to the interaction between habitual behavior and group life cycle phenomena, and to the role of the organizational context in prompting, shaping, and terminating habitual routines. 0 1990 Academic Press, Inc.

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90, a Boeing 737-222 (N62AF) was a scheduled flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from Washington National Airport, Washington, D.C. There were 74 passengers, including 3 infants, and 5 crewmembers on board. The flight’s scheduled departure time was delayed about 1 hour 45 minutes due to a moderate to heavy snowfall which necessitated the temporary closing of the airport.

Following takeoff from Runway 36, which was made with snow and/or ice adhering to the aircraft, the aircraft crashed at 1601 e.s.t. into the barrier wall of the north- bound span of the 14th Street Bridge, which connects the District of Columbia with Arlington County, Virginia, and plunged into the ice-covered Potomac River. . . .

The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of this accident was the flight crew’s failure to use the engine anti-ice during ground operation and take-off, and their decision to take off with snow/ice on the airfoil surfaces of the aircraft, and the captain’s failure to reject the takeoff during the early stage when his attention was called to anomalous engine instrument readings.

Excerpt from Synopsis of Aircraft Accident Report National Transportation Safety Board (1982)

The work of the second author on this paper was supported in part by Cooperative Agreement NCC 2-324 between NASA and Harvard University. Because the paper is an equal collaboration, order of authorship is alphabetical. Reprint requests should be addressed to Connie J. G. Gersick at Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA, 405 Hilgard, Los Angeles, CA 90024.

65 0749-5978&O $3.00 Copyright 0 1990 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

66 GERSICK AND HACKMAN

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report, based on extensive analysis by aviation safety experts, is the official determination of the probable cause of the accident described above. Yet it can be informative to speculate further about why the two-person crew did not use the anti-ice capability of the aircraft, and why they did not abort the takeoff when anomalous engine readings were noted.

Consider, for example, the following excerpt from the cockpit voice recorder transcript for the period just after the aircraft engines had been started. The captain had called for the after-start checklist, a standard procedure to ensure that the aircraft is set up properly for taxi. As is typical, the first offtcer read each checklist item and the captain responded after checking the appropriate indicator in the cockpit.

First Officer: Captain:

First Oflicer: Captain:


First Oflicer: Captain:



Electrical. Generators.

Pitot heat. On.

Anti-ice. Off.

Air-conditioning pressurization. Packs on flight.

APU. Running.

Start levers. Idle.

The checklist is a routine, run every time engines are started. It becomes second nature to experienced crews. The usual response to the query “Anti-ice?” is indeed “Off,” especially in the summer and for crews that typically operate in warm or dry climates. The NTSB noted that the captain had flown only eight takeoffs or landings in wet, freezing weather since becoming a Boeing 737 captain with Air Florida; the first officer had flown only two takeoffs or landings in such conditions during his entire employment with the company, Could the checklist have become so routine for these crewmembers that they were not even aware that the present flight required a nonroutine response to the anti-ice query?

The crew had a second chance to save the flight several minutes later, as the takeoff roll began. Here is the NTSB summary of that portion of the transcript:

At 1559:46, the sound of engine spoolup was recorded, and the captain stated, “Holler if you need the wipers . . .” At 1559:56, the captain commented, “Real cold, real cold,” and at 1559:58 the first officer remarked, “God, look at that thing, that don’t seem right, does it?” Between 1600:05 and 1600:10, the first officer stated, “. . , that’s not right . . . ,” to which the captain responded, “Yes it is, there’s eighty.” The first officer reit-

HABITUAL ROUTINES 67

erated, “Naw, I don’t think that’s right.” About 9 seconds later the fust ofEcer added, I’. . . maybe it is,” but then 2 seconds later, after the captain called “hun- dred and twenty,” the first officer said “I don’t know.”

Less than a minute later, the aircraft crashed into the bridge. The first officer was the pilot actually flying the aircraft. When he first

noted that something seemed wrong (“God, look at that thing, that don’t seem right, does it?“) the captain did not respond. When he repeated his concern, the captain reassured him (“Yes it is, there’s eighty”). Even though the first officer was not convinced (“Naw, I don’t think that’s right”) he continued with the takeoff. The routine was not broken, despite the data indicating that the roll was not proceeding normally. Could the takeoff procedure have become so routine for the crewmembers that they could not respond to indications that an extraordinary response (such as aborting the takeoff) was needed?

The Air Florida tragedy is an extreme example, but it does illustrate how powerfully a group can be governed by its routines, and how critical they can be for a group’s performance. Yet it is in the nature of routines that they go unnoticed; group members talk far less about things they do routinely than about extraordinary actions they have taken, and researchers have done relatively little systematic research on group routines. We contend, nonetheless, that a high percentage of what groups do is governed by routines, and that any robust understanding of how (and how well) groups work will have to deal with this pervasive but often- overlooked aspect of group behavior.

BACKGROUND

Despite the lack of research specifically on habitual behavior in groups, work at other levels of analysis provides good reason to believe that the phenomenon is pervasive. Most empirical studies of habitual behavior have been done at the individual level of analysis. What has been learned from that research is summarized elsewhere (Weiss & Ilgen, 1985) and will not be repeated here. It is worth noting, however, that even as the body of empirical findings is expanding, so are the conceptual tools available for interpreting and extending those findings. Especially promising, in our view, is the empirical and conceptual work by Langer (1989) on the manifestations and consequences of “mindful” vs “mindless” cognitive processing, the theoretical work by Louis and Sutton (in press) on the conditions under which people switch from schema-guided automatic processing to conscious engagement, and Weiss and Ilgen’s (1985) analyses of the antecedents, manifestations, and consequences of habitual behavior by individuals in organizations.

At the organization level of analysis, scholars recognized the existence of habitual routines many years ago, and have been theorizing about them


ever since. Simon (1945), following Stene (1940), described organizational habits as routines that develop in response to recurring questions and become accepted practice-actions taken without consciously consider- ing alternatives. He deemed organizational habits to be of far-reaching importance, because of the great difficulty of stopping an automatic launch into these routines, even when changed circumstances make them inappropriate. Barnard (194511976) concurred, asserting that much con- crete behavior in organizations is so habitual as to be ungovernable by rational deliberation, a view echoed later by March and Simon (1958, pp. 141-142) who asserted that routinized performance programs govern “most behavior in organizations.”

If habitual routines are pervasive at both the individual and organizational levels of analysis, then it seems inevitable that they would operate in groups as well. Groups are among the most common settings for the expression of individual behavior; and because groups are so frequently used to accomplish organizational work, many organization-level routines are actually executed by interacting teams (Huse & Cummings, 1985).

Indeed, it appears that organized social systems require at least some routinization of behavior to get work accomplished. Members of groups must be able to predict the responses of other individuals for coordinated action to be possible-and routinization contributes to predictability. The same is true for larger social systems: groups within organizations must standardize at least some aspects of their behavior to be able to act interdependently with other groups in pursuing collective objectives.

There are a few exceptions to the general silence about group habitual routines. McClelland (1984) documented that groups do routinize their decision-making processes over time. Her results further suggest that habitual routines may operate somewhat differently for groups than for individuals: certain predictions that were derived from previous findings about individual habits were not borne out at the group level of analysis. Argyris (1969) showed not only that groups have habitual ways of dealing with anxiety-arousing and authority-relevant material, but that these maintenance routines have great generality across various types of groups, from rank-and-file production teams to top management commit- tees. And Janis’s (1982) research on groupthink suggests that habitual behavior may figure heavily in groups’ strategies for handling dissent and deviance.

In a very different tradition, research on family therapy also shows the pervasiveness and potency of habitual behavior in groups. As Minuchin (1974, p. 17) explains, families inevitably develop myriad routines to address the tasks and needs of daily living. These are repeated “patterned transactions” in which each participant “triggers and monitors the behavior of the other and is in turn influenced by the previous behavioral


sequence. ” For structuralist clinicians, these group habits are such important determinants of family interaction that they supersede individual psychodynamics as the key to diagnosis and treatment.

We have also found evidence of the power of group habits in our own empirical work. Hackman and Morris (1975) discovered that experimental groups, asked to do creative tasks, settled immediately into performance routines that then guided behavior throughout the work period. There were few signs of overt planning or process management activities in these groups. Gersick (1988) studying naturally occurring project groups, also found that groups exhibited persistent patterns for handling their tasks, their internal processes, and their interactions with outside stake- holders. These routines persisted from the very beginning of their projects until half way through their project calendars-at which point they did change, a matter about which we will have more to say later.

It appears, then, that habitual routines are a fact of life in groups. In this paper, we hope to lay a foundation for understanding them better. We do not provide here either a literature review (there is not enough available to do that) or a theory of habitual behavior in groups (it is premature to do that). Rather, we seek to present a broad-brush survey of the territory. We begin, in the next section, by defining the phenomenon and bounding the domain we will address. Then we explore the functional and dysfunctional consequences of habitual routines in groups. Next we examine the conditions under which groups develop habits and maintain them over time and changing circumstances. Finally, we discuss the circumstances when groups are likely to modify their habitual routines or break out of them.

WHAT IS A HABITUAL ROUTINE?

It is essential to distinguish reliably what is being dealt with here from repetitive behaviors that fall outside the coverage of this paper. For us:

A habitual routine exists when a group repeatedly exhibits a functionally similar pattern of behavior in a given stimulus situation without explicitly selecting it over alternative ways of behaving.

While this definition is broad enough to apply to any group, we will deal exclusively with groups that perform some kind of work in an organizational setting. We explain below what we mean by each component of the definition, and identify some aspects of group habitual routines that are critical to what we have to say in subsequent sections of the paper.

1. “Repeatedly.” Habits can vary in strength. Accordingly, our definition does not specify that a behavior must occur every time a given stimulus situation appears-but it must happen many times, not just once.

2. “Functionally similar.” The issue here is not what specific words or


behaviors are exhibited, but what function the behavior has for the group or its work. For example, we would consider it a habit if a team repeatedly used joking to smooth over disagreements or to reduce tensions, no matter what the specific content of the jokes happened to be. We assume that habitual behavior usually serves some function when it is first established, even if it is a latent function not recognized by group members, and even if it is as simple a function as “freeing the group from having to think of alternative behaviors.”

3. “Pattern of behavior.” A pattern of behavior is a set of interactions that expresses a group’s way of handling a given issue or problem it faces. Whether explicit or implicit, it is a group’s observable, collective response to the invoking stimulus.

4. “In a given stimulus situation.” The behavior pattern is exhibited in response to a bounded class of stimuli. Because coding of stimuli is a key precursor of habitual behavior, there are several facets to this aspect of the definition.

First, specific stimuli in a given class are dealt with as if they all had the same meaning or significance for the group. A group that is using habitual routines may quickly code new or different stimuli as falling into the same class without giving explicit attention to them-even if those stimuli are, in fact, quite different. The Air Florida crew, for example, did not appear to “believe” that the data shown on their instruments during the takeoff roll were seriously discrepant from normal.

Second, it is the group’s perception or coding of a situation that elicits the habitual behavior, even though such coding may be accomplished without explicit group discussion, or even awareness by group members. This state of affairs can occur when all group members have learned to code certain cues in the same way: a yell from the coach may be simultaneously “read” identically by all members of an athletic team. But even a single member’s perception may be enough to trigger a group reaction, because once the others see a teammate launch into the routine response for “situation X,” they assume the same coding. A group of life guards does not wait until every member witnesses a swimmer in trouble to initiate emergency procedures; it is enough for them to see one guard racing toward the water.

Third, the stimuli that trigger that habit need not be externally imposed, but may-like the patterned transactions in Minuchin’s families-be self- generated, as when interactions among group members create a state of collective anxiety (the stimulus situation) to which the group responds by scapegoating a member (the group response). It is sadly ironic that the Air Florida crew did not adjust to the weather even as members talked about how cold it was. But once the after-start checklist routine began, the


stimulus-response pattern of the checklist appeared to overrule stimuli from the environment in governing crewmembers’ actions.

5. “Without explicitly selecting it over alternative ways of behaving.” The test here is simple and inclusive: the group does not process its behavior by explicitly discussing whether or not this way of proceeding is better or worse than alternatives.

CONSEQUENCES OF HABITUAL ROUTINES There are two features of habitual routines, as defined above, that bear

directly on the degree to which groups are better or worse off for having them. First, habitual routines operate without engaging group members’ conscious attention, evaluation, or choice; they function automatically. Second, habitual routines preserve and perpetuate existing patterns of behavior; until and unless some extraordinary event occurs, they are self-sustaining. These two features yield both functional and dysfunctional consequences for groups and their work.

Functional Consequences

The most obvious overall advantage of habitual routines is that they save time and energy, precisely because they need not be actively man- aged. For any group to take concerted action, members must have at least rudimentary agreement on their definition of the situation, they must have some kind of shared plan for how they will proceed, and they must exhibit at least a modicum of coordination in executing their plan. Habitual routines can help with all three of these requirements.

Because similar stimuli are automatically treated the same way when a habitual routine is in effect, a group can move quickly beyond stimulus coding activities. Because habitual behavior follows automatically from recognition of the invoking stimuli, a group need not spend time creating and choosing the behavioral strategy that will guide the work. And because habitual routines are well practiced, the time and energy needed to coordinate among members in executing behaviors is kept low.

At many steps along the way, then, groups’ habitual responses should contribute substantially to efficient performance, and free members to concentrate on nonroutine challenges. A second function of habitual behavior, perhaps less obvious, is that familiar, well-learned routines generally contribute to individual members’ comfort with the group. By re- ducing uncertainty about how things are done, habitual behaviors can increase members’ confidence about their roles in the group, and reduce their risk of “doing the wrong thing” and being perceived as deviant.

Although habitual routines may reflect the outcomes of past power struggles among members, once in place they can minimize overt com- petition and disagreement. Thus, habitual routines can attenuate the un-


certainty and anxiety that is inherent in collective work, and they can foster the kind of comfort that comes from familiarity and predictability. Yet, as will be seen below, this benefit may bring with it a cost in group performance and can threaten the long-term viability of the group as a performing unit.

Dysfunctional Consequences

There are two major ways in which reliance on habitual routines may be dysfunctional. First, performance can slip because members miscode performance situations, especially changing situations. Second, habitual routines can reduce the likelihood of innovative performance processes-and ultimately can contribute to stagnation of the group and its members.

Miscoding of situations. Habits invite miscoding. If a group fails to recognize a novel stimulus situation, or fails to see changes in a familiar situation, it risks invoking a habitual routine when something else is needed. Groups, like individuals, are likely to see what they know how to respond t~sometimes even things for which other responses would be far more appropriate.

A more subtle dysfunction may occur when the stimulus stays the same but the surrounding situation changes. Although the group may correctly code the stimuli that invoke the habitual routine, it may fail to recognize that the context has changed, and that the routine which heretofore has always been appropriate for those stimuli may no longer be so. The group does not realize this because, as is characteristic of habitual behavior, members do not actively assess the situation or evaluate alternative behavioral choices. The result, in many cases, may be suboptimal performance .

While this problem can emerge for any group whose behavior has become habitual, it is particularly likely when a group historically has been successful. Members of successful groups may be especially unlikely to attend to the broader performance situation, precisely because their standard routines have always worked line in the stimulus situations that invoke them (see, for example, Starbuck & Hedberg (1977) or Whetten (1980) for descriptions of the phenomenon at the organization level, and the work of Janis (1982) on the antecedents and consequences of “groupthink”).

Reduced innovation. The likelihood of innovation, either in the task or the interpersonal arena, may be reduced by habitual routines because the group’s behavioral repertoire is not changing or expanding. Moreover, productive dissent and disagreement are less likely when a group’s behavior is guided by habitual routines. The absence of dissent and disagreement assuredly increases member comfort with the group, as noted above. Yet performance may suffer as a result. Numerous researchers


have shown that dealing with intermember conflict and with dissenting views of members who hold minority opinions can prompt creative, non- traditional ways of responding to the group’s task (e.g., Hoffman, 1978; Nemeth, 1986).

Over the long term, there may be a more subtle and potentially more pernicious effect of reduced innovation. Because behaviors in the group are being executed mostly by rote, there are diminished opportunities for members (and for the group as a whole) to grow in competence, skill, and/or perspective. In the absence of active exploration and experimen- tation, members may fall into a comfortable pattern that gets the work done satisfactorily (assuming that the situation does not change in a way that makes the habitual routines inappropriate). Yet over time both the motivation and the opportunity for learning may diminish gradually, without anybody recognizing that these changes are taking place. This may have been part of what occurred in the teams of research and development scientists studied by Katz (1982), when productivity peaked and then declined after 3 years of members’ working together.

Contingencies. Habitual routines can help a group in some ways, and be harmful in others. Whether the net effect of engaging in habitual behavior is positive or negative appears to depend heavily on the nature of the performance situation. The mere existence of habitual routines obviously will not be a problem in situations where no change is needed-or when a group somehow gets alerted when a change in routine performance processes actually is required. On the other hand, severe performance problems may result when change is needed and the group fails to recognize that fact.

This suggests that two features of the performance situation may be especially salient in affecting the functionality of habitual routines: (a) the frequency of performance-relevant changes in the situation, and (b) the severity of those changes-that is, the degree to which changes are large enough to command a group’s attention. These situational features, in interaction, generate the matrix shown in Fig. 1.

The performance consequences of habitual behavior should differ substantially across the four cells in the figure. In Cell 1, for example, the performance situation seldom changes-and the changes that do occur are minor. Groups that operate in that cell should be well-served by habitual routines. The risk in this cell is that performance processes might become so routinized and stable that members would find in their collective work little variety, challenge, or opportunity for personal learning and growth.

Cell 2 presents potentially serious problems. If the situation is changing gradually in a series of small steps, no one change may be great enough to catch the group’s attention. Members are likely to persist with their es-


FREQUENCY OF CHANGES IN THE SITUATION

Low Moderate to High ,““““-‘----‘--------,--L”“““” I I’

I

I 1 I 2 I

Low 1 I i

Infrequent f 1

Frequent minor minor

i I I

SEVERITY I changes I

I changes

i OF THE :-----------------------:----------------------~ CHANGES t

i 3 I 4 I

Moderate to t I I

High i Infrequent 1 Frequent I

f major I I major I

I changes I changes f I

I L,,-,,,,-,,-,-,,,,,,---~-----,------------------~

FIG. 1, Frequency and severity of situational changes.

tablished behaviors unless, at some point, the discrepancy between the situation and the group’s behavior causes a major failure. Without such a failure, the group might go on operating at a suboptimal level indefinitely, never seeing a real need to change its performance processes.

Stable habitual routines are likely to be maintained by groups operating in Cell 3, because the situation itself is stable and routinized. The rare drastic change that does occur, therefore, may catch the group entirely unaware and unprepared. Serious performance problems may occur in the time between the onset of the change and the group’s response to it, because groups in Cell 3 do not anticipate major situational changes and therefore do not have appropriate plans or programs ready to deal with them when they do occur.

Predictions for Cell 4 differ as the frequency and severity of changes move from moderate to high. When situational changes are consequential enough to command the group’s attention and frequent enough to keep members alert, a group should be well-protected against the dysfunctions of habitual behavior. In these circumstances, a group would be well- served by a meta-level habit that provides routines for dealing with change. However, if the frequency of serious changes becomes too high, such positive outcomes are less likely. With very frequent changes, it could become impossible for a group to cope with its performance situation unless it were extraordinarily versatile, or had a superb forecasting system. Failing that, the group might develop an attitude of collective fatalism, superstitious learning, and/or a set of objectively useless ritu- als-all devices that help members deal with stressful uncertainty, but


that lessen their ability to continue learning about the situation and ex- perimenting with their behavior.

The predictions we have offered for these four cells are just that: predictions. As far as we know, no systematic research has been carried out that would bear directly on them. Yet what is known about the potency of situations in affecting group behavior (e.g., McGrath, 1984; Sundstrom & Altman, 1988) suggests that research on the effects of performance situations on the functionality of group habitual routines could yield a useful harvest of empirical findings.

HOW DO GROUPS DEVELOP HABITUAL ROUTINES?

There are at least three conceptually distinct ways that a group can get into habitual patterns of behavior: by importing those patterns, by creating them early in its life, and by gradually evolving them over time. As will be seen, these processes have much in common with those through which group norms are created and developed (Feldman, 1984).

Importation. In this case, a group follows routines that members did not themselves develop. Nonetheless, members know how they are supposed to operate, and they proceed to act in those ways. Sometimes, for example, behaviors are preset and overdetermined by organizational representatives-as when there is a standard operating procedure for which all group members are routinely trained. This is often the case when choreography must be precise for all organizational actions to mesh.

A special case of an imported routine occurs when organization representatives request that members engage in anticipatory planning and practice for an event that happens infrequently but that is highly important, like an engine fire on an aircraft, or an overheat condition in a nuclear power plant. In such circumstances, the organization wants the group to be able to respond as quickly and automatically as if it had a habitual routine, but cannot count on such a routine developing naturally-the event is too infrequent, too complex, and the stakes are too high to wait for that. The organization, therefore, overtrains the group’s response in a simulated setting, so that when the tire bell rings in the cockpit, the result is a behavior pattern that looks just like a well-practiced habitual routine. In fact, it is an artificial habit, deliberately engineered for a good reason.

At other times there is no preset strategy, but members have common previous task experiences, or share a common set of subcultural norms about how things are supposed to be done in groups. When a member has had previous experience with a task similar to the one now facing the group, then the cues in the present circumstances will prompt recall of routines that have worked in previous similar circumstances, and predis- pose that member to act in accord with those routines (Hackman, 1969). If all members have common or similar previous experiences, members


may find that they “naturally” fall into an agreeable set of performance routines without ever having discussed them explicitly. The same should be true when members share a common organizational culture or ideology (Louis & Sutton, in press). In both cases, members share a priori premises about the performance situation and strategies for proceeding to work within it. When the group does convene, members may simply proceed to do what everyone knows should be done, and a pattern of habitual behavior may be established without any explicit thought or discussion.

This kind of importation was found by Hackman and Morris (1973, in their analyses of the transcripts of groups that were asked to write brief essays in response to tasks of three different types. Some tasks asked groups to create new materials (as in writing a story), others to take a position on a controversial issue, and others to solve a practical problem. They found that virtually all groups used the same behavioral routine or strategy for working on tasks of a given type, that routines were different for the three task types, and that, with few exceptions, the strategy a group used was not explicitly discussed. The members, all students at the same university, had considerable experience with tasks requiring the production of written essays. Their previous learning about how to accomplish such tasks was simply imported into the group and accepted without discussion. Only those few groups that happened to include a member whose behavior indicated that the person was marching to a different drummer took time from production work to discuss explicitly how the work should be carried out.

This conceptualization of the importation process is informed by a model of the development of group norms, proposed by Bettenhausen and Murnighan (1985). The model posits that group interaction will unfold immediately in a well-coordinated fashion if (a) group members’ scripts (Abelson, 1976) are similar to one another’s and (b) members’ definitions of the situation also are similar. In effect, the norm is imported and the absence of disagreement and miscues implicitly affirms that all members accept it. When either scripts or definitions of the situation brought to the group differ among members, then their interaction will reveal that explicit attention to norms is needed, either sooner (if scripts are similar but definitions of the situation differ) or later (if definitions of the situation are similar but scripts differ). The processes described by Bettenhausen and Mumighan for group norms appear to parallel those by which intact habitual routines are imported.

In sum, importation of routines appears to happen under two different circumstances. One is when organizational representatives prespecify the desired routines, train members in them prior to their entry into the group, and provide motivational incentives sufficient to ensure compli- ance with them. This may be especially likely when the performance


stakes are high for the organization and good coordination among members is required for task effectiveness-as in the aircraft engine fire example given above. The second circumstance is when the group task is familiar and members are relatively homogeneous (especially regarding previous experience with the work and/or membership in a strong, common organizational culture), as was the case for the groups studied by Hackman and Morris. In both circumstances, observations of group process might suggest that group members had carefully developed and practiced a set of habitual routines, when in fact they may be strangers who are starting to work together for the first time ever.

Creation atjht encounter. When the group task is novel, members are heterogeneous, and/or the organization has not prespecified appropriate routines, then the group must somehow derive a way of operating. In doing so, members may create some behavior patterns with the potential to persist as habitual routines. As with importation, routine-creation may draw on propensities for coding and responding to stimuli that members bring into the group, ready-made. In the case of creation, however, members’ responses to the particulars of a group’s beginning interact to form new patterns that are specific to that group.

Gersick’s (1988) research on project groups shows how this can happen. For example, one team in her study was a group of hospital admin- istrators, selected to form a project committee from a larger group of department heads. The selection was made by a hospital vice-president at the regular monthly meeting of his division. When he asked the assembled group whose turn it was to chair the next committee, two women simultaneously “volunteered” the same colleague, each intending to work closely with him on the project. Although the nominee asserted that he preferred not to head up the committee, the vice president appointed him anyway. And although neither woman wanted to work with the other, each felt obligated, having nominated her colleague, to sign up. This incident only took a minute, but it launched interaction patterns that lasted through the first half of the team’s 12-week calendar.

Specifically, the committee leader, who did not want the job, took little active leadership inside meetings. The two women vetoed each suggestion the other one made, and competed to control the committee by talking privately with the leader after every meeting. Indeed, the group maintained these patterns for 6 weeks, rejecting every idea anyone proposed for getting on with its task. Although this pattern might have developed even if the first interactions among members had been different, internal evidence reported by Gersick (1984) strongly supports the con- tention that the initial encounter did establish some behavioral routines in the group that defied change for a long time thereafter.

If members’ initial reactions to each other are important, their reactions


to the behavior of the group’s leader (or to the external manager who designs the group’s task) are likely to be even stronger. Ginnett (1987) found that the way group leaders behaved at groups’ initial meetings set lasting precedents for subsequent patterns of group interaction. Specifi- cally, he documented what transpired in the initial briefings that airline captains gave to cockpit and cabin crew members when they first met, before going off on a multiday trip. He found that captains tended to brief in one of four characteristic ways. Some of them briefed in ways that creatively elaborated the airline’s core expectations about how crews should function, tailoring shared general expectations to the particular people on the crew and taking account of any special challenges or opportunities in the upcoming work. More typical were captains who af firmed organizational expectations, but did not take initiatives to build the team beyond them. Others abdicated responsibility for building their crews as teams, merely going through the required motions of conducting a briefing. And a few captains actively undermined preexisting organizational expectations about how crews should function.

It would be expected that crews briefed by these four groups of captains would differ substantially in how they worked together, and Gin- nett’s on-board observations affirmed that what happened in the briefing significantly shaped the patterns of interaction characteristic of each crew-starting with the first leg of the trip, just minutes after the briefing was completed. Although none of the crews Ginnett observed had ever worked together before, a framework for members’ behavior was established within a few minutes after they first met that powerfully shaped what transpired in the cockpit throughout much of each crew’s life history.

Although creation appears to be different from importation as a means of establishing habitual routines in task-performing groups, there are two significant commonalities between them: both processes result in routines getting established very early in the life of the group, and established very quickly with little or no time specifically devoted to hammering them out. Whatever is on the table at a group’s first meeting, then, may be particularly potent in setting the early directions of a group.

The swiftness with which groups establish lasting patterns may derive in part from the anxieties people have about dealing with process matters, uncertainty, and planning (vs acting). We noted earlier that one of the functions habitual routines serve is to increase members’ comfort in the group. The problem members face is that the process of creating such comfort-enhancing routines can itself be anxiety arousing. So if routines can be established very early in the life of a group, with a minimum of time and energy expended in doing so, then their advantages can be achieved without members having to face up to the anxieties that inhere in group “process discussions” (Hackman 8z Morris, 1975).


The early establishment of routines, when it occurs, almost certainly unfolds without members’ conscious awareness, resulting in habits that are invisible as well as self-sustaining. Indeed, if a group were to undertake a review of habitual routines that were imported or created early in its life it would risk reopening matters that members might well prefer to keep behind them. As will be seen later in this paper, that is one reason why it is rare for a group to spontaneously initiate changes or improve- ments in its established habitual routines.

Evolution over rime. Patterns of habitual behavior also can evolve in- crementally over the life of a group, as members gain experience with their task. Over time, group members gradually learn what is working well, and what is creating problems among them or with the work. Group behavior patterns can be shaped by reinforcers just as is the case for individuals, and the result (if a group experiences success) can be relatively deep habitual patterns to which members have high commitment.

This evolutionary process can result in habitual routines that occupy a central place in a group’s behavioral repertoire. Yet it also is possible for habits to evolve as a by-product of the group’s work, almost accidentally. Without really being aware of it, members (whose attention is on something else) fall into a particular routine-for example, a postmeeting cof- fee break. Members may even notice the routine, but there is no particular reason for them to do anything in response to that observation. The result can be a habitual routine that is not central to the group’s lie or work, and in which members have little motivational investment. Were someone to suggest changing or eliminating the pattern, he or she probably would meet with little resistance. But precisely because the routine is peripheral to the main concerns of the group, that suggestion is unlikely to be made.

Conclusion. All three of the above processes-importation, creation at first meeting, and evolution-may operate for any group, and they probably reinforce rather than conflict with one another. Yet there are two special cases when some interesting interpersonal dynamics might be expected to derive from interactions among the three processes.

One is when group maintenance routines are imported (members know how to interact with each other in their general type of group) but tusk performance routines must be created or evolved because the task is unfamiliar. The second case is the reverse of the first: when task performance routines are imported (members all know how the work should be done) but group maintenance strategies must be created or evolved, as when the group is a heterogeneous collection of strangers from different cultures or subcultures.

We expect that different things would happen in early group meetings in these two cases, because members’ anxieties and uncertainties would


be rooted in very different parts of group life (i.e., either task or socioemotional concerns would be particularly salient relative to the other). Moreover, because the critical demands faced by groups in the two circumstances would be quite different, what should be done early in the life of the group, ifit is to be effective, would be different as well. It would be relatively straightforward to design a study comparing groups in these two situations, which could both explore differences in actual group behavior and predict which groups would get into trouble because the early behaviors they exhibited failed to address the critical demands that they sub- sequently would face.

WHAT MAINTAINS HABITUAL ROUTINES?

Our basic argument is that habitual behavior, once established, persists more or less automatically until and unless something specific happens to break a group out of its routine. With an accumulation of repetitions of a new routine, the routine “settles in” to a group’s behavioral repertoire. The more the habit is used, the less conscious it becomes, and the more likely it is to be automatically repeated the next time the appropriate stimuli appear. Members become less likely to change it, in part because it has dropped from their awareness. Recent research on both the organizational (Miller & Friesen, 1984; Tushman & Romanelli, 1985) and the group (Gersick, 1988) levels of analysis have illustrated the strength with which simple inertia can keep behavior patterns from changing.

Moreover, this inertia can persist even when group members experience habitual behavior patterns as increasingly negative. For example, early in the life of one project group studied by Gersick (1983) members who came to a meeting unprepared would apologize, and then others would deny there was a problem. This was no doubt the easiest and least anxiety-arousing thing to do the first time it happened, but soon that behavioral sequence became a standard routine for the group: each time someone arrived unprepared, the person apologized and then other members asserted that it was “no problem.” One would expect that the routine would have been abandoned as the costs of maintaining it became increasingly negative over time. However, the routine persisted throughout the life of the group, until, by the end of the project, members had built up such an unequal work load, and so much resentment about it, that they were barely speaking to one another.

How and why do habitual routines have such staying power in group life? We examine below four possible explanations, each of which appears to have validity and which, when operating in concert, can make it very dBicult indeed for a group that falls into a routine to break out of it.

Social impact. Even if individual members begin to feel uneasy about a


routine, they may refrain from explicitly raising the possibility of change because they are waiting for someone else to take the lead. In the dead- locked hospital committee described earlier, for example, three of the five group members said, in interviews conducted at the project’s conclusion, that they were waiting for another member to take the initiative to move the group out of its dysfunctional pattern of behavior.

Social impact theory (Latane, 1973; Latane, Williams & Harkins, 1979) posits that individual reticence to take such initiatives should be far stronger in large groups than in small groups, which suggests that the likelihood of a group breaking out of existing habitual routines should vary directly with group size. So far as we are aware, this straightforward prediction has not been empirically tested.

Social entrainment. This concept, borrowed from biology and applied to social and organizational behavior by McGrath and his associates (e.g., McGrath & Kelly, 1986; McGrath, Kelly, 8z Machatka, 1984) refers to the process whereby a system’s internal rhythm is “captured” by a temporal process such that the rhythm of the system shifts toward the periodicity and phase of the capturing process. Entrainment may be one factor that contributes to the persistence of habitual routines across time and changing external conditions.

Kelly and McGrath (1985) showed how this can happen. They asked groups to perform tasks of various types in two trials, one lo-min long, the other 20-min, with time limit counterbalanced across groups. Results showed that interaction did vary as a function of task type and time limit, as expected. Of primary interest here, however, is the finding that patterns of behavior that emerged in the first trial (e.g., “we have to hurry,” or “we have plenty of time”) persisted in the second trial-when the group had either twice as much or half as much time as before. That is, the “pacing” that the group established in response to the time limit for the first trial persisted in the second trial, even though there was a 100% change in the amount of time members actually had to complete the work.

While McGrath and his associates have focused their research primarily on entrainment to time, they note that other internal and external conditions also can set entrainment processes in motion-resulting in persistence of the infhrence of earlier conditions even when those conditions are no longer present. Thus, for habitual behavior, a group may develop routines in response to conditions present at one point in its life, become entrained on those patterns of interaction, and continue to use them long after the original conditions have disappeared or been substantially altered. This process has more conceptual teeth in it than mere inertia, in that it specifies a social process (modeled after well-established biological processes) that promotes the persistence of habitual routines.


Additional investigation of the conditions under which habitual routines become entrained, and the dynamics of the entrainment process itself, would appear to be well worthwhile.

Cost of change. To alter a routine after it has settled in involves not merely deciding to head in a new direction, but also to give up an old direction-one to which members may have become attached. Moreover, the very process of changing habitual behavior is itself costly, which introduces a bias in group life toward continuing with established behaviors. Finahy, there may be political costs or risks associated with alteration of a routine. Any explicitly proposed change may be viewed as a bid for control of the group, and other members may prevent a group from moving into a new pattern to protect themselves and their special inter- ests from that possibility.

Such veto power may be especially in evidence when one or more members enjoy special importance within the group whenever a given routine is executed. For example, if a marketing group routinely performs a certain kind of analysis whenever a competitor adjusts prices, then those who are expert in doing that analysis may have a vested interest in keeping that routine intact. These members might even seek to expand the domain of stimuli that prompt the routine (e.g., Alderfer, 1977, p. 244; Weber, 1922/1958, pp. 251-252), by expanding the stimulus category “price adjustment” to include ever more kinds of competitor actions. Such redefinition would simultaneously enhance the importance of the marketing group in the larger organization and contribute to the persistence of the habitual routine over time and changing circumstances.

Group norms. The behavioral norms that evolve in groups also can add pressure to adhere to habitual routines. Once a routine has been established in a group, the behaviors involved in executing that routine are likely to come under normative control. Members who deviate from habitual routines are then brought back into line just as if they had violated any other norm of conduct in the group. Because groups, especially co- hesive groups, tend not only to seek uniformity of member behavior but also to have powerful means at their disposal to achieve it, sustained deviance is unlikely to occur (Hackman, 1976). In such cases, one would expect habitual routines to be exhibited with increasing regularity and reliability over time.

To augment the above process, evidence to date (e.g., Hackman 8% Morris, 1975) suggests that many groups have a meta-norm, rarely artic- ulated, that members should not explicitly discuss their first-level norms. For example, group members are unlikely to suggest spontaneously that the group examine its own behavior to assess whether it could be operating better. The net effect of this meta-norm, then, is to inhibit collective


reflection and lessen the chance that a group will acknowledge (let alone consider changing) its first-level norms.

The more powerfully group norms control member behavior (and the stronger the me&t-norms that make such control undiscussable), the less likely individual members will be to take initiatives that question existing habitual routines-even if individual group members privately feel the need to change. That can be unfortunate, because (as discussed earlier) there is ample evidence that the persistent expression of minority views about what should be happening in a group often is beneficial for a group and its work (Moscovici, 1985; Nemeth, 1986). On the one hand, strong group norms are essential to orderly collective behavior; on the other, they can inhibit reflection on the continued appropriateness of the very routines that provide such order.

In sum, the four factors discussed above (simple inertia, social entrainment, the anticipated cost of change, and group norms that enforce ad- herence to existing routines) can result in group habits that are, in many cases, effectively self-maintaining. Yet sometimes groups do break out of their routines. What can jolt a group out of its existing patterns of behavior and into a state of mindful, deliberate processing of how it is responding to the stimuli it encounters? That is addressed next.

WHEN DO GROUPS BREAK OUT OF HABITUAL ROUTINES?

Although evidence bearing directly on this question is scanty, we can now begin to identify the conditions under which a group will break out of a habitual routine. Three factors are relevant: (a) the impetus for change, (b) the timing of the possible change, and (c) the tenacity of the routine itself. We examine each of these in turn.

Impetus for Change

Habitual routines generally persist until and unless there is some explicit impetus for change. We discuss below five different occasions that offer the possibility (although do not mandate) that a group will modify, abandon, or replace one or more of its habitual routines. They are: (a) encountering a novel state of affairs, (b) experiencing a failure, (c) reaching a milestone in the life or work of the group, (d) receiving an intervention that calls members’ attention to their group norms, and (e) having to cope with a change in the structure of the group itself.

Encountering novelty. In reviewing the conditions under which individuals break their habitual routine, Weiss and Ilgen (1985) note that numerous researchers have identified novelty as a factor that instigates cognitive activity-and therefore that can prompt change or abandonment of a habit. Although that view appears to be well accepted by researchers


interested in habitual behavior, the effects of novelty are more compli- cated than they might at first seem.

Consider, for example, a group that encounters a stimulus that no member has ever seen before. Because that stimulus is truly novel, no habitual routine will be invoked because habitual routines are, by definition, patterns of behavior that occur in response to a given stimulus. The novelty that can break a group out of its habitual patterns, then, must reside in the situation rather than in the stimulus itself. Yet, as we have seen, habitual routines often persist even when the situation has changed (so long as the evoking stimulus is still present. That is one of the reasons they can be dysfunctional, as with the Air Florida crash with which we began this paper. That crew was in a novel situation (wintry weather, for a crew not accustomed to it), but the novelty apparently was insufficient to cause the group to break out of its standard take-off routine. One can readily imagine a degree of novelty in the situation that would have broken the routine, however; for example, the presence of an armed hijacker in the cockpit.

It may be that to provide an impetus sufficient to provoke reexamina- tion of a habitual routine, the novelty in a situation must be so great that it raises uncertainty about the meaning of the stimulus itself. That is, because the situation is so different, the stimulus also appears different. With a hijacker present, a captain’s call for the after-start checklist would take on a different meaning for members than it would in less novel circumstances. Moreover, as the novelty of a situation increases, it should become increasingly likely that some group member will call attention to its uniqueness. If that happens and she or he receives support from at least some other members, then there is a real possibility that the habitual routine will be reexamined and perhaps modified or abandoned.

In sum, novelty may indeed be an impetus for changing a habitual routine. The dynamics by which this happens, however, may be neither simple nor straightforward. For one thing, it may be situational novelty, rather than novelty in the stimulus itself, that provokes group members to take a look at their routines (cf., Denning, 1988). Second, change seems unlikely unless the situation is experienced as very different from what members are accustomed to. And third, the process of recognizing and interpreting the changed situation centrally involves social processes within the group.

Experiencing failure. Another factor often pointed to in discussions of individual habitual behavior is failure or “goal blockage.” Weiss and Ilgen (1985) point out that “either sudden, unexpected failure to reach stable goals or a re-evaluation or change of goals can result in the uncertainty necessary to reconsider the appropriateness of routines” (p. 60). This would seem likely to hold true for groups as well.


Indeed, one could argue that failure-induced change might be especially likely, or come especially quickly, in groups because there are multiple individuals available to perceive that a routine is not working and to point that out to their colleagues. Moreover, once a group has recognized and accepted the fact that its routines are no longer working the way they used to, it might fmd a more generous repertoire of alternatives available than would be the case for an individual, since a group has multiple members who often have a variety of perspectives on the work.

There is, however, a significant caveat to this optimistic scenario. Some groups faced with failure simply execute their existing habitual routines more vigorously, rather than call them into question. This response can create subsequent problems, at least for some kinds of tasks. “We’re failing, so let’s try harder” is a strategy that may be highly appropriate in a tug-of-war, but less so when innovative responses are required .

The tendency for social systems, including groups, to close down rather than open up under stress and threat is well-documented (e.g., Staw, Sandelands, & Dutton, 1981). Organizational decline is a good case in point (Greenhalgh, 1983). After pointing out the chronic tension in social systems between stability and conservatism on the one hand, and change and adaptation on the other, Greenhalgh notes that “under the stressful conditions of decline, when variation is perhaps most needed, the con- servative tendencies tend to be exacerbated” (p. 241). This phenomenon was documented for groups under threat by Gladstein and Reilly (1985). And, in a study that specifically addressed the development and persistence of routinized group decision-making behavior, McClelland (1984) found, contrary to her expectation, that groups that had experienced failure routinized their decision making and adapted to failure feedback at the same rate as did those that had experienced consistent success. In sum, if there is empirical evidence that moderate or occasional failure prompts groups to reexamine their habitual routines, we have been unable to find it.

Why do groups that are failing so often intensify execution of existing routines rather than reconsider their appropriateness? Two mechanisms may be in operation, separately or in concert. One is the “escalating commitment” phenomenon. Research on this phenomenon has been conducted primarily at the individual level of analysis (e.g., Staw, 1981) and typically focuses on the continued investment of material resources after data have become available that previous investments have not paid off as anticipated. It seems reasonable to assume that groups, too, might sometimes respond to performance failures by escalating their commitment to existing habitual routines rather than reconsidering them.

A second mechanism has to do with social facilitation processes. If it


can be assumed that the experience of failure serves to heighten members’ arousal (an individual-level phenomenon that can be powerfully reinforced and enhanced by fellow group members), then, following Za- jonc (1965), one could expect an increase in the degree to which the dominant (in this case, habitual) response would be exhibited.

Clearly, additional research is required to identify those conditions under which failure will result in reconsideration of habitual routines as opposed to recommitment to them. Like novelty, it is by no means certain that failure or goal blockage will automatically result in a review or revi- sion of habitual routines; instead, these events merely provide one of several occasions that may have such an effect.

Reaching Q milestone. Reaching a natural breakpoint in the task (such as finishing a first draft of a paper), or reaching a milestone in the life of the group (such as an anniversary of the group’s founding), can provide team members with a stimulus to break away from old patterns and initiate new ones. In her field study of project teams, Gersick (1984; 1988) found that each team studied developed a distinctive approach toward its task as soon as it commenced work and stayed with that approach until precisely half way between its first meeting and its project deadline. (Since groups’ projects were of varying duration, these periods varied from several days to several weeks.)

At the midpoint of its life, every group underwent a major transition. In a concentrated burst of changes, groups dropped old patterns, reengaged with outside supervisors, adopted new perspectives on their work, and made dramatic steps forward. Groups also showed changes in more mundane patterns at the time of their transitions; for example, midpoint meetings typically occurred at unusual times or locations, lasted longer, and/or showed different patterns of seating and attendance than previous meetings. Field study evidence suggested-and a subsequent laboratory study documented (Gersick, 1989)-that teams use midpoints (and sometimes other temporal markers) as milestones against which to pace themselves. Because they are half-way through, members feel it is “time to move ahead,” and push themselves to take new steps in the work. In the process, habitual routines can change, sometimes radically.

If one were to extrapolate from Gersick’s findings to groups that are not time bounded, one might expect to see a similar phenomenon in operation: a group reaches a natural breakpoint in its work and members find themselves compelled to take a look at their routines before the start of the next work period. Yet we see no evidence of that, either in the literature or in our own research. In Hackman’s (unpublished) research on aircrews and semiconductor manufacturing teams, for example, distinct breakpoints were easy to identify: between days of a multiday trip for the cockpit crews, and at the end of six-week-long production periods for the


manufacturing teams. In neither of these cases did teams spontaneously attend to or assess their performance routines, or reconfigure themselves in any significant way for the upcoming work period.

Why do on-going groups appear to operate differently from what Ger- sick found for time-limited project groups? Three features of the design of the groups appear to be critical. Gersick’s groups had clear, strong goals and specific deadlines by which the goals had to be achieved and full authority to manage their own performance processes. It may be that all three of these conditions are required for the kind of midpoint transition she observed to occur. In the absence of a motivating goal, a clear “due date,” and the discretion to make changes in performance strategy, groups may not be able to undertake the kind of review and reconfigura- tion she documented.

Receiving an intervention. Receiving an intervention-such as from an authority figure in the organization or from a group leader or consultant- can prompt a group to review its habitual routines. At issue here is the degree to which an interventionist is able to help a group alter the focus of its attention temporarily, from executing its routines to examining their appropriateness for the task and situation. In effect, the interventionist uses his or her special role to cut through the meta-norm that inhibits explicit review of group norms about behavior (discussed above), and to help members examine routines that they may not even realize they are following.

This is the kind of thing done by good process consultants (Schein, 1969) and team leaders (Hackman & Walton, 1986). Yet there is no reason to assume that the initiative for norm-relevant interventions must origi- nate outside the group; sometimes interventions are actively sought by members themselves. Five of the eight teams Gersick studied in the field, for example, sought outside help or solicited outside ideas at their calendar midpoints-and then used these fresh inputs to shape their transi- tional moves forward. So, when the time is right, groups may take initiatives to secure the kind of outside help that eventually can lead to reconsideration of habitual routines, even though member-initiated discussion of routines without external assistance rarely is observed.

Coping with structural change. A major change in a group’s structure also can provide an impetus for reexamining, and possibly reconfiguring, the routines members use in carrying out their work. We look specifically at three structural features-the composition of the group, the design of its task, and the amount of authority the group has to manage its own affairs. When one of these features changes, members are likely to experience their group and its work as quite different than before. And that can prompt a fresh look at habitual routines that previously had been accepted unquestioningly.


Recomposition of the group. In a large organization, a few changes in personnel are unlikely to affect established routines. In a group, however, membership changes may have profound effects on the group’s repertoire of habitual routines. When even one member enters a small group, habits can become visible as the newcomer tries to learn, and old members try to teach, how things are done in the group. Moreover, the arrival of a new member may be coincident with the departure of an established member-perhaps someone who has played a central part in the execution of certain habitual routines. Membership change, then, may call into question many things that need not be addressed during periods of stability, and those questions offer at least the possibility of being converted into changes in the group’s habitual routines.

Redesign ofthe group tusk. The task of a group is itself one of the major sources of stimuli members confront on a regular basis, ranging from the actual materials with which a group works to cues about team objectives and/or required behavioral processes (Hackman, 1969). When a task changes, then, the configuration of stimuli a group encounters will change as well, and members may find that their standard routines are insufftcient for (or inappropriate to) the new work requirements and opportunities. And that, of course, can prompt a return to active processing of the choices open to the group.

Alteration of the group’s authority. How a group operates is very different if the group is merely executing what someone else has decided about, as opposed to managing most or all of its own affairs. A way of assessing the level of a group’s authority proposed by Hackman (1987) results in placement of a group on a four-step continuum ranging from “manager-led” through “self-managing” and “self-designing” to “self- governing.” A change in a group’s authority on this continuum (in either direction) should provide a strong impetus for members to reconsider their habitual routines, since many standard ways of proceeding will no longer be appropriate if the group now has noticeably more (or less) authority to manage itself than it did before.

Summary. We have drawn on several lines of research to identify five different occasions that can prompt a group to break out of a habitual routine. These occasions are perhaps not as distinct from one another as our discussion might suggest. All involve some change in how the context is perceived-which also has been shown to be critical to the dynamics of both creativity and the Einstellung effect (i.e., the tendency to persist with the same approach to a problem or series of problems). Denning (1988, p. 118) for example, has proposed that creativity necessarily involves, first, recognition of the context within which one has been working-and then the “invention of a new context” that allows one to break from existing routines. And Ericsson and Simon (1984, p. 129) report that


the Einstelhmg effect can be reduced by alterations in the context (specifically, when test items are marked as belonging to separate sets rather than as one continuous series).

If any of the five occasions for change we have discussed is actually to result in a break from an existing routine, then some change in the group’s definition of the situation appears to be required. If a group is failing, for example, change from existing routines will be unlikely if members at- tribute their lack of success merely to their failure to execute well. If, on the other hand, the failure prompts members to view the situation as “a whole new ballgame,” then existing routines may be interrupted and real change becomes more likely. Whether such redefinition occurs, in any case, depends as well on questions of timing and on the properties of the routine itself. We turn to these matters next.

Timing of the Change

While habitual routines rarely change without some identifiable impetus, whether a change actually does occur depends on when the impetus is encountered by the group. At some times in their life cycles groups are open to reconsideration of their habitual routines: at other times, even a very powerful event pointing out the inadequacy of existing routines may be insufficient to shake a group out of them.

Existing research suggests that times favorable for initiating, revising, or replacing habitual routines include: the start (or restart) of the group, the midpoint of its life cycle, and other major times of transition in the group’s life and/or work. When a group is in a basically stable period, significant change in habitual routines is unlikely. In the Gersick study of project teams we have been discussing, for example, groups did not reconsider their routines prior to reaching their midpoint transition-ven though in a number of the groups several members showed that they were highly dissatisfied with prior patterns of behavior. And once the midpoint transition was past, groups did not seriously reconsider the new directions they had chosen, even when members made suggestions that they do so.

By the same token, one would predict that on-going groups (i.e., those that do not have a fixed beginning and end, as Gersick’s groups did) would be unlikely to successfully review or revise their routines while in a period of intense, driving performance. Change would be far more likely at the end of a performance period or at some other time when normal performance processes come to a natural pause.

There are, moreover, some potential interactions between the impetus for change and its timing. Consider, for example, alteration of group structure as an impetus for reexamining habitual routines. When a group encounters a major change in composition, task, or authority, that may in

!I0 GERSICK AND HACKMAN

itself create a disjunction in the flow of the work sufficient to establish a state of readiness for review for which one might otherwise have to wait. Similar reasoning applies to the impetus for change provided by reaching a milestone in the life or work of the group. At such times, even continuing groups (which rarely initiate reassessment of their performance routines spontaneously) may be far more amenable to outside intervention that involves review of habitual routines than would be the case at other times. An interventionist who appears then might find the group significantly more open to her or his initiatives than one who seeks to intervene in the midst of a mainline performance period, partly because milestones, by marking the close or beginning of performance periods, invite percep- tions that the context is changing.

Tenacity of the Habitual Routine

Some habits are harder to change than others. Three attributes of habits bear on the amenability of a routine to change. They are: the orientation of the habitual routine (i.e., toward socioemotional vs task issues), the depth of the routine (i.e., the degree to which the routine is deep in group history and invisible to members), and the centrality of the routine (i.e., the degree to which it deals with behaviors associated with the primary task of the group).

Orientation. Habits having to do with socioemotional issues should be less amenable to change than routines that guide task performance processes. One reason for this prediction is simply that socioemotional issues tend to be anxiety-arousing, and people generally do not rush to address them in group settings. In addition, individual members are more likely to have strongly held personal preferences and styles for dealing with socioemotional issues than they do for matters having mainly to do with getting work done. Thus, a group routine for handling instances of “deviant” behavior by a member should be more resistant to change than one that guides behavior dealing, for example, with the occasional late arrival of production materials. It is easier to deal with “it” than with “us.” Routines that protect a group from having to deal with affectively negative socioemotional issues should be particularly difticult to change, especially since such routines keep the group from ever learning the consequences of exchanging and dealing with negative feelings.

Depth. The depth of a habit refers to the degree to which it is “buried” in the life of a group, unacknowledged and perhaps even unknown to group members. Such habits cannot be changed until after members have come to understand that they have the habitual routine and that it is consequential for the life and/or work of the group. A surface habit, on the other hand, is known to the group, and should be much easier to change,


simply by someone suggesting that it be stopped, and other members agreeing.

Centrality. Some habitual routines have to do with matters at the heart of a group’s work. Alteration of such routines can directly affect how, and potentially how well, a group performs its primary task. Other routines are more peripheral. Peripheral routines help a group deal efftciently with mundane matters that probably merit little concern in their own right because they have little relevance to the group task. Thus, a central routine for an aircrew might involve the sequencing of landing preparation activities; a peripheral routine might dictate when uniform hats are re- moved and where in the cockpit they are hung. Peripheral routines such as this should be far more amenable to change than are those located close to the heart of a group’s work.

Summary predictions. The matrix shown in Fig. 2 provides a set of predictions about the amenability of habitual routines to change for each of the cells generated by the last two properties discussed-depth and centrality. Note as well that within each cell (although this is not shown in the figure) routines having mainly to do with socioemotional issues are predicted to be more resistant to change than are those that deal mainly with task performance processes.

Summary

In sum, we have argued in this section that a group will not explicitly rethink its habitual behavior unless two conditions are met. First, there must be an explicit impetus for change, something that offers the group an opportunity to reconsider its behavior in response to the eliciting stimuli.

CENTRALITY

Peripheral Central r”““““““““‘““‘, I I

“““““‘-“““‘“““I I

t f

Easy to change: I Moderate: potential I

Surface I habit is accessible I

problem is opening ;

I 1

I and nonconsequential 1 Pandora’s box I

DEPTH f i i :-------------------------‘---------------------------

t I t I Moderate: potential f

Buried [ problem is getting i Difficult to change: I

t habit is inaccessible t access to the habit,

I and consequential ;

i awareness of it i

I

L I --------------------- ,,,,-,,-,,-,,-,,-,-,----J I FIG. 2. The amenability of habitual routines to change.


Such occasions include encountering novelty, experiencing failure, reaching a milestone in the life or work of the group, receiving an outside intervention relevant to group norms, and having to cope with change in the structure of the group itself.

Second, the time must be right for a habitual routine to be modified or replaced. Even if the time is right, we suggest that habitual behavior will rarely change if there is no specific impetus for change. On the other hand, if the time is wrong, habitual behavior is unlikely to change even if there is an explicit impetus. Both an impetus and an appropriate time are needed.

And, finally, change may not occur for certain habitual routines even when both of these conditions are present. If the habit is buried deeply in the life of the group, central to its primary task, and oriented heavily toward socioemotional issues, then it could take a truly major jolt to break a group out of its existing routines.

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

We are uneasy suggesting conclusions and implications for the material in this paper, because so little of what we have written is backed up by empirical data. Our unease is mitigated only slightly by knowing that one of the major reasons we wrote the paper in the first place was to encourage additional research on group habitual routines-and, we hope, to provide a slightly elevated platform from which to initiate such studies. Yet there do seem to be some implications for practice even from the few studies that have been done on group habitual routines. And there certainly are many opportunities for research that would move understanding beyond what we now know about them.

Implications for Practice

Existing knowledge about habitual routines in groups, it seems to us, has implications both for those who design task-performing groups and those who lead them. Practitioners’ objectives, of course, typically are to structure and lead groups in ways that foster the benefits of habitual behavior, while keeping to a minimum the likelihood that groups will fall victim to their dysfunctions. To accomplish this requires that designers and leaders of groups create conditions that foster both attention (the monitoring of routines and their possible effects), and motivation (the active desire to develop and maintain routines that are appropriate for the group’s work and situation).

For designers, the device of a self-managing team (e.g., Cummings, 1981; Hackman, 1987) may offer one reasonable approach. Because such teams have the authority and responsibility for managing their own behavior, including responding to changing task and situational demands,


they are more likely than manager-led teams to both (a) develop routines that aid in maintaining flexibility, and (b) keep the level of deliberate processing within the group high enough to avoid many of the dysfunctional consequences that can come from mindless habitual behavior.

In addition, it appears that it would be advantageous to build a direct link between a group and other groups with which it must deal (either inside or outside its organization), thereby ensuring that the group is directly exposed to perturbations in its environment. This, too, should foster active processing, and would contrast with an alternative (and frequently observed) design strategy in which task-performing teams are “protected” from the organizational context and external environment. In the latter cases, the rationale often is to provide a buffer for the group, so it can focus on its own task performance without distraction. In practice, such a buffer also can insulate a team from having to deal with, or even attend to, environmental changes that may have implications for the appropriateness of its habitual routines.

For leaders (contrasted here with designers, although we recognize that the same person may have both responsibilities), the material we have addressed suggests two levels of intervention, both of which involve questions of timing. At the first level, a leader can offer direct interventions aimed at helping a group examine the routines it uses in executing its work, thereby increasing the likelihood that members will catch inappropriate routines before serious damage is done-and perhaps even develop new routines that are uniquely suited to the task and situation. The timing issue has to do with the readiness of a group for such an intervention. The scanty evidence that exists on this matter also is convincing to us: only when a group is at some breakpoint in its work are such interventions likely to “take” and have their intended effects. To suggest that a group step back and take a look at its norms and routines around performance processes when members are wholly occupied with executing those processes is likely to be, at best, ineffective-and perhaps even distracting and actively unhelpful.

A second level of leader intervention involves helping a group develop metu routines that prompt members to initiate their own review of their first-level habitual routines on a regular basis and at appropriate times. Again, timing is critical: this kind of intervention can only be done when a group is ready for some serious reflection on how it manages its affairs. It is tempting to suggest that such a meta-routine could be established at the first meeting of a new group, but we are doubtful that it could be done so easily, even with a competently designed and executed plan for that meeting. The first meeting is indeed important in getting a group off on the right foot (see, for example, Ginnett, 1987), and it can lay the groundwork for the subsequent development of meta-routines of the type we are dis-


cussing. Yet we strongly suspect that such routines cannot be developed without repetition, and without members having logged a good measure of experience working together. It will take staying power for a leader to help members understand how occasional review of their habi:ual routines can be advantageous, and to help them do the gradual, incremental learning that we believe is required to build such activities into the fabric of a group’s life.

Implications for Research

There are many unanswered empirical and conceptual questions noted throughout this paper. In fact, we know distressingly little about habitual behavior in groups-and we hope this paper has piqued the interest of at least a few researchers in filling in some of the many gaps in knowledge about them. Let us close by identifying a number of questions that we find especially interesting.

One has to do with the social processes involved in the development, maintenance, and change of habitual routines. Much of what we know about habitual routines in groups has been imported, often intact, from the rather richer literature on individual habitual behavior. What is interesting about groups is that they are social entities, with much of what goes on visible in the group interaction process. It seems to us that it should be both relatively straight forward and highly productive to place those social processes under a microscope and chart how the ways that people work together affect (and are affected by) groups’ habitual routines.

We also believe that there is much ore still to be mined concerning the role of time and group life cycles in understanding habitual routines- particularly regarding those times when groups become attentive to their habitual routines and motivated to improve them. Evidence to date, scanty as it is, seems to point relentlessly to the importance of time and timing as factors that can spell the difference between a group enjoying the benefits of habitual routines versus falling victim to their dysfunctions.

Finally, we are intrigued by the ways in which the relationship between a group and its organizational context may shape habitual routines. There surely are some kinds of settings that actively foster habitual behavior and others that actively discourage it. And there surely are some kinds of settings that promote active review of habitual routines and others that implicitly encourage groups to drift into relatively mindless automatic processing. And, finally, there may even be some settings in which groups are relatively likely to develop the kind of meta-routine we discussed above, in which members themselves initiate periodic reassessment of their first-level routines. Although we presently know little about such


matters, the material reviewed in this paper strongly suggests that group- context relationships play a central role in their dynamics.

It obviously would be advantageous to capture and examine interesting patterns of habitual behavior in groups wherever and whenever they ex- ist. However, some instances of such behavior-for example, the meta- routine that results in self-initiated review of first-level routines-may occur spontaneously only on rare occasions. If it is true that such meta- routines tend not to appear naturally, then action research may be required to investigate the conditions required to create them, the ways they evolve and operate over time, and their short- and long-term consequences for groups that have them. The same may be true for other interesting, theoretically significant, but infrequently occurring features of habitual behavior in groups.

Habitual routines are a fact of life in groups, as they are for individuals. One cannot imagine a group operating very long, or very successfully, without them. Yet they are hard to keep under control-there is always the risk that either too much time and energy will be spent managing them (resulting in the old “process drives out content” problem) or that too little attention will be given them (resulting in the kind of mindless automatic processing we have discussed in this paper). In our view, additional research aimed at investigating further the ways in which groups succeed and fail at keeping their habitual routines under control is likely to result in greater knowledge not only about group-level habits, but also about the fundamental processes that operate when groups of people take collective action within larger social systems.

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