Social Relations of Peers in a Formal Organization Setting.

This paper reports on an analysis of public school teaching staffs as variations of primary groups. From survey data, schools were classified according to indices of social relations among teachers. Several dimensions of the primary group were treated as attributes of school staffs in defining crucial tasks of teaching and relating them to peer influence. With both reported behavior and attitudes as dependent variables, hypotheses concerning the differential impact of three types of peer relations were tested. It was found that certain forms of social structure influenced behavior alone in some settings; in other settings, both behavior and attitudes were affected. Moreover, how the tasks of teaching were defined was an important organizational condition for the efficacy of given forms of peer influence. Findings generally supported the hypotheses developed, although the restricted definition of peer influence and its situationally specific meaning restrict the interpretation of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]