Group management principles and practices

Group Dynamics

In the lifetime of an individual student in any learning institution, he is bound to work within a setting that brings him together with other students with a common goal to be achieved collectively. Group work seems inevitable in many aspects of a student's life and our group discussed herein was one of the several groups that I have found myself in the course of my academic pursuit.

The group here was out to set a vacation for the group that had been working together on several assignments and it was agreed that it was in order to end the year by having a weekend vacation together. This was interesting since it presented a unique and somehow queer situation since the group had been working together on school and academic based assignments for quite sometime, but since it has never worked on the arrangement of a vacation, it seemed like it was a totally new group again when we started organizing for the vacation. It seemed more like a new group within the old group due to the radical change of goal to be accomplished for the same people. The group hence was trying to put together a vacation plan, agree on the particular date and time of departure, agree on the venue to be visited during the vacation and also strategize on the activities that the group would engage in while on the vacation as well as the duties and responsibilities of each individual within the group as concerns the vacation.

Baring the numerous tasks that were at hand, the group performance in accomplishing the these tasks took a trend almost similar to the group development stages as outlined by Mind Tools Ltd., (2014) taking up the Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning. However, this last stage in this structure was not reached since we are yet to go for the vacation and deem the task completed hence worth adjourning, the arrangement for the vacation is the complete task. At the forming stage, everybody was full of anticipation and excitement and the idea of having some fun together hence there was excellence in terms of performance in getting people together to start sharing on the details of the task ahead. At the storming stage, the task proved a bit of a challenge since here frustrations started setting in at the realization that agreeing on the venue was not as easy as earlier thought. Even though at last it was agreed on a venue which is the nearest camping site, there were still some dissatisfaction among the members, this is expected at the storming stage and I can say the group did well on this. At the norming stage, things started working out as those who had formed negative opinions about the venue began to agree that it was in order to go to the venue and since they were allowed to give the suggestions of activities to be engaged in while there, the team cohesion began to show again and each member started to cope with the opinions of the other, again it can be said that the team performed very well at this stage. At the performing stage everything was now falling into place with the group activities agreed on and the responsibilities were now being assigned to each individual to ensure that the desired activities on the vacation day take place.

One thing that helped in the communication aspect within the group was the active listenership of the group leader. He actively listened to all members and did lesser talking and this way he was able to capture the ideas floated by each member and every single complain or dissenting voice that could have been. He realized that communication majorly involves more of understanding than talking and in this way was able to steer the group towards the goal to the satisfaction and contentment of each member. One communication failure that proved to distract a lot communication within the group was people, in the bid to assert their point, ended up shouting over each others points. This created a noise that distracted rather than helped in the communication process. The group leader however was always quick to pacify the group and filter out the turns that each person would take in communicating with others. Intolerance can be a great distraction in the communication as was seen here.

The greatest influence in the way the group performed was from the allocated task ahead. The direction and progress of the group was mostly influenced by the task that was ahead since the group was task oriented more than relationship oriented group. The fact that each individual wanted the class group to end up well with the vacation was a motivation to ensure that the group performed to its level best.