Informal Groups and Community Change

Abstract

The form I group stems from actual behavior patterns of individual members of an organization. This is formed through face-to-face relations of members, interactions between members, and perception individual persons between members. "The informal group whose members may or may not coincide with those of formal group is a relation of two or more persons within a larger organization for the joint production of some satisfaction of their own." While the formal group is artificial, the informal group is "a natural growth." In other words, the former is legal institution and the latter is a actual behavior pattern. Therefore, the formal group is visible, whereas the informal group is invisible or hard to find. The formal group can be explained by the logic of efficiency and informal group can be explained by the logic of feeling or sentiment. We may thus say that the informal group is more dynamic than the formal group. As the other characteristic, the informal group would be controlled by influence, and the formal group by authority. Accordingly, the formal leader holds a legal power to control the group, but the informal group does not hold it, except that two kinds of leaders coincides. The community which is comprised of social units and systems contains one or more informal groups with various forms and origins. ''While a small group is made up of member units which are both individual people and, even more pertinent, social systems into which these individual people are organized." In a community, there appears informal or formal groups through processes of integrations. These integrations can be classified a cultural, normative, communicative and functiona integration. Cultural integration is consistent with cultural standards, varying from extreme consistency to extreme inconsistency. Normative integration is agreement between cultural standards and the behavior of individuals, varying from high conformity to high violation of cultural standards Communicative integration involves an exchange of meanings, or communication, varying from a high degree of communication between members of the group to prevalence of barriers to communication within the group.