Cohesive Groups

In the third stage, the group develops solidarity. Team members understand each other’s trait and express personal opinions. In this phase norms and roles are established. “Neuman and Wright (1999) described this as a stage of developing shared mental models and discovering the most effective ways to work with each other” (Bonebright, 2010, p. 114). Tuckman (1965) stated that in this phase, the team becomes an entity because members develop in-group feeling and seek to maintain and immortalize the group as a result the conflicts are avoided for effort to ensure

Status is a socially defined position or rank given to the group or it’s members by others. The size of the group affects the group’s overall behavior. Cohesiveness is the degree to which group members are attracted to each other and are motivated to stay in the group. Both the Sarto and Clark groups shared these properties. (Robbins and Judge, pp 276-293)

At this stage, the group begins to realize the more positive points of individuals within the group, which promotes the development of trust and respect which begins to build group cohesion. The next stage is the performing stage, which is typical of high-performing teams that are able to function as a group and figure out various options to get the job done smoothly and effectively without supervision. The final stage is the adjourning phase, which is the final step in completing tasks and breaking up the team.

Cohesion can be defined as the emotional bonding that family members experience with each other (Galvin, 2015, p. 32). You have been working to positively be cohesive with your family since you were a baby. There are four levels family cohesion, disengaged, connected, cohesive, enmeshed. Disengaged is when members are extremely separated with little belonging. Connected with when they have little emotional independence as well as some involvement. Cohesive is when members strive for emotional closeness and loyalty. And enmeshed is when they experience extreme closeness, loyalty and dependence (Galvin, 2015, p. 32). An example of growing and changing cohesion would be the changing relationship between a father and daughter. How over time their physical closeness would need to change as the daughter matures into a young later.

There are many factors altering group behavior and effectiveness, such as decision- making, cohesion and communication (Crocker, 2016). The later has also shown a positive relationship with group task cohesion (Smith et al., 2013), and methods of enhancing intrateam

Therapists must also be aware that members of the group may abuse other members in the group; avoidance of this behavior may be avoided with proper guidelines in place and disclosure at the start of the group process for each member. A close relationship can be built between all group members as well as the therapist, Forsyth (2011) refers to this relationship as group cohesion. Tenbrunsel (2006) mentions social cohesion, as enabling unethical and selfish actions, instead of a positive feature of group life.

One of John Hughes’ many classic 1980s hit films, The Breakfast Club begins by labelling the main characters: Andrew Clark is “the athlete”, Brian Johnson is “the brain” (his name is an anagram for brain), Allison Reynolds is “the basket case”, Claire Standish is “the princess”, and John Bender is “the criminal”. These labels identify the roles the students play throughout high school career and with these roles come associated stereotypes and status. These labels, stereotypes, and status make the students not want to associate with the each other at first, but nonetheless, thrown into detention together, confronted with a mutual “enemy”, and through self-disclosure, they begin to learn more about each other and learn they are more similar than they are different. They break through the stereotypes, barriers associated with their labels and learn to accept themselves and each other and ultimately emerging as a cohesive group, they have called “the breakfast club”.

Norming - this is the stage “it can be done”. Group cohesion takes place. Ref: Ann Gravells as above.

If the feeling of connectedness is not there than the group member can feel as they are not there as they do not matter to the group and even the company. The lower the feeling the lower job

This stage sees group members begin to confront each other as they begin to vie for roles within the group that will help them to belong and to feel valued. Thus as members begin to assert their individual personalities, the comfort of the forming stage begins to come under siege. Members experience personal, intra and inter group conflicts. Aggression and resentment may manifest in this stage and thus if strong personalities emerge and leadership is unresponsive to group and individual needs, the situation may become destructive to the

In fact, threat only increased cohesiveness under certain conditions - when it is imposed from outside the group. (Reis & Sprecher 232) When the threat is imposed from outside the group, it forces the group to work together and their bond gets stronger and stronger. With the group working, together, members are able to accomplish anything that they set their minds to. It is important to note that when a group is working towards the same goal they get along better.

Group member cohesiveness was absent from the group meeting for several reasons, but the primary reasons were due to the fact that the group members did not have a common description of value or structure to the discussion. Each member viewed their own area of involvement within the organization as being more valuable than any other area, and it was this exclusion of other valuable traits that lead the group to begin to clash in such a

I surveyed my mother Laticea and my friend BriOnna. My mom used her church choir as an example and BriOnna used her job. The church choir would be considered a social group, because the rules and norms are less formal than BriOnna's group home which would be considered a problem solving group. In the church choir, member's are more relaxed when it comes to dress code. When dressing for service, approriate church attire is required but there is no uniform. BriOnna's job however, requires them to wear scrubs and closed toed shoes. Both my mother's choir and BriOnna's group home are in the emergence phase. BriOnna feels that everyone has a sense of understanding, regarding their roles and moving forward. The choir has also made progress from where they originally started, but are not completely at the reinforcement phase.

The earliest stage is one of awkwardness and cautious risk-taking where members gradually open themselves to others; learn to trust or mistrust; to deal with periods of silence, awkwardness, and perplexity about what the group is about. Members are learning to build trust.

When doing so the other group members were active listener, by using their whole body verbally and nonverbal. Like facing the speaker and giving eye contact and try to avoided interruption. The group also acknowledges the thoughts of the speaker by giving constructive feed back. Due to the effectiveness of the group communication, we were able to build trust, respect and understand the issues and make decision for effective change. We illustrate this by coming together as a group one again to accomplish the goal we initially wanted to accomplish. Since the first organization that we had chosen was incorrect, so we had to make the necessary changes to accomplish our goals. The other effective feature is the purpose of the group. Kozier et al (2010) stated that the effective group purpose is when “goal, task, and outcomes are clarified. Understanding and modified so that members of the group can commit themselves to purposes through cooperation” (p.401). For instance, each individual was assign a task and knew what was to be accomplished. As group we all decided to meet at suitable day and time which was beneficial to all team members, because we could commit to the group and focus on what needed to be achieved.