Group 's Decision Making Process

Doing a group project is a challenge because some members are not well committed to the work. I am going to use my leadership skills to motivate all members to participate equally

1. What type of decision was the group instructed to reach (e.g. majority, consensus, authoritarian, etc.)

Hadia Akbar and I had a few roles being the follower, compromiser and the gatekeepers we accepted the idea of others in the group and to reach a solution that everyone finds acceptable. As the gatekeepers, we also facilitate participation from everyone. The two other members Ethan Clark and Aisha Asghar played the follower and the observers, I also believe towards the end we had help seeker who did not follow through because they were too busy.

One of the things that worked well in our group was the willingness of those in the group to listen to each other and entertain various viewpoints. I think that mutual respect is the key when working with groups. Each of us played different roles in the group: some of us were listeners, some of us were leaders, and some who were initially listeners became leaders as the group went on. Within our group we had different personality types and communication styles.

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

“When groups are planned so that each member's strengths have authentic importance to the ultimate success of the group's activity, this creates a situation where individual learning styles, skills, and talents are valued, and students shine in their fortes and learn from each other in the areas where they are not as expert.”(Willis)

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

For example, we all have similar communication styles. None of us has a confrontational style, so there were no altercations. Sasha was the most outgoing member of the group in general, and sometimes she had to actively encourage some of the other members to speak up if she could tell there was something bothering them or if they did not understand what they were supposed to do. Otherwise, we all felt comfortable enough to share our concerns. We did not pick a group leader so much, but Sasha sometimes took charge of the discussions we had. This gave us some kind of focus, but generally we had a democratic group and collaborated continually. We brainstormed together often, such as when we came up with the keywords for researching the databases.

This week I would like to discuss about a past decision made for the group project on one of my nursing class. There was a total of six people in our group for our group project. Before getting together as a group we analyzed the group project and distributed the task to all members of the group equally. Every one of us were given sufficient time to accomplish the work we were assigned for. We communicated through email and text messages. When everyone had finished their part we met in a group to discuss the group project. At the beginning of the group project, unilateral decision making was involved. One member in our group didn’t want to consider other group member’s perception. Her loud and dominating voice dominated other member’s idea.

Also, we would have made all decisions by consensus in order to diminish dissent amongst the group. Although debate was encouraged among team members, some decisions were inputted by a majority rule due to time

I believed that team effectiveness can be measured by looking at how you and your team members approached assignment or presentation as a group. Working as a group for the first time in a master program can be challenging and difficult at the same time. I brought a lot of things to my team during the process of working together to complete our presentation, but I also had some challenges when it came to dealing with scheduling meeting with my team outside of class.

When we first started this assignment, the member roles were not very clear. But after a few weeks, everyone started to fill in most of the 12 roles provided in the "Interpersonal and Group Dynamics" textbook. Bjorkquist, B. (2011). Chapter 10 Evaluation: Improving Your Group's Performance. In <i>Interpersonal and Group Dynamics</i> (Second Edition ed., pp. 149-151). Toronto. Benjamin's role of the group was in my opinion, the leader role. He most of the time came up with the meetings, how to get involved with our project ect.

My group was somewhat unresponsive when it came to making decisions and I found that whenever people made suggestions they were usually met with silence or responses that consisted of “no”. It made things very exhausting and slightly more complicated when we needed to move forward. I wish people had been more outspoken and a bit more supportive during this time. I think this situation was mostly solved once we stopped talking about ideas and just started putting things into action.

The rational decision-making model describes a series of steps that decision makers should consider if their goal is to maximize the quality of their outcome. In other words, if you want to make sure that you make the best choice, going through the formal steps of the rational decision-making model may make sense. The following are the steps taken to come to a rational decision: 1. Identify the problem, 2. Establish decision criteria, 3. Weigh decision criteria, 4. Generate alternatives, 5. Evaluate the alternative, 6. Choose the best alternative, 7. Implement the decision, 8. Evaluate the decision.

It was clear from that point forward there were large personalities in the group, which caused friction between the group members. By the third group meeting on Moodle, one of the group members decided to leave as they felt that no conflicts should be occurring during the planning stage. The remaining four group members were confused by the departure, as many group projects will often experience conflicts, as it is part of the process (Liu & Tsai, 2008). On reflection, during the beginning stages of the group’s decision-making process our group had similar ideas and opinions and within the first online group chat; a target group was agreed