Tension Between Participants in a Working Group

After being able to experience what it was like to be apart of a task group, I can say that there was a lot of things that affected my personal feelings towards groups. Overall view on being a member of my group was okay. I know that we weren’t a bad group because we all shared a common purpose and were interdependent. However, the interaction part showed to be difficult. I noticed that my group wasn’t able to get to the working stages instead dealt with a lot of conflicts.

There was a lot of primary tension in the group directly between the members.

Non-verbal behavior impacted my group a lot. Someone would say something, and another person’s expression would change. I know personally, there was a time where I felt like I wasn’t doing enough for the group, which I know in the beginning I wasn’t but another group member of mine made me feel worse about it without him even having to say it, which he definitely did.

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This seemed to make me get unmotivated to work with the group. A big conflict that I noticed constantly occur within the group was time management. I was very hard to get everyone to take time off from being full-time student and worker to get together and work on the presentation. For me, I didn’t have a big issue if one or two members were missing because, with technology, I feel like we could’ve facetimed, not everyone felt the same as me.

However, the girls of the group did manage to meet up the Friday before our presentation to bring all of our notes that we had from the readings of our topic and put them into the power point. One thing that did help our group members was that we got to form a group chat and it was pretty active majority of the time. In the beginning, I was more so of the leader, I was trying to get everyone’s information so that we can start with the forming stage of our group, this is where I emerged as the leader of the group. While I was taking the leader role, I believe that the main reason I took on that role was to get everyone focused because that first meet up was all over the place, I felt like the group wasn’t really concerned about the group.

However, as time went on and other classes seemed to overwhelm me, I stepped away from the leader role and then Zohaib seemed to take more control over the group. During the point where he seemed to be the leader, I feel like he went his role in a more autocratic leadership style because I feel like he didn’t really care what other things that the members had to deal with outside of the group as long as we got the group work done. Overall, I just felt like he wanted to get the presentation over with instead of looking at it as a learning opportunity. Which it was great how he was trying to get us together, but I think I would’ve liked it if he went in a different direction with it. For example, like messages that were sent by him were sort of nerve-racking and sometimes rude. But like I said I understand why he felt the need to be that way since he was just trying to get the project done with.

As mentioned, I noticed that there was both primary and secondary tension between group members. With the way things were going after the second meet up, I personally feel like it was going to happen just because every time we tried to make the next meet up someone always had something else planned which was totally understandable. So, no I don’t think that it came in an unexpected time. The primary tension was mainly due to a group member believe that he was in charge, but no one seemed to feel the same way back. The secondary tension was seen with how the work was presented and who was the one that came up with the idea of a skit in my group. There was slight to no bypassing that was happening within our group. If one member said something that another person in the group didn’t understand, there was always a good level of comfort in asking what they mean by a word or phrase that they were talking about.

As a whole, the group wasn’t very cohesive however I feel like that last meet up with just the girls working to finalize the skit and PowerPoint that we showed a lot of cohesion. On the Friday before our Monday presentation, I saw where the girls actually enhanced our critical thinking by coming in and leaving that meeting with the right attitude and making sure that the information, we took notes on to put on our slides was correct and if we grasped the information correctly. The biggest thing that I feel like went unsaid by other shyer group members was the feeling of tension and how certain members made others feel more nervous than they already were. Also, I feel like certain members let things that were said go by without giving a reaction, I least I know I did, especially within the group chat.

I feel like I definitely could’ve been a way better member of the group if I was more willing to push other things around and make more time to meeting up to talk about the presentation and I should have been more understanding and vocal about my opinions and other group members thoughts as well. I noticed that I wasn’t an active listener throughout the whole process because as certain members kept complaining about not meeting up physically and weren’t being punctual in the group chat, I just started pseudo-listening cause, I stopped caring honestly. All in all, I feel like this was a great opportunity to learn different aspects about being in a group and how I myself and others affect the input, throughput, and output of the group process.