Analysis of Group Work in Class and Personal Conclusions

In the class, teams of four were given a simple task: to end the sentence ‘the best way to the coast’ in a limited time. Upon time out, most of the groups had completed the task whereas ours failed to do so. As competitive as we all are to a certain extent, I remember feeling frustrated in the end about our performance, especially realising how simple the task was. When we were given the task, I could not fully understand what the underlying reason was to form a team to complete such a task. West believes there are certain tasks that are best performed by teams and others that are best performed by individuals or groups of individuals and that the tasks that teams are given should be tasks that are best performed by a team. Clegg supports the claim advising not to use teamwork for ‘simple, routine, or meaningless tasks’. There are a number of characteristics to analyse the appropriateness of the tasks for the teamwork. Those are completeness, varied demands, requirements for interdependence and interaction, task significance, opportunities for learning, developmental possibilities for the task and autonomy. Looking at the task we were given, it becomes very clear, that the task we were provided with does not have any of those qualities, meaning it is not best performed by a team. Realising this, I now can see that the real purpose of the activity was not to complete the task, but to let us experience the teamwork and observe our performance under stress.

Straight after given the activity and finishing it, I thought the size of the group was another reason for the uncompletion of the task by our team. Group size has significant effects on aspects of individual and group performance. Clegg says ‘teams must not be too big, or too small’ and according to him, the nature and complexity of the task is one of the questions to be considered when deciding on the size of the team. It is suggested that 3 person groups are sufficient to solve highly intellective problems. I felt the activity in the class, namely to end the sentence ‘the best way to the coast…’, however, was way too simple for a group of four. What puzzled me later as I was analysing it over again was that given the same task and having the same number of members in a team, we as a team worked together worse than other groups. It made me think further, as the above two reasons were not the only and probably the main contributors to our bad performance. After the activity, I took a couple of minutes to write down notes of what I felt, what I thought went wrong and what was the reason of it. I strongly believed we were given very little time and too many people in the group to resolve a basic problem. However, now I realise that the main reason was that our decision-making approach was not efficient. Robbins recognizes several approaches of decision making, which include consensus, majority and minority rules, averaging, expert, authority rules with or without discussion. He highlights the significance of choosing the method by the team in advance. I see now, that we should have done that before the activity, especially since we have very limited time.

When in the group, I communicated fairly by offering my opinion on the matter and taking feedback from the others as well as listening to their thoughts. It is undoubtedly a good way to communicate within the team, but at that point I did not consider the time we had, which obviously resulted in us not being able to make a decision. I also spent quite a while discussing with my teammates on the semantic issue within English, which of course was not as important as completing the task. As I am reflecting now on my behaviour, I understand that my issue was – not prioritising the completion of the task and tracking time when those two did matter.

In the future, when working on a task with a team or individually, I will first and foremost try to evaluate the task and the time and decide on the top priority. This most likely going to be challenging because it requires to change my mindset that I have had for a long time. Through using the Kolb’s learning cycle, I hopefully will succeed. I have not yet completed the stage of experimenting my behaviour in new situations, but I can see the results of the reflective observation on the experience asking strategic questions and answering them honestly.