Literature Review On Group Performance

The group the facilitator will be observing is an anger management group that is held Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Assurance of Hope Institute, Inc. The group consist of twelve men between the ages of twenty-five to forty-five. The group contains ten African American men and two Caucasian men. The group has been meeting three times a week for four months. The group is an open group that is available to all young adult men particularly those suffering from mental health illness. The clients whom attend the group have been either court mandated because of a violent encounter. The group discusses triggers that make one anger, ways to manage your anger, decrease overall intensity and frequency of angry feelings, increase ability to recognize and appropriately express feelings as they occur, identify situations, thoughts, feelings, that trigger anger, angry verbal and/ or behavioral actions and the targets of those actions. The facilitators of the group have explored family background and history to

In March and April of 2003, the Patriot system was involved in two unforgettable fratricide incidents that occurred against coalition aircraft, resulting in three air craft crew members that lost their life. “These incidents generally involved a complex chain of events and failures, and there is often insufficient data to pin down the exact causes of failure. However, a number of shortfalls can be identified” (). Units in Operation Iraqi Freedom often operated under degraded maintenance conditions, minimal voice and data communications with high echelon units, and outdated tactics, techniques, and procedures. Due to these events, Patriot implemented a more intergraded missile system due to the lessons learned during Operational Iraqi Freedom.

Organizational behavior is the study of human and group behavior in organizations using methods such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science (Schermerhorn, Hunt & Osborn, 2005). This study also empowers leaders to understand, predict, and influence the behaviors of workers. Furthermore, good leaders must also possess other qualities such as good communication skills, an ability to understand the culture of an organization, and must be knowledgeable about diversity in the workplace. Ress Asst (2012) describes diversity as the understanding of values and characteristics of different people. In order to have a diverse working environment, managers must be respectful, appreciative, and acknowledge the characteristics and ideas of individuals. Proper management of diverse employees allows for companies to receive the benefits from different talents and skills that employees are able to bring to the table. With diversity management, employees of different backgrounds learn to understand that everyone is not the same. However, with their differences, they are able to work together to get a job completed. This concept can be easy for managers to implement and practice by educating employees, communicating effectively, and enforcing how employees should treat each other.

“Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without” _William Sloane Coffin Jr_ Over the last decade there has been massive rise in level of workplace diversity within all the organizations. As a result of it majority companies achieved higher performance and according to all the researchers, it shows heterogeneous groups are more inventive than homogenous groups. It is not only about those heterogeneous people bring various type of figures their different type of thinking benefit organizations to bring out their best outcomes throughout the process

Group work has been a cornerstone of the social work profession and requires a variety of facilitator skills and awareness of group processes. The SSLDTM Group Program for People with Difficulties in Social Situations (Socialwork1914, 2017) provides an excellent example of a psycho-educational group co-facilitated by two female social workers, Jane and Karen. After viewing the 6th session of this 8-week program, I began to understand how the concepts of group formation/development, interpersonal dynamics, and leadership styles contribute to successful group work outcomes.

As everyone knows, especially those who themselves have attended in a college environment, many students are often young adults who go through a number of new experiences: for some, paying their own bills for the first time, building new relationships, and indulging themselves in the new opportunities that are now open to them, all of which comes with a severe amount of stress; it is also common knowledge that stress hinders an individual's thought process and judgment. With this, it is important to understand that in times of tension, students are often pushed to do things they unfortunately regret. There have been times where, even before the law was passed, that a handgun was found on campus, although a majority of these findings were in order for individuals to protect themselves and ended without worry, others did not end in peaceful negotiations and some even managed to ascend into all-out shootings. Although many individuals turn and ask, “what if I want to defend myself” or “if any other bystander had access to a gun, they could have stopped the shooter before the scene escalated”, many of these people don’t realize that there are many options other than a gun to protect and disarm a perpetrator. This can be done in a number of ways including using a taser, defense spray, or even self-defense techniques.

The way in which an organization tackles diversity determines its negative or positive outcome. All the 5 companies agreed that diversity has contributed to their success. Some barriers were identified in managing diversity like the difficulties faced by women in managing the work and family, fear of discrimination, resistance to change, diversity is not seen as an organizational priority, resistance to change and unsupportive working environment for diverse employees. Diversity contributes to more productivity but if not properly managed could hinder success.

The world’s increasing globalization requires more interaction among people from a wide variety of cultures, values and backgrounds. People no longer live and work in a one-dimensional marketplace- they are living in a highly complex and competitive environment that has growing demands of innovation in order to perform successfully amongst other industries. Business and organizations need to respond to this new diverse landscape, and the best corporations increasingly align with it. A strong diversity initiative and inclusion in an organization is crucial in remaining competitive in the current business world. Diversity is in the workplace is claimed to foster and spark creativity and innovation in employees. On the other hand, it is perceived to increase conflict and communication in an organization. Thus, in theory, diversity is allegedly advantageous to worker productivity, though counterproductive in work-group processes and dynamics. However, there is a lack of validity and reliability in the empirical research conducted to support this assumption.

From our research, we identified three different perspectives on workforce diversity that people embrace, each with different implications for a work group’s ability to realize the benefits of its cultural diversity. We use these observations here to examine critically some of the themes and basic assumptions of previous research and to propose new directions for both researchers and practitioners interested in diversity (Ely &Thomas, 2001). When organizations have a diverse economy, it makes the company strong. Once our nation has embrace the changes from the demographics that reap the economic benefits of a diverse and inclusive workforce. Burns et al. (2012) stated in their investigation that:

In this paper I will discuss how a team/group can become a high-performance team/group, examine the demographic characteristics and culture diversity and the impact on the team/group behavior. I will also describe how demographic characteristics and cultural diversity contribute to or detract from high-performance groups or teams.

The positive impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can contribute creativity to a high-performance team. Membership diversity offers a rich pool of information, talent, and varied perspectives that can help improve team problem solving and increase creativity (Hunt, J., Osborn, R., Schermerhorn, J., 2005). Cultural diversity contributes various group input and group dynamics to the team. These two factors are essential in the high performance of a team. Cultural diversity can develop a high-performance team by allowing the diverse potentials of a team to operate. The negative impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can develop numerous of conflicts between team members. Conflicting interaction can limit or decrease the effectiveness and efficiency of productivity. There should be an awareness of the diverse culture values in order to prevent these conflicts.

I am Zeeshan Ali; I am working as a Computer teacher for Classes VI-X-M in Canal Side Boys Campus. I have done Masters in Computer Science (MCS) from Punjab University College of Information and Technology (PUCIT) Lahore. The students are the main focus of every teacher and our entire teaching efforts circle round our students to achieve the set targets. Effective Teaching includes many useful teaching strategies that a teacher chooses according to the requirement of his/her respective subject and topic as well. In result of my years of experience and as a Computer teacher I find Group Work as the most effective and fruitful technique at every level.

According to Cartwright & Zander (1968), a group may be defined as a “collection of individuals who have relations to one another that make them interdependent to some significant degree”. Other definitions state that a group is “two or more persons who are interacting with one another in such a manner that each person influences and is influenced by each other person (Shaw, 1981). Turner (1987) goes further to say that “a psychological group is one that is psychologically significant for the members, to which they relate themselves subjectively for social comparison and the acquisitions of norms and values…that they privately accept membership in and which influence their attitudes and behaviour”. Clark & Pataki reserve the term “group”

Diversity in culture and demographic characteristics can be a negative impact or be one of the team's greatest strengths, depending on how the team as a whole functions and applies these different “routes to success”. A group can become a high performing team by understanding how cultural and demographic differences influence group behavior. The groups must realize that they can benefit from their diversity to their advantage and into a high performance team.

Today's workplace is more diverse than it has ever been in history. While the workforce has made strides in the direction of equality, it is still far from attaining total equality in the workplace. A company must value diversity. The main objectives of valuing diversity include awareness, education, and positive recognition of the differences among people in the workforce. Organizations are increasingly emphasizing group work or teamwork as a source of competitive advantage in a diverse workforce. It has been suggested that such organizations must target their recruitment efforts at applicants who are both diverse and amenable to working in teams ( Rau, Hyland 2003).