Groups

Groups are very important bodies, or structures, of people. A group can get things done; they are an effective force for change and can get much accomplished in comparison to people less connected to each other. And that is where the power of a group comes from, its cohesion. This cohesion has been defined in a variety of ways, but I will focus primarily on cohesion as attraction; individual attraction to the group, and group attraction. Individual attraction is when people in the group are attracted to each other as individuals, as by common interests or friendships. I’ve seen this numerous times in school. If groups for projects are settled by the students themselves, what attracts a student to a particular group is that they have a friend, or friends, in that group. The students are bound together by friendships and necessity, and not necessarily because it’s the best group to be in. The other type of attraction is group attraction. In this case, people in the group are attracted to the group because they have a favorable view of it; they have group pride. This is how it came to be for my soccer team when I was much younger than I am now, originally I was connected to the team by a single friendship, but overtime, I developed group pride. I was proud to be on that team, because we began to work as a seamless whole, and we seemed to do pretty well. Even if we hadn’t, I wouldn’t have switched for a “better” team. Groups are very important, and they go through a series of phases, as outlined in Tuckerman’s Model of Group Development. The first stage is “Forming”, when bad behavior slides because everyone is just getting to know each other. It’s also considered a “honeymoon” stage. In my BlueChip team , this phase lasted a fairly longtime, as we were all awkward with each other since we weren’t finding any common ground. The “Storming” phase is when conflict arises over the bad behavior that was let slide in the Forming Stage; a person’s true personality is shown. We saw this in our team at the very beginning of Field Day, because we all had various levels of commitment to winning, and many were not particularly enthused to be there. This caused us to clash, but not overly so. The next phase is the “Norming” Stage. In this stage, the group falls into routine as differences are ironed out. My team saw this by the end of Field Day, because we finally saw everyone as they really were, and surprisingly enough, we actually liked those versions of ourselves better. And finally, there’s the “Performing” stage. In this stage, the team begins to work in synergy and rhythm, not just routine. We saw this after Field Day, because we were in tune with each other, accepting and more comfortable. We began to truly function as a cohesive “team”.