Teamwork

CURING THOSE OL' "OMIGOD-NOT-ANOTHER-GROUP-CLASS" BLUES

Taken from Organizational Behavior Teaching Review, vol. 10 (4), 1985-6.

Donald D. Bawell and Conrad N. Jackson, University of Tulsa

Like many of you, we assign students to work groups in our classes so that they can learn from the experience of working together over the course of the semester. However, we have found that proposing group work elicits strong resistance from many students. They cite bad experiences with groups, both from classes and outside of school. Rewarding or satisfying group experiences are apparently rare exceptions and usually encountered only by those who have participated on athletic teams. Typically, education provides little training in the special skills and knowledge required to make a group work and work well.

Left to their own devices, students, like managers, tend to focus on task or content and overlook process issues. They are particularly likely to get off to a slow start in gathering and analyzing relevant data about the group or in building the group as an effective team. They also forget to close the loop on learning through self-evaluation and retrospection at the end of the group. Timely assignments and exercises can help students develop the interaction and observation skills required for group effectiveness. But there are no instant "miracle cures." It is our role as teachers to help students learn to learn about groups, and to help them muster the energy for the learning role.

We have found that there are many things that group members can do to greatly enhance both learning and productivity in group tasks. The rest of our remarks are in the form of suggestions to student groups. We have been handing copies of this manuscript out to groups in our classes. If you, as instructor, feel that our comments have merit, please feel free to pass them on to your students.

The Necessity for Groups

Whether in classes or in some other organizational settings, most of us have had some negative experience with a group. Managers often complain about the time taken up by meetings, or cite the familiar ... "A camel is a horse put together by a committee." Our students often have similar feelings, usually based on problems with groups they have been assigned to in previous classes; problems with the extra effort required to meet and coordinate, difficulties in reaching compromises between varying strongly held perspectives, anger and frustration experienced when a member lets the group down.

Nonetheless, we regularly assign our graduate and undergraduate Organizational Behavior students to work groups responsible for a series of in-class and out-of-class assignments. Why do we inflict such misery on classes of resistant students (and on ourselves!)? The issue as we see it is simply that managers and professionals will be working in groups for the rest of their lives. The complexity of most modern organizational tasks, the necessity for broad participation to achieve commitment to programs, and the isolation resulting from task specialization in organizations require group forms of organizing (committees, task forces, project teams, boards, etc.) to achieve coordination on projects. No single person, working alone, can float a bond issue, produce a jet fighter, or market a new laundry detergent. The more important the project or issue with respect to the organization's priorities, the more likely that a group will be needed to tap the energies, ideas,

resources, and involvement of numerous managers and technical specialists. In short, "group smarts" have become survival skills for the modern professional or manager!

We would not deny the validity of the negative reactions of managers and students to group work. As Argyris (1962) observed, managers are usually not very effective as group members. A lifetime of experience in behaving in groups does not assure that one will be able to do so effectively, Moreover, research confirms that the mere creation of a group involves a measure of lost energy through friction (Hackman and Morris, 1975) which must be compensated for through extra effort by group members. From the horror stones students tell us, they have encountered such problems all too often in previous group experiences.

But do groups have to be miserable and ineffective? In our combined 22 years of experience in overseeing student teams and task groups, we have observed many instances where student groups were just the opposite--deeply satisfying, highly creative, extraordinarily productive. We will attempt in the following paragraphs to outline steps that you, the group member, can take to improve the likelihood that your team will achieve such synergistic results.

Before the Group Begins

An opportunity for enhancing one's group experience begins even before the group is formed. Here are some things you can do for yourself at this point.

Watch those pre-group expectations! Your attitude going into the group can create self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect to learn from and enjoy the group, you will tend to act in ways that reflect this, and others will tend to react to you in ways that will make it happen. Conversely, if your attitude is negative or apathetic, you are likely to stimulate anxieties or defensiveness in others.

Try not to get on a team with friends or people you know well already. Sometimes students are assigned to groups by the instructor, but sometimes they are allowed to form their own groups. Left to their own preferences, they usually pick group members they already know. We have found this less likely to lead to a positive experience in the group (confirmed by Feitchner and Davis, 1985). There are several considerations that lead us to recommend avoiding this temptation:

* You have more to learn from people you don't know.

* It could be an advantage to have friends in other groups so you can compare experiences and progress.

* If you find yourself resisting the idea of joining a group of "strangers," does this say anything about the assumptions you make about people before you meet them? Would you like people to make the same assumptions about you?

* Managers aren't assigned to teams on the basis of friendship. Learning to work with strangers is an important part of your preparation for the "real world."

* It may be harder to openly confront friends on issues regarding the group's progress with a task. You may be reluctant