Final answer:
Team members enforce norms to ensure social order, facilitate group coordination, and achieve goals. Norms are more easily monitored and enforced in smaller groups. Conformity to norms is influenced by individuals' desire to fit in and the belief that the group's decisions are correct.
Step-by-step explanation:
Why Team Members Enforce Norms
Team members enforce norms within a group primarily to maintain social order, facilitate coordination among group participants, and achieve a common goal efficiently. Norm enforcement stems from the drive to maintain consistency and create a predictable and stable environment. This behavior throughout social interactions may be influenced by groupthink, which causes individuals to conform to what they perceive to be the consensus of the group. This can lead to more extreme decisions being taken by the group as a whole as opposed to individual actions. Also, from a functional point of view, norms play an integral role in the operation of social institutions and are maintained by society members through social control.
The need to monitor for infractions and enforce appropriate rewards or punishments is facilitated in smaller groups. While large groups can rely more on social trust, in smaller groups, monitoring and enforcement activities are more direct and can be handled informally without the need for established mechanisms. In addition to formal rules that are clearly stated and enforced, there are also moral norms that are upheld by community members who offer praise or blame to reinforce the behaviors.
Furthermore, people have a natural tendency to conform to group norms due to the desire to fit in or because they believe the group has the correct information or because they perceive a group to be competent. The development of new norms in groups can occur quickly and spontaneously as a response to new situations, guided by the emergent-norm perspective. Conformity can lead to the requirement of maintaining certain standards, but it also has the potential to result in negative outcomes if ethical and moral considerations are overlooked.