Group Dynamics: Weaknesses and Strengths

As I sit here to this day group work is still not my favorite thing it makes me angry when professors mention it. I feel as if we are now in college not in high school. We should be treated as one person when doing an assignment. So you could see each potential of each

As a college student, I don’t enjoy group work. I am the student that dominates the group and does almost all of the work, establishing group times to talk about what needs to be done, and making sure that attendance is mandatory

Initially, I had a negative view on group working because of the challenges that I had. When I was in high school, my five other friends and I used to work together in a music competition. Although we were supposed to get together to practice

Working in a group to achieve a high quality group project can be one of people’s most difficult school experiences. Working in a group is tough because there is often someone who does not pull their own weight. “There are five stages to group development, adjourning, forming, storming, performing, and norming” (John & Wiley pg 166). Christine’s group from the Case Study the Forgotten Group Member is in between the Storming and Norming Stages. The Storming Stage “is dealing with tensions and defining group tasks,” while the Norming Stage is dealing with high emotionality and tension among the group members” (John & Wiley pg. 166). Christine and her group could have had better

I believe many students do not like group assignments because for the most part a person or two do not pull their wait leaving the leader doing most of the work. Other problems includes having to deal with various personalities, the work distribution, trying to communicate with each other, feeling vulnerable, and the way everyone gets the same grade because it is a group effort. So the lazy people get the same grade as the people who worked hard.

In the past, I have struggled with group assignments because of my perfectionist tendencies. I find group assignments challenging because of individual work habits. However, collaboration among people that shares similar goals sometimes yield great

In this group project, I had a major role in ensuring that it came together in a unified way. Generally, I usually take a leadership role in group projects so I was the central person coordinating group meetings and ensuring sufficient communication. To begin the project, we divided up the work by assigning people to work on the case study, find literature, summarize the textbook, and talk to key informants. My assigned part was to summarize the textbook, which also ended up lending itself to finding some additional sources to build on what the textbook was lacking. In regard to the group literature and informant summary, I ended up writing most

Throughout middle school and my freshmen year of high school, I was never extremely comfortable in large group projects. For most of my life, I preferred to work alone or do most of the work in group projects. There was a time, however, in my sophomore Project Lead the Way class where my teacher was explaining to us the grave importance of group work and how it translates into the real world of engineering. After the speech, we were put in groups of eight to solve simple engineering problems, and I began to push myself to interact with my unknown peers. Slowly but surely, I grew more comfortable in group scenarios and kept pushing myself forward. Looking forward to today, I am a captain of my soccer team and a constant leader in group projects

My role in the project was make sure all our ideas followed within the guidelines of the instructions.  I would occasionally throw an idea out to my peers, but with an introverted group I usually wouldn't get much feedback.  As the project came to expiration I learned that even though sometimes being in a group makes the work load lighter it can also occasionally make the work harder since it's more difficult to mold multiple individuals preconceptions into one

Our group was brought together for a purpose of making a presentation. We were strangers to each other but expected commitment in terms of attendance, communication, meetings and quality of work. It can be argued that individuals can be demotivated by group project if they feel their success depends on others who do not share this views and which might lead to discrimination and oppression (CMU, 2015). However this might be resolved by a professional organisation of working process, high motivation and personal responsibility of each group member indicating a successful group development. This project was a valuable experience for developing our teamwork skills and in this essay, I will discuss our group process and theories which can apply

In my undergraduate work, almost all of my classes that were directly related to my major required at the least one group project. In the beginning this was not something I was very fond of mostly because I had some bad experiences when it came to working with others on projects. Usually it was the problem of people not pulling their own weight, and doing their parts to help with the tasks. When it came time to have the assignment complete it was even harder to give a grade to those people. I did not want to be the guy who caused someone to throw someone under the bus. However, after I thought about it, I did want to be that guy because in the real world on a work project if there was someone who did not pull their weight in the job projects would not be successful. So, when it came time for grades, I was always honest, and usually if a person did not do their part I told it how it was.

Tuckman proposes that groups develop via five stages; forming, storming, norming, performing and finally adjourning (Archee, Gurney, & Mohan, 2013a). The first stage, known as forming, involves clarifying the task and purpose of the group, and identifying boundaries of both the task and interpersonal behaviour (Archee et al., 2013a). For the presentation task we were randomly allocated into groups. This worried me greatly as I have struggled in the past with group members who do not contribute equally or see the task as important as other group members. To avoid this problem, the group collectively determined and agreed upon a number of ground rules. For example, we decided that all group members were expected to contribute equally to the presentation, all group members were expected to attend and contribute at all group meetings, and all group members would adhere to agreed upon deadlines. Having failed to do this in previous group assignments, this clarification stage

Being a member of a group helps develop interpersonal skills, such as speaking and listening, working with and motivating others and leadership. “ The interpersonal and organizational skills needed for managing a group project need to be highlighted in any assignment, so that students recognize the importance of such things as: listening, clarifying statements and providing good feedback; keeping discussions on task; probing assumptions and evidence; eliciting viewpoints and perspectives; mediating conflicts; and summarizing and presenting findings.” (Bosworth, 1994) These skills are very important to learn while in highschool, so that a strong communicational foundation is built for later in life, such as college and career opportunities. These communication skills also help with good team building skills, if one can communicate his/her thoughts more clearly to their peers then the team will be more fluid and able to solve the tasks at hand in a more timely fashion. This brings the argument to the need for a development in team working

I used to believe that I did not perform very well in groups. I am an observer who likes to learn alone. I thought I learned best when I worked on my own. Even though I always knew group work had many positive values, I was more comfortable with the lecture-based approach and resisted group work merely because it involved change, not because it had a collaborative learning approach. However, during the learning community project, I came to realize that I learn more effectively when I work in groups. Working in a group was like an adventure for me; there were both exciting and challenging times while preparing for the learning community project.

In conclusion, this class has changed my perspective about working in a group. Since my prior experience with groups was so unsettling, I believed that all groups were going to be the same. However, this class has made it possible to believe that there are groups that respect and take into consideration other members’