When thinking about working on teams or in group settings most people have strong reactions: they either love it or hate them. If you experience feelings of fear and dread when an instructor says you will need to work in a group, you may experience what is called grouphate (Meyers & Goodboy, 2005). Like many of you, I also had some negative group experiences in college that made me think similarly to a student who posted the following on a teaching blog: “Group work is code for ‘work as a group for a grade less than what you can get if you work alone’” (Weimer, 2008).

But then I took a course called “Small Group and Team Communication” with an amazing teacher who later became one of my most influential mentors. She emphasized the fact that we all needed to increase our knowledge about group communication and group dynamics in order to better our group communication experiences—and she was right. So the first piece of advice to help you start improving your group experiences is to closely study the group communication chapters in this textbook and to apply what you learn to your group interactions. Neither students nor faculty are born knowing how to function as a group, yet students and faculty often think we’re supposed to learn as we go, which increases the likelihood of a negative experience.

A second piece of advice is to meet often with your group (Myers & Goodboy, 2005). Of course, to do this you have to overcome some scheduling and coordination difficulties, but putting other things aside to work as a group helps set up a norm that group work is important and worthwhile. Regular meetings also allow members to interact with each other, which can increase social bonds, build a sense of interdependence that can help diminish social loafing, and establish other important rules and norms that will guide future group interaction. Instead of committing to frequent meetings, many student groups use their first meeting to equally divide up the group’s tasks so they can then go off and work alone (not as a group). While some group work can definitely be done independently, dividing up the work and assigning someone to put it all together doesn’t allow group members to take advantage of one of the most powerful advantages of group work—synergy.

Last, establish group expectations and follow through with them. I recommend that my students come up with a group name and create a contract of group guidelines during their first meeting (both of which I learned from my group communication teacher whom I referenced earlier). The group name helps begin to establish a shared identity, which then contributes to interdependence and improves performance. The contract of group guidelines helps make explicit the group norms that might have otherwise been left implicit. Each group member contributes to the contract and then they all sign it. Groups often make guidelines about how meetings will be run, what to do about lateness and attendance, the type of climate they’d like for discussion, and other relevant expectations. If group members end up falling short of these expectations, the other group members can remind the straying member of the contact and the fact that he or she signed it. If the group encounters further issues, they can use the contract as a basis for evaluating the other group member or for communicating with the instructor.

QUESTIONS to Think About

1. Do you agree with the student’s quote about group work that was included at the beginning? Why or why not?
2. The second recommendation is to meet more with your group. Acknowledging that schedules are difficult to coordinate and that that is not really going to change, what are some strategies that you could use to overcome that challenge in order to get time together as a group?
3. What are some guidelines that you think you’d like to include in your contract with a future group?

It is my hope that this textbook will help students in the social service sector understand theories, concepts and skills that will increase their capacity and enjoyment of working in groups or teams.  I have created this book specifically for AMHW 202: Group Work Practice at Centennial College – Ashtonbee Campus, however it is adaptable to almost any community and health studies group work course.

References:

• Myers, S. A., & Goodboy, A. K. (2005). A study of grouphate in a course on small group communication. Psychological Reports, 97(2), 381-386.
• Weimer, M. (2008, July 1). Why students hate groups. The Teaching Professor. Retrieved from  http://www.teachingprofessor.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/why-students-hate-groups.

Authors & Attribution

The chapter is adapted from Small Group Communication by Jasmine R. Linabary, Ph.D. The book was adapted from a work produced and distributed under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA). This work is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.