The Tradeoffs of Social Control and Innovation in Groups and Organizations

Abstract

This chapter presents the description of research on social influence that moves rather freely between laboratory settings and organizational contexts. The laboratory studies follow several well-developed research paradigms, with variations in conditions and resultant findings occurring in a cumulative fashion. The organizational studies of social influence have tended to draw on a wide variety of psychological and sociological theories, resulting in a more disparate set of findings that have rarely been drawn together. Whereas the social psychological work has typically been experimental, the organizational research ranges from quantitative experiments and surveys to more qualitative case studies. Thus, the integration of work on social control and innovation will necessitate mixing results with varying levels of internal and external validity. The chapter explains the discussion of social control and innovation that moves freely between the microscopic and the macroscopic. The chapter explores the way the studies of organizational behavior can profit from knowledge of more basic social influence processes and the way experimental group research can be enriched by an understanding of more complex organizational processes.