CHAPTER 8: THE NATURE OF GROUPS

What is the definition of a group? According to our text: A group consists of a small collection of people who interact with each other, usually face to face, over time in order to reach goals.

At this point of time im pretty sure all of us who are taking human comm as an elective subject are busy with our culture and advert assignment which is due early next week. Reminiscing back on the first week of our human comm lecture, Mr. Murali divided us into groups of 5. Throughout the whole semester we are required to work together in completing assigned tasks, groupworks and so on. The other four group members of mine were all new friends to me as I have never met them in my previous two semesters. In class we learnt that without interaction, a collection of people isn't a group which is definitely true because if we are not able to communicate and talk amongst us, how are we going to get things done collectively as a group? We also learnt that in groups, members don't just interact, their members are interdependent. If someone in the group fails to do his/her part, it affects the whole group; this is called the "ripple effect" which can be in the form of positive and negative actions. Moving on, we learnt that a collection of people who interact for a short while doesn't qualify as a group, thus time is an important factor in handling proper group dicussions/meetings. Time management is really important because one thing that I've learned is that the longer we take our time in doing our assignments, the more we procrastinate in getting our work done, we would have to rush through doing it up at the 11th hour which will most likely result in bad performance in our grades. If only one plans earlier and discusses with their group members, I'm pretty sure things would go smooth towards the due date of the assignment. The size of the group also plays a vital role in managing groups, as for instance if the group is too big and some of us may not agree with the majority of the crowd on a certain issue, but nontheless because majority of the group agrees on that particular issue, we are pressured to conform to the group because majority wins anyway right? Research suggests that the optimal size for a group is the smallest number of people capable of performing the task at hand effectively. Last but not least, for a group to be successful, common individual goals along with common group goals to acheive the best and highest recognition amongst the rest would help boost confidence in each and every member of the group to succeed in carrying out their tasks.
posted by Haylena. xx