“ Individual commitment to a group effort that is what makes a team work,
a company work, a society work, a civilization work” (Lombardi, n.d.).
As part of the assessment for swb104, I recently participated in a group presentation that examined the use of language to construct messages. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how effectively the group worked together. The reason that groups are evaluated is to see what was the most effective parts of the group were and identify weaknesses within the group (Sharry, 2001). This essay evaluate the effectiveness of the group against Tuckman’s theory of Group Development (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). This will indicate how effectively the group worked together.
The Tuckman's theory of Group Development was developed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965. Tuckman's theory of Group development consists of 5 stages Forming, Storming Norming, Performing and adjourning (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). These five stages each have different characteristics. Forming is when the group first started people may be preoccupied which what group to join and looking for people with similar interests. Storming this stage is essential to developing an effective group as it could effect the outcome of the groups task. This is the stage where you are able to observe your group members initial behavior and is also where early roles start to emerge within the group. The Norming stage is when the group has successful found all roles within the group. Individuals within the group are starting to connect with each other on a deeper emotional level and there seems to be a harmony within the group. The preforming stage of the group is when the group is effectively carrying out what ever its set task was. This can also run in conjunction with norming stage of group development. The adjourning stage of the group is when the group has finshed the task that they set out to do and at the end were either successful and or not successful with the groups common goal. All these stages are indicators of weather a group was successful at the goal throughout the group work (Brown, 1992). (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977).
The forming part of the group process went very smoothly because we all knew each other from the previous semester. This gave us a big advantage as we already knew we all wanted to do our presentation early. Another advantage was that, as Toseland and Rivas explains (2005), we were all interested in similar things and therefore we could agree on a topic. The group dynamic differed somewhat from Tuckman’s forming stage as there was already a deep rooted relationship between the members.
The thing that was the hardest in our forming stage was working out what our assessment was about. This was done in consultation with our tutor. This was good because as a group we came to the consensus that it was our responsibility to understand what the task was at hand (Hammond, 1998 p. 28). This was where we started to allocate research areas because this would give us a vague structure of what our presentation would look like and what information was included (Brown, 1992 p. 97).
In the storming stage we found that there was some disagreement on how much some individuals talked and how people wanted to do things. Decisions were made by individuals without complete agreement. I found that I did not agree with some of the decisions but I went along with them just to keep the peace. This difficulty was not really resolved. I just wanted to get the assignment done and I didn’t want to prolong the discussion.
Some of this problem was because I was the only male of the group and the others tended to dominate the discussion. The women in the group tended to talk a lot more and sometimes cut me off when I was speaking. However, this was not intentional and it could come down to the fact that males and females have different strengths and weakness (Hammond, 1998 p. 41).
The norming stage was where we learned what was acceptable and what was not. As a result we all agreed on that we would work from a strength based perspective and also from the outset we agreed what was happened when people were going to be late. Also, before we officially started each meeting we did a dynamics checker which checked if each member had done task set and required before next group meeting this helped us deal with a lot of the conflict that arose which was not often.
The performing stage was where we worked together most effectively. Despite splitting research our group roles were fluid and changed from time to time which was good as it helped us keep each other motivated. Our contributions and interactions were what was called “free floating” where all members took responsibility for contributions to the essay. We had a very strong sense of cohesion which made the two other people easier to work with (Toseland and Rivas, 2005 p. 75). We heavily relied on the model of communication process outlined in Toseland and Rivas (2005 p. 76) (See appendix 1).
In the performing stage we worked strategically to our strengths. I was good at researching and developing the overall structure of the presentation and one of the others was very fluent in her writing. This worked well in that it let us show our full potential in different areas. However, this did not give us the opportunity to explore and develop skills that we may not be so good at (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). One example was choosing the wording on the slides. Only one of the group did this and did not allow others to give suggestions.
Our group presentation was planned out in the performing phase of our group (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). This was done in agreement with each other and there was little or no conflict when splitting up who was going to talk on each slide (Sharry, 2001 p. 51). The major advantage of splitting the talking up slide to slide was that it helped engage the audience. Our activities also helped engage the students even some of the students we thought were going to be quiet. They all participated throughout our presentation which is important for people to gain an understanding of the material (Frey, Fisher and Everlove, 2010). This was evidence that our group had moved through the phases of Tuckman’s theory of group development and we were successful in achieving our goal as a group.
The Adjourning stage of our group was something I think we lacked (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). We did however do a small amount of Adjourning with our tutor where It was explained how good/bad we did. However, I did not feel that this was sufficient due to the fact that we had been working on this for weeks. We did not do any talking about how we think we went as a group. This goes against the strength based group work and against our group culture (Toseland and Rivas, 2005 p. 81). This was very disappointing to me as we did not get a chance to talk about specific things in the presentation and encourage each other. I feel this would have helped build on our strengths which I have been taught in previous classes is an important part of social work and human services. I also feel that it may have been beneficial if we would have talked about what didn’t work so well in presentation as this could have helped me in future group assignments throughout my university studies. If we would have had a meeting to go over what we had done, I would be more confident in feeling that I can successfully get through university (Hammond, 1998 p. 70).
We did well on our presentation and we gained a seven mark for it. We did come together well as a group even though it differed somewhat to Tuckman’s theory of group development (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977). I feel that the goal of our group work was achieved. However, I also think that it would have been important to have one last meeting as a group to just build each other’s self esteem and confidence. This is because all of the academic sources I have examined put an emphasis on strengths based group work and encouraging groups. So, I would think that it would have important to meet up and congratulate each other on a job well done (Sharry, 2001 p.51)(Brown, 1994 p. 155)(Hammond ,1998 p. 70)(Toseland and Riva, 2005 p.80). This essay was also important as it gave me chance to reflect and evaluate the effectiveness of our group and after careful consideration I think our group as whole was a success.
References
Brown, A. (2001 ). Groupwork (3rd ed.). London: Ashgate
Frey, N., Fisher, D., & Everlove, S. (2010 ). Productive Groupwork: how to engage students, build teamwork and productivity Teachers Librarian, 37(4)
Henriksen, L., Jongejan, B., & Maegaard, B. (2004). Tone of Voice University of Copenhagen.
Lombardi, V. Retrieved August 14 from http://www.heartquotes.net/teamwork-quotes.html
Neill, S., & Caswell, C. (1993 ). Body Language for Competent Teachers. New York Routledge
Sharry, J. (2001). solution focused groupwork London Sage.
Shulman, J., Lotan, R., & Whitcomb, J. (Eds.). (1998). Groupwork in Diverse Classroms New York.
Toseland, R., & Rivas, R. (2005 ). An introduction to groupwork Practice (4th ed.). Boston Ashgate
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