  We use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) redshift catalogue to look for
galaxies with accordant redshifts in the nearby environment (up to ~2 Mpc) of
15 Hickson Compact Groups (HCG) and 7 more HCG+environment from the literature.
We find that: (a) HCG's tend to be aligned with the overall galaxy distribution
in their ~1 Mpc environment, (b) the well-established orientation effect by
which the group velocity dispersion correlates with group axial ratio, is
present also in the HCG+environment systems, (c) the radial velocity dispersion
of the HCG+environment systems and of ordinary poor groups only weakly depends
on the group richness, (d) the mean absolute K-band magnitude of E/S0 galaxies
in HCGs is similar to that in ordinary poor groups, and is brighter than that
of isolated E/S0's, indicating that they were formed by the merging of two
galaxies of similar luminosity, (e) the fraction of E/S0 galaxies in these HCGs
depends only weakly on the group richness and velocity dispersion, (f) the
fraction of AGNs is similar in the HCGs and their close environment, while that
of starbursts is significantly higher in the HCGs, (g) the fraction of AGNs and
starbursts is anti-correlated with the velocity dispersion of the
HCG+environment systems. Furthermore, the observed fractions of early-type and
active galaxies as well as their correlations with the group velocity
dispersion suggests a picture by which nuclear activity and galaxy
transformation by merging is instigated by effective gravitational interactions
in the low-velocity dispersion groups, which then dynamically evolve via
virialization processes to higher velocity dispersion groups, which thus have a
higher fraction of early-type galaxies.
