How to Manage Work in Groups

By: Linda Driskill

Table of Contents

This discussion will help you prepare to work on collaborative projects, often called "group projects" or "team assignments." Some instructors use such assignments more frequently than other instructors. Group or team assignments in a managerial communication course help you prepare for problem solving in business; as one consultant put it, "Forget about writing alone in a garret: The twenty-first century works in teams." Even when you are writing or preparing a presentation by yourself, others (such as your manager or your colleagues) have a stake in what you produce or present. Prepare for participating in group work in any course by evaluating the group's process: spend at least the last five minutes of every group meeting evaluating the success of your group's process (see form). These few minutes will improve your group's efficiency and effectiveness.

Applying Communication Principles


Also, pay attention to the implications of many of the things you have learned from the textbook, Business and Managerial Communication: New Perspectives. APPLY WHAT YOU KNOW. It's great practice for using your knowledge on the job.

Build a good relationship among group members. Chapter 3 emphasized building relationships with audiences. Team members are constant audiences for one another, and they can build good relationships by understanding one another's stakes in the team's project, by inventing roles that satisfy as many mutual needs as possible, and by double checking that they understand one another.

Clarify the group's objectives. As noted in Chapter 4, a group needs a comprehensive purpose: there has to be something for everyone to make the project attractive. Not every team member has an equal stake in every project. A particular project may be central to some students' majors or concentrations; other students may view the assignment as nothing more than a task in a required course. By recognizing one another's goals and defining roles, reasonable expectations can be established and realistic plans can be formulated. It is better to know in advance that one student can only make a minimal contribution to a project (perhaps because he is working part-time or has an unusually heavy course load) than to discover just before a deadline that assigned work has not been done. The group dynamics evaluation form will allow people who contribute more to receive a higher grade, but they can't receive high grades if the final project is incomplete.

Recognize one another's strengths--and weaknesses--and learn from one another. The twenty-first century requires what many management experts have called "learning organizations." Practice group learning in group project work. Most assignments offer a combination of challenges that demand several team members' skills. One part of an assignment may offer a challenge in financial analysis--just the thing the member with a concentration in finance can address--and a second part may involve marketing--another student's specialty. Each one can help others in the group attain a more complete understanding of the case. By discovering one another's strengths and learning from one another, the group can reach a consensus on how to solve problems.

Prepare for meetings as you would for any communication event: briefly jot notes as though you were filling out a strategy planner. As pointed out in Chapter 9, you should analyze the transaction and the probable roles in advance. If your group's task is to plan the project, certain roles are more likely than if the group were gathered to analyze data that had been collected since an earlier meeting.

Page 187 offers a chart of possible roles for accomplishing tasks:

Information giver finds and supplies pertinent information
Initiator states pertinent beliefs about the task and others' suggestions
Elaborator builds on suggestions made by others and considers implications
Clarifier gives relevant examples, offers rationales, and probes for meaning by asking questions or restating problems
Tester raises questions to ìtest outî whether group is ready to decide
Summarizer reviews or tries to pull together the discussion content


Page 188 gives you another table showing roles that maintain the group relationship

Harmonizer mediates differences of opinions
Encourager praises and supports others in their contributions
Compromiser imagines options that satisfy mutual needs, recognizes differences
Tension reliever draws off negative feelings with humor
Gate keeper keeps communications open and creates opportunities for others to participate


Naturally, one person may play many task roles and many different group relationship roles from moment to moment, but personalities and other factors sometimes cause a person to play some roles more frequently than others. You ought to be able to switch roles as the situation requires. The tables on pages 187 and 188 also show the types of remarks that enact these roles. Review these tables if you haven't looked at them recently.

Most groups work best when they meet regularly, allow all members to participate, distribute leadership responsibilities, and clarify assumptions, goals, and roles. A group that has an agenda for its meetings, creates a positive atmosphere, and satisfies its members needs is usually more efficient and productive than an unstructured team. As Chapter 9 explains, professional conversational and listening styles create greater harmony in the group (see pages 178 to 188).

And as Marda Steffey argues on page 181, groups, like individuals, must be ethical in their communication. They must write or speak clearly, emphasize important information, make information accessible to one another, ask for specific actions from specific individuals, and follow through with phone calls, E-mail, or visits when necessary. Even when a task is a group project, each person must be conscientious. Steffey concludes that assertive, ethical managers "must go beyond the mere creation of a document; they do what it takes to ensure results." If you are working in a culture that depends on a shared knowledge of background rules, you may be less explicit, but in US business environments clarity and directness are the rule.

Phases of Group Development

Group interactions change over time, as industrial and organizational psychologists have shown. Although not all psychologists describe the "phases" of group development in exactly the same way, most groups go through the following experiences.
First impressions Group gets together and learn one another's identities. People try to figure out how to get along with one another. First attempts to define project goals, interests, tasks. Members exchange communication information such as telephone numbers, E-mail addresses, and possible times for meetings.

Organizing period As goals are defined and tasks identified, people begin to assume roles, either by mutual consent or by individual choice. The group develops an approach to the project and a schedule, it and defines implicit or explicit rules and procedures.

Operating period Group is now coordinated. Group conducts research, analyzes data, examines assumptions, models, and theories to create useful interpretations. Group offers feedback to one another (see below). Options develop: group may reach for most familiar or routine solution ("satisficing") or may creatively brainstorm without criticizing immediately. After a review of goals and criteria, options are evaluated.

Reporting period Conclusions, recommendations, and products created are presented to others--to clients, management, government agencies, and so on. At the end of this period, the group may choose a ritual of farewell and dissolution, promising to keep in touch, and so on.

Because these stages take time, do not expect every member in a group to seem immediately comfortable and familiar with one another. Work to achieve the appropriate functions in each period, strive to develop relationships, and gain the most knowledge and experience you can. Work to achieve your own goals as well as the group goals.

Group Dynamics and Cultural Differences

The way people work together during a project may be influenced by many factors, especially cultural background and gender. As Chapter 18 points out, values such as attitude toward age, punctuality, status, and individualism may affect how people participate. It would be a good idea to review the checklist on page 451 together, especially if you have international students in your group, looking for differences in attitudes that might affect how you work together. For example, students who come from countries where age and status are deferred to may feel uncertain about putting forward their own ideas unless upper-class students have spoken first. Students from some cultures are fanatics about punctuality; others are much more casual about deadlines and time in general. Sorting out these differences in expectations can prevent a great deal of frustration.

Group Dynamics and Gender Differences

Similarly, differences in how many men or women are in the group may affect how people work together. A group of men only or women only may interact differently than a mixed group. Sociolinguists interested in popular business culture, such as Deborah Tannen (see her book Talking from Nine to Five), point out that men and women tend to seek different relationships through language. Anglo men, in particular, are prone to seeing each transaction as a competition, with someone ending up "on top." They tend to trade information to establish who has the best sources and the best command of data. Women, on the other hand, tend to seek commonalities among group members and to feel most comfortable when everyone understands a situation in the same way.

For example, if Dan comes in and says, "I see that IBM jumped 2 points," Fred may reply, "Well, Compaq moved 2 1/2." This exchange will lead to an analysis of why each of their stocks moved as they did, and each man may draw on his store of knowledge about the market and methods of analysis before they reach a satisfactory interpretation. One man is likely to feel that his contribution was more substantial in the process. On the other hand, if Dan makes this comment to a woman, she might say, "Oh, yes, my stocks went up too. It was a really good day for us, wasn't it?" Her emphasis on shared experience and the tag question at the end do not mean that she is uncertain about the market's activity, but that she wants Dan to confirm they see things the same way.
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The more serious problems in gender relations come up when people use virtually the same phrases or sentences to try to accomplish different things. If a woman asks a question for the purpose of inviting all members to contribute ideas and reach a consensus and a man treats the question as a competitive request for information, the process of consensus building may be thwarted. For example, if a woman asks, "Would you like to stop for a break now?" and the man answers, "No" (thinking that the question is a request for information), the process of deciding whether such a break is desirable will stop. The woman's feelings may be hurt because she expected that he would, in turn, ask her whether she wanted to stop for a break and that they could then reach a decision together.

The words themselves do not matter; rather, the scenarios in which each person interprets the words, the contexts in which they are imagined to occur, cause misinterpretations.
You can't always know what the other person's scenario is, but if you are sensitive to puzzled expressions, looks of surprise, hurt, or other emotional reversal, you can keep the process in focus and simply ask whether the other person expected something else to occur. This kind of fine tuning will make the first two stages of group formation (forming first impressions and organizing), especially, more efficient and successful.

Feedback


Give feedback to avoid "Groupthink" and ensure multiple perspectives. For the group to develop a full range of options and the most appropriate consensus, members must give one another feedback. Feedback helps members acknowledge differences and avoid bad decisions. It also contributes to the "continuous improvement" featured in many total quality management programs.

Chapter 23 on performance evaluation communication emphasizes the difference between "process feedback" and "evaluative feedback or ranking"(see page 638). Process feedback describes what the speaker has seen and comments on how the process could be improved. "I see that most of this information is from the 1990 census. Do you think you could find any more recent sources, closer to the middle of the decade?" Ranking feedback gives the action a "grade" by measuring the action against some criterion: "This is the most efficient amplifier we've found for the sound system."

Early in the group's work, process feedback will be more helpful than ranking. Just saying a member's work was "good"won't help him or her to understand how the action was valuable. Itís the same principle as using a "COACH" approach to give other presenters feedback:
Commend
Observe objectively
Ask for rationales or reasons
Consider egos
Help with specific suggestions.
As you gain more experience in group work, keep a set of notes about what works best and put your insights to work in new projects, modifying your understanding over time. Your ability to manage successful groups will surely affect your long-term achievements.

Using Quality Control to Improve Your Group's Process


Finally, as almost every management text will tell you, it's easier to accomplish a goal if everyone acknowledges it, pays attention to it, evaluates progress, and continuously strives for improvement. Please use the last five minutes for process quality control by completing the following form individually (2 minutes) and discussing it together (3 minutes).


Meeting date:__________________      Participant's Name:__________________

EVALUATION FORM

Was everyone on time?_______

Was everyone prepared?______

How could the preparation have been improved?

Was there an agenda for the meeting?

What was supposed to be accomplished?

What process did the group use to tackle this task? 

What subtasks worked out best?

What did the most to help the group succeed today?

What would have improved the meeting?

How personally satisfied were you with this meeting      1   2   3   4   5                                                                     
                                                        low             high
                                                        
How did you rate your own contribution to the meeting    1   2   3   4   5                                                
                                                        low             high
                                                        
What should the group do to improve the next meeting?



What will you do to improve your contribution?

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Last modified on September 2, 1996