Culture, Groups, and Coordination Problems

Summary Group task performance depends largely on the extent to which group members can successfully solve the coordination problem (Schelling, 1960; Lewis, 1968). It is the problem of coordinating group members' task relevant actions, while maintaining a necessary level of interpersonal trust and group cohesiveness. This paper offers a preliminary analysis of action from a cultural psychological viewpoint, examines the role of culture in solving the coordination problem, and explores implications for considering the effects of cultural diversity on group task performance. In particular, it is suggested that the problem for culturally diverse task performance groups is analogous to the discovery of a hidden profile (Stasser, 1988), that is, pooling together unshared action resources which can nonetheless provide an optimal strategy for group task performance. Key words: group task performance, interpersonal trust, group cohesiveness Any joint action requires coordination. Schelling (1960) suggested that whenever two or more people share a common interest or goal, there arises a need to coordinate the individuals' actions. Lewis (1968) called this a coordination problem. The participants in the joint action are to coordinate each other's actions as one person's action depends on the others' actions in order to reach the common goal. To illustrate the problem, in the 1950s United States, Schelling posed his experimental participants (all residents of New Haven, a short train ride from New York City) a series of problems that required some coordination to solve. Questions included (Schelling, 1960, p. 56): (1) Name ,,heads" or ,,tails. " If you and your partner name the same, you both win a prize. (2) You are to meet somebody in New York City. You have not been instructed where to meet; you have no prior understanding with the person on where to meet; and you cannot communicate with each other. You are simply told that you will have to guess where to meet and that he is being told the same thing and that you will just have to try to make your guesses coincide. You were told the date but not the hour of the meeting; the two of you must guess the exact minute of the day for the meeting. At what time will you appear at the meeting place that you elected? 3 These coordination problems highlight the very point of this book, and the conference on which the book is based, that is, cultural diversity and group performance. Let me explicate how this is so. To begin, most readers would nominate ,heads" for Question 1 just as 86% (36 out of 42) of Schelling's participants did. However, there would not be an answer that a majority of the people would agree with though a majority of Schelling's subjects named the information booth at Grand Central Station at noon for Question 2 (footnote on pp. 55-56). Question 1 is a simple problem with only two possible answers, and for most people living in the monetary economy, choosing ,,heads" is an action that follows ,,naturally". By contrast, it is far more difficult to come to a ,natural" solution for Question 2. A number of pertinent questions may be raised to make an educated guess. For instance, ,,Is the other person coming from New York or elsewhere in the US, or from Europe or Asia? " Perhaps if he is coming from Europe, a natural meeting place might be somewhere in the John F. Kennedy Airport, but where in that huge airport? For Schelling's participants, who all lived in New Haven, the ,,natural" meeting place was the information booth of Grand Central Station, as they expected the other person to travel from New Haven by train. But, for an international traveler, this answer seems overly parochial. The world has changed a great deal since 1950s. What makes Question 2 more difficult than Question 1 for international travelers? For one thing, Question 2 is more complex, having a large number of possible solutions. But, that is clearly not the only reason. …