Today lecture’s topic, Group Communication, reminds me so much about my golden time at Saigon South International School, back in Vietnam. Being involved in many varsities high-school teams such as dance team, basketball team, as well as volleyball team; I know well how important communication in a group is.
Dance team is my favorite team ever. And it was the hardest one to manage as well. Why managing group communication is that hard? It is because any great performance requires a strong coherence of talented individuals. Group synergy is how this is called, which explains that individuals perform best in a group. But because dancers are gifted and artistic, they are quite hard to work with. Some may even say that artists or dancers are hard-to-pleased as each individual one of them has a very strong characteristic. Took it at a challenge, I myself formed my own dance team and participated in the School’s Annual Dance Competition. As the other two members of the group are my two best friends, I thought that it would be very simple to work as a group. However, things turn out the other way around, we had the problem related group dialectics. I could be able to manage well the task vs. maintenance goals in the group, but not individual vs. group needs. For task vs. maintenance goals, each member of the team was in charge with different tasks such as costumes seeker, music picker, or performance coordinator. By focusing on what we were best at reduced a lot of time-consuming for us and avoided any conflict among the group’s member. In contrast, we did not meet the individual vs. group needs. Our levels of individual expectation of rewards gained from the competition were not same; therefore, leads to different levels of commitment and contribution to the group. After all, we solved the problem by re-adjusting our individuals and group needs.
The best part came out at the end, when our efforts have been paid by the First Price of the Competition.
Reading about Bruce Tuckman’s Five stages of Group Development’s Model, I can see that our team work process that day exactly passed those stages mentioned. They are forming (task identity), storming (status argue), norming (disagreements), performing (get the work done), and adjourning (reflection).
Additional Feed:
Step Up 2, the newest movie released last week again wakes my love for dance up. The movie also shows a lot of concepts about Group Communication like I mentioned in the entry above. Below is the trailer of ‘Step Up 2′
Watch it and get inspired by the Dance Evolution as well as strategies for effective Group Communication.
Enjoy the movie ^^
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