Social Processes: Definition, Types, Features, Pros And Cons
Social processes are foundational to the existence and functioning of human organizations. But what are social processes, and how do they manifest in the organizational and business setting?
Social processes are recurring, sequential patterns of interaction between multiple individuals pursuing mutual or antagonistic goals. Social processes like cooperation, conflict, and competition are fundamental in the operation, management, and success of organizations and businesses.
While the social process concept is somewhat vague, it is critical to understand its significance for organizational and business management. The following information and insights will hopefully assist managers and anyone wishing to improve their knowledge of social processes.
What Are Social Processes?
Social processes are the foundation of organizations and businesses. These phenomena have a decisive influence on operational performance and the achievement of long-term strategic goals. So what are social processes exactly?
The term ‘social processes’ refers to established patterns of interaction that occur between two or more people.
These patterns of interaction are sequential, meaning they consist of a series of interconnected actions or events that progress toward particular outcomes.
Social processes are commonly recurring throughout society from the interpersonal to the global level, rather than being isolated to specific times and places. The expression and effects of a particular social process vary, however, depending on the historical, cultural, and economic context.
To make this concept more concrete and understandable, here are some of the most fundamental and recognizable social processes:
- cooperation,
- accommodation,
- conflict,
- competition.
These social processes serve practical functions in society, enabling people to navigate the complexities of social living while pursuing individual or collective goals.
Social Processes In Management
One of the core social processes in management is leadership. This interaction involves an authority figure directing, regulating, or guiding a group’s efforts toward achieving a collective goal.
In management, leadership is about influencing employees to think and act in pursuit of organizational aims and objectives. Successful managers use the leadership process to get the best performance from employees.
To engage effectively in the leadership process, managers must establish and maintain relationships of trust and cohesion in the workplace. It is also essential for managers to provide clear and consistent guidance if they wish to lead employees to work toward the organization’s goals.
Managers adept at leadership can foster and harness social processes like cooperation among their workforce. Similarly, skillful leadership enables managers to minimize the presence or effects of disadvantageous processes such as conflict.
Managers can apply different approaches or styles to the social process of leadership, depending on their personality and the organizational context.
In the traditional hierarchical leadership approach, managers command and control their subordinates. This top-down approach is organizationally simple and efficient but can undermine the long-term motivation of employees.
Instead of motivating employees through external control, the persuasive influence approach strives to have employees generate motivation from within themselves. Persuasive influence operates through cooperation and requires open communication, transparency, and accountability.
Social Processes In Organizations
Organizations consist of formal groups of individuals acting in collective coordination to achieve shared goals.
This coordinated group action is facilitated through the social process of cooperation. The functioning and success of an organization depend on individual employees having the willingness and ability to harmonize their thoughts and actions.
Conflict is another social process that is inherent in most organizational settings. Differences in personality, beliefs, attitudes, and agendas can create tension between colleagues.
If this tension is not resolved, it can escalate into conflict. This interaction pattern negatively affects employees’ performances while undermining their desire and capacity for cooperation.
Accommodation is another, more constructive social process for dealing with personal and professional differences and tensions in the organizational context.
This social interaction pattern involves conflicting parties adjusting their ideas, opinions, or actions to maintain harmonious organizational relationships. Accommodation enables individuals in the organization to transcend their differences, so they can work together and perform effectively.
The social process of competition is inherent in the context of organizations. Competition unfolds between individuals and divisions seeking to advance specific personal or group interests. In business, the social process of competition is fundamental to the interactions between different organizations.
Features Of Social Processes
Though social processes are infinitely variable in their expressions, they share some common features or attributes. The following section elaborates on the core features of social processes.
Interaction
Interaction between people is the core feature of social processes. This feature refers to the contact and engagement between individuals.
Interaction manifests through the exchange of thoughts, words, emotions, and actions. People interact some interactions are isolated and random events, while others connect in a cumulative chain forming a social process.
Sequential
One of the defining features of social processes is their sequential nature.
Social processes consist of a series of connected interactions that unfold over time. These processes operate as successive flows of interaction between people.
The sequential nature of social processes means these phenomena are dynamic and change as people engage with each other over sustained periods.
Understanding that social processes are not discrete events is crucial in organizational and business settings. For instance, managers can improve their performance when they recognize that effective leadership consists of a complex series of interactions.
Recurring
Social processes are universal phenomena that recur widely across society.
The fact that social processes are recurring phenomena makes them identifiable as patterns of interaction.
For instance, cooperation operates in the same recognizable manner, whether the interactions occur in a preschool sandpit or in a geopolitical negotiation. In both cases, individuals interact to pursue a shared purpose through coordinated effort and mutual compromise.
Functional
Social processes have a functional role in society, enabling people to achieve particular goals.
These patterns of interaction provide ways for people to meet their material and psychological needs and to deal with the omnipresent challenges of social living.
Types Of Social Processes
There are myriad types of social processes. These various types fall into one of two categories: associative and disassociative. In associative social processes, individuals interact to generate win-win outcomes.
Dissociative processes involve a struggle between individuals seeking to advance their interests a the other party’s expense.
The primary types of social processes have been introduced already, but here is a more detailed explanation of these pervasive patterns of interaction.
Cooperation
As alluded to earlier, cooperation is one of the most fundamental social processes that humans engage in.
Cooperation is associative and involves multiple individuals combining their efforts to achieve collective gains. This social process enables people to achieve more than they could if working alone.
When cooperating successfully, individuals harmonize their knowledge, skills, and efforts. They subsequently deploy these powerful resources in a synchronized way to pursue mutual goals.
Effective cooperation requires that individuals share a strong motivation to work together. The co-operators must be willing to balance personal and collective interests and agendas. The success of cooperation also depends on individuals having a shared vision of their desired outcomes.
Accommodation
Accommodation is also an associative social process that enables people to live together despite their differences. In this sense, accommodation is vital for social living.
Accommodation occurs when individuals with conflicting personalities, views, or behavior make adjustments or concessions to avoid further conflict and facilitate cooperation.
The social process of accommodation plays a critical role in organizations and businesses. Accommodation is vital for maintaining harmony between colleagues and enabling them to work together more effectively.
This interaction pattern also makes them more capable of responding to changing work conditions.
Accommodation between conflicting or disputing parties takes several forms:
- compromise – both parties make concessions,
- conversion – one party aligns their position with the other person’s viewpoints,
- rationalization – one or both parties formulate rationales for ending or exiting the conflict,
- tolerance – parties avoid conflict without resolving the underlying disagreement.
Assimilation
Another associative social process that helps people live and work together is assimilation. Assimilation happens when members from one group become part of another group.
A classic example is when a person moves to a new country and integrates into that society by adopting certain aspects of the local culture and value system.
The process of assimilation typically follows accommodation. Assimilation requires new and existing group members to make mutual adjustments to their values, beliefs, and behavior in the interests of the collective.
Through sustained interaction over time, the outsiders and insiders develop relationships of trust and understanding, resulting in cohesion within the group.
In business, assimilation frequently occurs, for example, when new employees join a company. The outsider must learn and internalize the organization’s work culture and practices. At the same, the insiders need to make adjustments to integrate their new colleague and establish a cohesive team.
Competition
Competition is a dissociative social process that places individuals in opposition to one another. Unlike cooperation and accommodation, competition is a zero-sum process with winners and losers.
This is not to say competition is an inherently harmful social process. There are constructive forms of competition that motivate and propel individuals to elevate their performances. Healthy and fair competition can drive progress and innovation.
In the organizational context, competition unfolds at the individual and collective levels. Colleagues compete with each other for recognition, promotions, and financial resources. Organizations and businesses also compete with one another for market share and revenue.
Conflict
The social process of conflict entails the struggle or confrontation between people with opposing ideas or actions. Like competition, conflict is a disassociative social process in which the participants try to prevail over one another rather than obtain a win-win solution.
The expression of conflict ranges across a spectrum. Conflict can be covert, unspoken, and unseen. The conflict process also manifests overtly through physical violence and verbal disagreements over divergent values and options.
Conflict is often destructive but the process can potentially create opportunities for positive change when handled constructively. Conflicting parties have the chance to confront and change certain attitudes, beliefs, or behavior that are causing problems for people around them.
Elements Of Social Processes
Social processes are composed of a variety of elements.
Communication
All social processes unfold through communication between the participating individuals and groups.
Social processes incorporate verbal, non-verbal, written, and audio-visual communication.
Depending on the social process, people communicate in various ways when engaging and influencing each other.
In co-operative social processes, open and direct communication enables people to coordinate their thinking and efforts. Communication becomes more strategic and guarded in conflict and competition processes, as parties seek to advance their interests in a zero-sum social process.
Using the appropriate communication approach is crucial. For instance, a person who communicates openly in a process of a conflict or competition is unlikely to prevail over the other participants.
Relationships
The quality of the relationships between people is also a critical element of social processes.
Relationships in associative processes are characterized by mutual trust, understanding, solidarity, and altruism. The maintenance of these positive relations is critical for individuals to cooperate effectively.
Relationships of antagonism drive disassociative social processes. In conflict and competition, the relationships between participants range from neutral to hostile.
Rules And Norms
Rules and norms provide the structure or framework that guides and regulates peoples’ interactions in social processes. These rules and norms dictate which attitudes, words, and behavior are appropriate for a particular social process.
Rules in social processes are usually explicit and formal. For instance in organizations, the leadership process is governed by policy documents that guide the interaction between employees and managers.
Norms are generally informal and implicit (or unspoken). Unlike rules, norms derive from moral and cultural imperatives rather than technical and legalistic prescriptions.
As a result, the norms that guide social processes differ according to the local cultural and moral context. For instance, Asian and Western European countries have different norms governing interactions between leaders and subordinates.
Adherence to the rules and norms of social processes is necessary if individuals wish to obtain a positive outcome. Contravention of the regulatory framework generally results in sanctions or penalties.
Social Processes Example
Here is an example that illustrates how social processes operate in practice. This example highlights that social processes overlap and interrelate with each other.
Example: Social Processes In A Software Company
Sarah and John are programmers working in a software company and are designing a new app. One morning, they encounter a problem with the code for the app. With the deadline for the project approaching quickly, Sarah and John are under pressure to fix the problem.
Sarah and John exchange ideas and agree about the cause of the problem, but they disagree about the actions needed to solve it.
Unable to agree on a solution, tension and hostility between Sarah and John escalate, undermining their desire and ability to work together to correct the flawed code.
At this point, their manager Mary intervenes to resolve the antagonism between John and Sarah. Mary brings the two colleagues into her office and facilitates a respectful and constructive discussion about the coding problem.
During their discussion, Sarah and John begin to grasp the validity of the other’s ideas. After making mutual compromises to their positions, they reach a consensus on the optimal way to fix the problem.
Having settled their dispute and found a compromise solution, Sarah and John pool their technical knowledge and skills and harmonize their efforts to create new, superior code for the app.
Identifying The Social Processes In the Example
The example above reveals several interrelated social processes that commonly occur in business and organizational settings.
Cooperation was evident at the beginning of the example when Sarah and John were working together on the initial design of the app.
The social process of conflict arose when they could not agree on the solution to the coding problem. At this stage, the social process of co-operation between Sarah and John ceased.
Mary’s intervention brought the process of leadership into the equation. As a manager, Mary used her authority and expertise to influence Sarah and John constructively.
Through her skillful leadership, Mary guided them away from conflict and towards the social process of accommodation. As a result, Sarah and John adjusted their positions and reached a consensus about how to solve the coding problem.
Finally, the process of accommodation that transpired between John and Sarah laid the foundation for them to cooperate. Having addressed the source of their conflict and established a mutual understanding, Sarah and John were willing and able to work together to achieve a shared goal.
Wrap Up
Social processes are fundamental to organizations and businesses. These patterns of social interaction unfold as a sequence of actions or events and recur in all organizational settings and broader society.
The principal social processes include cooperation, accommodation, assimilation, competition, and conflict.
The way social processes are expressed and managed in a business is critical in determining the success or failure of the enterprise.
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