In Mixed Company: Group Analysis

Throughout college I have worked in many different groups for various reasons. My experience of group work has been 90% positive. One reason I feel my group work experience has been so great is because of the fact while working with other students my work has been of greater quality. Working with others always allows me to come up with greater ideas and attain negative or positive feedback. After reading the first few chapters of, In mixed company: Communicating in small groups and teams, I realized this group dynamic is known as synergy. For a better understanding synergy is when a “group performance meets or exceeds expectations of what would happen if done individually”. The end work is usually greater than the sum of its individual parts. Synergy can be acquired in one of two ways. One of the first ways is that all of the members work together to achieve their shared goal. An example of this is when I was working in a group my freshman year that’s end goal was to receive an “A” on our project. Everyone in the group was very passionate about grades and doing well and we used that goal to work together. The second way
Open discussion, feedback, active listening, and flexible decision-making are all necessary to have in a diverse group (Fritz, 2013). An experience I have had working with a group that was very well diverse was in my freshman year Philosophy class. Since this class was a general requirement age my group members ranged from the age 18-26 (different school standings). We all shared the commonality of the class and being students but our views, race, gender varied. However, this group was very successful and it was very good to hear all points of views. We all learned a lot about each other but at times it was challenging to agree upon what was important and what was going to get us a better