Working In A Group
Chiderah Onyeukwu
Katie Schoonover
COMM 150 Lab
26 April 2013
Team Process Paper For the team discussion forum, our group name was “Team SWAG.” The other members of Team SWAG were Michael Bates, Sarah Phillips, Elise Griffin, and Evan Abdullah. The communication perspective we chose to tackle was the issue of Conflict Management. To do this, we divided up the five methods of managing conflict discussed in the book, withdrawing, accommodating, forcing, compromising, and collaborating, and individually researched and came up with examples of each one. This method was effective in achieving the overall objective of the project; we all worked together well and meshed well enough to get the job done. To make decisions, we employed a “majority rules” system. This one of the ground rules that we set the first time we met for this project. One person would present their idea to the group, and the group would brainstorm on whether or not that idea became part of our project. This was all based on the feedback the group gave. At first, everyone just presented their ideas and how they thought we should go about doing the project and we went with the best one and delegated the roles and responsibility of the group through that. There were never any slacking group members; our team chemistry was very good with plenty of cohesiveness and everybody came to work so we all got our work done. However, had there been a slacking group member, our team first would have confronted the person about the issue; if that did not work, then we would have had to report the group member to Katie and have her deal with it.
Some examples of the team process we went through while doing this project are disagreements in presentation content and scheduling conflicts. While trying to decide how to incorporate the class discussion element into the presentation, some of the group was in favor of the streaming video option (“Big Bang Theory”), while others in the group preferred the conflict
Katie Schoonover
COMM 150 Lab
26 April 2013
Team Process Paper For the team discussion forum, our group name was “Team SWAG.” The other members of Team SWAG were Michael Bates, Sarah Phillips, Elise Griffin, and Evan Abdullah. The communication perspective we chose to tackle was the issue of Conflict Management. To do this, we divided up the five methods of managing conflict discussed in the book, withdrawing, accommodating, forcing, compromising, and collaborating, and individually researched and came up with examples of each one. This method was effective in achieving the overall objective of the project; we all worked together well and meshed well enough to get the job done. To make decisions, we employed a “majority rules” system. This one of the ground rules that we set the first time we met for this project. One person would present their idea to the group, and the group would brainstorm on whether or not that idea became part of our project. This was all based on the feedback the group gave. At first, everyone just presented their ideas and how they thought we should go about doing the project and we went with the best one and delegated the roles and responsibility of the group through that. There were never any slacking group members; our team chemistry was very good with plenty of cohesiveness and everybody came to work so we all got our work done. However, had there been a slacking group member, our team first would have confronted the person about the issue; if that did not work, then we would have had to report the group member to Katie and have her deal with it.
Some examples of the team process we went through while doing this project are disagreements in presentation content and scheduling conflicts. While trying to decide how to incorporate the class discussion element into the presentation, some of the group was in favor of the streaming video option (“Big Bang Theory”), while others in the group preferred the conflict