Groups and cohesion

Good day and welcome back,

Tuning in this week for my leadership course we discussed the importance of cohesion and group aspects which entail this. First off, the concept of cohesion is attraction meaning there are two underlyers; individual and group attraction. Individual attraction can be described by simply each member of the group has their own likes, interests, and ‘hanging out’ if you will. This, compared to group attraction is the group has very close views on likes and dislikes, thus it can be known as group pride. I believe this can relate to me in past experience when designing a template for a health company my group and I had to complete. We all agreed on the formatting, structure, word choice, and so forth coming up with the finished product, in fact this can relate to unity. Cohesion is unity. Entailed is the thought of group ‘one-ness’ and the sense of ‘we’. The last related definition of cohesion is team work. It is the member’s commitment to team goals and their belief in the capacity of the group. Concluding, cohesion can be summed up by the driving force that keeps a group together keeping out ‘outside’ detracting forces which can harm the group effectiveness.

In turn, we dive into the next topic of collective efficacy being the belief of most, if not all, group members that the group can attain its goals. It was actually in my Blue-Chip Leadership Program on Field Day that is the most recent example of this term. My group shared the common goal of being the best team out there dominating the competition. No one had the lack of faith in the others and in the end we did come out on top overall winning all the physical competition games. On behalf of my group, I would say we had high collective efficacy to say the least. A side concept discussed in class was Tuckmans Model of Group Development. In a brief overview it was divided by an ordering sequence of ‘phases’ including: Forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Here is a breakdown of each:

-Forming: Group comes together and gets to know each other (very nice at this point)

-Storming: Group hits a ‘bump in the road’ by trying to create processes

-Norming: Group gets back into routine and starts solving problems

-Performing: Group goes beyond and actually gets into rhythm and synergy with each other

-Adjourning: Group comes to an end and lets go of structure in effort to move on

The relevance of this can only be done by utilizing each person’s assets for the benefit of the team. We all have assets, some being more important than others and it is crucial to use them and not let them go to waste given the right situation. I have been in a group where one of them members did not say he had access to a van to get us from point A to point B and this caused time and money to bring two vehicles instead of one. Have you been in a situation where you held back a certain asset that could have proved beneficial?