Group Process Paper

Pankaj Garg

Date: 04/17/2006

ORG 530 (online)

Group Process paper

Our group is a 5-member team whose goal was to finish the assignment on time. We were committed to working together to be successful because our class experience and grade was related to successfully completing this assignment. Our team worked together collaboratively to analyze the issue and to plan for an organized presentation. When we began our meeting, we knew that we wanted our end-results to be some sort of solution and action plan for the assignment given. All of our members were competent and each contributed valuable input to the discussion. Our assignment was to find out why the iMeeting portal's reception and use was met with mediocre results by NTCNA users. The external recognition we were attempting to achieve was the acceptance and approval of the WIN group and president of NTCNA (Nissan Technical Center North America). At different times during our meeting, each team member exhibited good leadership. Overall, our group fits the description of a winning team.

Throughout the semester, it was very hard to get group members together to meet at certain time. Everyone had different priorities and commitments. Our communication, via email, was a very important aspect of the whole project. Since it was an online class; I was glad we will have at least our Tuesday evenings open so we could meet on Tuesdays. However, being an online class, some of us had to travel each Tuesday. It is easier to meet in class with the group because professors usually give sometime at the end of the class to meet with the groups. In my other two classes at campus, I have discussed project with my group during breaks and after class.

Luke works in NTCNA and the company has recently deployed iMeeting intranet portal. The use of the portal by users was minimal. This was certainly a good project for us. We wanted to find out why users didn't find the tool useful. Interviewing users was out of question because it would take long time. We all decided that we should send out a survey to users. The question was whether we should send out the survey in email as word format or hand out paper to users. The email was a bad decision because people might not go through the trouble of filling out the word file. The paper format will certainly not work because it would be hard to distribute out to all users and Luke would have to do all the work. I suggested the group that we should do online survey.

One of the things that worked well in our group was the willingness of those in the group to listen to each other and entertain various viewpoints. I think that mutual respect is the key when working with groups. Each of us played different roles in the group: some of us were listeners, some of us were leaders, and some who were initially listeners became leaders as the group went on. Within our group we had different personality types and communication styles.

Because we did not begin with an assigned or designated leader, different types of power showed up in each person's leadership as a result of personalities and previous experience. The team roles were adopted informally by all the team members. The leadership role was not formally assigned so everyone just worked on their assigned asks. We trusted each other for completing the tasks. However, leaders emerged in the group as leading email discussion, leading face to face group discussion, or leading discussion on webct.

I developed initial task role of contributor by suggesting online survey. After the surveys were done, my task role was mostly information giver to provide data to the rest of the group for decision making. The rest of the group mostly adopted task role of information seeker by gathering the data from the survey and turning them into meaningful discussion. John also adopted task role of recorder as he took notes and emailed them to the group. Since Luke worked at NTCNA, he also adopted the task role of elaborator by providing the group additional information regarding the users, departments, and managers at NTCNA. Robert adopted the task role of coordinator as he