Marilyn Skeens
PSY 4060
Group Dynamic Reflection Paper

I was very pleased with the group members that I was assigned to. I was a little worried knowing we had one male group member and six girls, but surprisingly we all had great group chemistry and had very little to no conflict. Everybody but one person in my group possessed different types of qualities such as leadership, creativity, charisma, and so forth. My group members and I were not under any pressure throughout the entire process when preparing for our presentation. We all worked efficiently, cohesively, and had great communication skills which allowed our group to perform in a very successful manner. Our initial meeting was extremely productive and we were able to see how each individual’s personality was and how much effort each person was willing to put into our presentation. Christine definitely portrayed task leadership skills. She was very goal-oriented and right off the bat, she was shooting out some ideas we could use for our lengthy presentation. She thought it was a good idea to divide up the sections in our chapter in pairs of two being’s our topic was very broad and to the point. This was an advantage to us all because it created a sort of outline that each person could work with, making the material simple to follow. Christine assigned tasks to certain members and was very easy to understand. She made sure that the group work was distributed evenly and gave us all evaluative feedback when we would meet up and discuss our progress. She was the group leader in our group. I played an important role as well when it came to leadership in our group. I would have to say that I was more of the relationship leader in the group. Alongside with Christine, I listened to all of my group members and I was always very positive, friendly, and easily approachable at our meetings. What I really liked about my group is that we always tried real hard to meet outside of class when it came to our final revisions for our presentation. We were a very diverse group and we all maintained a busy schedule, but we managed to meet at small coffee shops, the library, and the honors commons to make sure we had a strong and easy-flowing presentation. Lexi and Chelsea were the creative ones out of the bunch. Lexi was an avid theater performer so her skills to combat stage fright came in handy as our presentation date got closer and closer. She had charisma and helped to communicate goals clearly when one of us would have a hard time understanding another person’s ideas. She had access to the Honors Commons and we would frequently have meetings there because it was a lot quieter than the library. Chelsea on the other hand, was the only art major in our group mixed with both Psychology and HHP majors. She was very down to earth and calm and despite the issues she was having with her partner for our presentation, she was always punctual and had a great sense of humor no matter what. Allison and I are very much alike. We both decided to work together for our part of the project and we were surprised to find out how similar our ideas were for our part of the presentation. Our similar views can be best described as the reward theory of attraction. Allison made sure she posted on D2L when and where our next meetings would be so there would be no confusion whatsoever. Justin was definitely the comic in our group. He insisted on the activity which was later presented to our class towards the end of the presentation and did a wonderful job introducing and concluding our work. Justin really stood out best because he would try his hardest to show up at all of our meetings. He lost his mom in the process of completing our presentation and was absent for about a week, but he came back strong and was willing to do what he could to make our presentation successful. Lastly, there is April. She was definitely the social loafer in our group. She did not care what ideas our group members would come up with and she was always the first one out the door when we concluded our meetings. I kind of figured she was having some personal problems and unfortunately it affected her schoolwork greatly. At times I felt like ostracizing her from the group because we worked more efficiently when she was not around. She was always in a bad mood and she gave us the impression that she did not want to be there or around us at all times. At one of our group meetings, I remember her saying she would prefer talking less for our presentation therefore; giving Chelsea more talk time which was not fair. When Dr. Hatz had mentioned that no none had done a skit, we thought that would be a great idea for our group and sure enough April made it loud and clear that she wanted no part in a skit. Groupthink was very important and it helped maintain group cohesiveness and helped us reached a desired conclusion for our overall presentation. I believe we definitely had an advantage over most of the other groups because we had great group members; well at least all of them were great. We experienced very little to no conflict despite the one mishap we had on our presentation day. We were all shocked and taken by surprise with how April handled the situation. We had met the previous night at a coffee shop called Lasaters and we went over our entire 35 minute presentation and had made some final changes before the big day. We all could tell that April was extremely nervous and unprepared as she read line after line on her power point in somewhat a crackly voice in front of us. I thought to myself if she is having trouble presenting to us, how is she possibly going to get through it in front of our class? Like I had mentioned before, we had experienced no conflict at all until the day of our presentation. Previous to that, we felt that Chelsea was getting the majority of the work done for her and April, beings that they had paired up for the topic of Social Facilitation, but we did not expect this sort of outcome from her towards the end. It was both humiliating and embarrassing to us and to the whole class. I was very impressed with the way my group members and I handled our mishap in class because we all remained calm and collective in front of our peers. We used effective communication skills and came up with a decision together that we would have to present at a later time. We were the first group to not present on a Friday and we were worried that the class would grade us poorly because of what had happened the week before. All in all, Justin was able to use the problem we had endured in our presentation by letting the class know that performance can come with some minor flaws. Even though our presentation was halted temporarily, we managed to pull through together and we delivered a very well presentation. Like I mentioned before, our group presentation was by far very different and interesting in comparison to other group presentations. We decided to go in a different direction and felt that showing lengthy videos was a way to extend one’s presentation because videos added an extra ten minutes to a group’s presentation. Many groups conformed or followed the format of those who presented before them and we felt we needed to do something dissimilar to stand out. We decided not to use lengthy videos and felt it only be necessary for my portion of the presentation since I was proving that brainstorming did not really work. My video in length was less than a minute long and towards the end we gave ourselves a huge pat on the back because we proved to ourselves and to the class that we do not need ten minutes of youtube videos to make a forty-five minute presentation. Overall, I was extremely pleased with my group and I honestly could not have asked for a better group of members. We all possessed different qualities and we all had our own way of thinking and analyzing ideas which definitely made our group strong in so many ways. Although I tried to prove that brainstorming does not work, I can say that it does because it allowed us all to pull such diverse ideas to deliver a great presentation.