Many things we do in our day to day life, and many choices we frequently accept are not through the result of our own individual judgement or process of decision making. We all accept and live mostly guided by enlightened opinion of a few other persons, considered prominent, who happen to act as trend setters. We follow dress codes, accept food habits, choose the type of education that we must receive and finally accept the line of career based on the powerful influence that the views of others hold on our minds. A few in our circle have the quality to initiate and think originally, but the majority of us are guided by accepted public opinion. Employees may think that their career prospects are better in the service of an inefficient State-owned public Undertaking, compared to an efficiently managed private enterprise. This is what they are told by those who guide them. On this plea, they agitate against government disinvesting its recurrently loss sustaining units and privatising them.

In the net result we find that there are powerful groups and sub-groups, formal or informal that wield immense influence over the individuals and their minds. It is more important to understand the behavioural patterns of different groups that constitute segments of our society, like, say, the workers of an organization forming themselves into multiple trade unions etc. While an individual's behaviour is mostly unpredictable, groups react on cogent lines and therefore it is easier to deal with groups, than individually with the members comprising such groups. Commitments obtained from groups are more binding on the individuals forming part thereof and more likely to be honoured, than those from individuals constituting that group.

Groups add strength to the individual leading to the proverbial statement that "Unity is Strength". The strength of an integrated group is always greater than the aggregate might of the individuals forming part of it. This is termed as "synergy". A team of four persons working in perfect coordination can achieve much more than what they would have been if performing individually and separately. This is the advantage of horizontally designing organisation structure into work-groups and teams in place of the traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic system organised vertically top to bottom.

It is easier to organise groups based on negative values and narrow vested interests. Freedom of speech and assembly provided in the modern democratic form of governments are often misused and regional or sectarian groups, based on parochial or sectarian allegiance pose a formidable challenge to the progress of a free society. Experience has shown that informal groups like trade unions, social, or political organisations exert greater influence on the minds of the members constituting it, than formally organised group guided by a code of conduct and discipline. A society with higher literacy and freedom of speech together with enlightened leadership leads to quicker progress and brings forth the greater beneficial results to their people. This an example what a group organised qualitatively can produce. Living examples of this social effectiveness are countries like Japan, Germany and more recently Israel & South Korea. All these countries have a common approach of making very large investment in education to bring about over 95% literacy in their respective countries.

We will study in this section about group psychology, group formation, group thinking and group Discipline. The project on Group Effectiveness & Group Dynamics consist of 11 articles as listed in the column to the right.