Power in Groups: Self-Concept Changes of Powerful and Powerless Group Members

Abstract

The failure to find unequivocal relationships between small-group participation and self-concept changes may be due, in part, to undetected mediating variables. That is, it may be that groups do not have either uniformly positive or uniformly negative effects on self-concept-but that both occur systematically in groups as a func-tion of specifiable and measurable aspects of each group member's experience.

One possible mediating variable, power or dominance, was investigated in this study of 102 members of six self-analytic groups. Power seemed to be a fairly robust antecedent or predictor of the direction of self-concept changes: those high in power changed toward a more positive self-concept and those low in power changed toward a more negative self-concept.