Group Dynamics and Communication

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the issue of group dynamics and communication by analyzing how the nursing staff on a head injury unit worked together with a team leader and a psychologist to find ways to reduce the escalating levels of aggression among patients. The paper examines factors that affect team effectiveness such as the team's productivity, quality, and timeliness, the strategies it uses to enhance its ability to work together in the future, and how the group experience contributes to the learning and well-being of team members. The paper also stresses the importance of open communication, group decision-making, cohesion, and motivation. The paper concludes that the nursing staff was able to achieve its goals through the strategies they learned and devised as a team, and most importantly, through their cohesion as a work group and their motivation.

From the Paper:

"The team's task needs to correspond to the team's purpose. The team size should be as small as possible, must include members with adequate task and interpersonal skills, and should be marked by diversity. The size of the team was not a problem and there was ample diversity. Diversity means having people who are not too similar or so different that they cannot communicate or coordinate properly with one another (Wageman, 2005). The problem with the team was more based in personality where some members were introverts and others were not inclined to speak out. All groups are based on the idea of cooperative group norms that reflect the team members' shared pursuits, shared objectives, and mutual interests If the group has strong expectations about cooperation, the members expect each other to engage in information sharing (Ng & Van Dyne, 2005). Once again, the team leader needed to act on the discrepancy. The team leader is there to coordinate and motivate, and to build commitment to the group and its task, and to help find innovative ways to accomplish the tasks (Wageman, 2005)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Akrivou, K. (2006). The evolving group: towards a prescriptive theory of intentional group development. The Journal of Management Development, 25 (7), 689-698.
• Denton, D. (2006). Making changes within a team. Team Performance Management, 12 (3/4) 82-85.
• Forrester, W. & Tashchian, A. (2006). Modeling the relationship between cohesion and performance in student work groups. International Journal of Management, 23 (3), 458-465.
• Ng, K. & Van Dyne, L. (2005). Antecedents and performance consequences of helping behavior in work groups. Group and Organization Management, 30 (5), 514-541.
• Wageman, R. (2005). Team diagnostic survey. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 41 (4), 373-399.

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