The paralles of Group projects

Similarly to most individuals there’s a negative response that is associated with group projects. In on sense a group project can be a positive experience with a great deal of collaboration between group members, however this seems to be very different than in most of my real life experiences involving group projects.

The first example of a group project I had was from my Econ 203 group project, which was a group of 4 or 5 working on a specific assignment. This whole issue of group size should also be mentioned because most times when I am in a group with more than 4 people, there always seems to be someone who isn’t willing/able to work on the project at times when others are free. This whole circumstance is very annoying because even if there are multiple dates/times when some members decide to get together there’s always an outlier who is busy.

In this example it was 2 individuals that had very busy schedules because both were athletes and who had to focus on practice and other activities involved in their sport. This caused a problem because they were always busy right after their classes and didn’t have any time to discuss/work on the project with us group-mates. This resulted in a disorganized system, which basically meant that 3 of the people would be working together and the other 2 had to talk to us either over email or Facebook. Both of these options where very annoying because one of the two people wouldn’t respond to an email or Facebook message; making communication between group members very difficult, thus becoming very problematic to agree on who would do what parts of the problem and ultimately ended up hindering our groups overall success. As in R&B chapter 8, there wasn’t any group synergy because all members of the group weren’t on the same level of understanding as the others who met in person.

This whole issue of group synergy is very important to overall success because if one individual isn’t communicating with the other group members there seems to be a lapse in the group dynamic. In addition, there’s a lack of communication which causes the group dynamic to be split up and focused more on a few people, who are communicating while the others have no understanding of the project and what still needs to be done.

In this case it is very annoying to do group work because I feel that there will always be a lapse in the group synergy due to some individuals being left out of necessary meetings and come out with a lack of information.

Another group project where a similar problem arose was in High School when I had to do a group presentation where the teacher gave us a scenario and in a group of 5 we had to give a lengthy presentation about what we would do in this situation and how would we go about accomplishing this.

Once again, this ended up being a struggle because different people were busy at different times and sometimes weren’t willing to compromise on the meeting time, thus causing conflict among some group members. In addition, this made it very difficult for everyone to agree on one strategy that we would use and arguments about different ideas occurred, which cause the group synergy to be split up into some who agreed on one strategy and others who agreed on another strategy.

This whole situation was very annoying because I feel that communication was split up among these cliques. Once again, I feel that in this large of a group there will always be individuals who disagree on some facet of the project and cause a lot of inefficiencies, thus hindering the overall success of the project because concessions are needed in order for everyone to agree on one strategy.

These two examples really prove to me that in order for a group to be successful the level of communication between group members should be very high. In addition, the size of the groups should be examined to determine if a single opinion is to be made, such as in my experience with disagreements between individuals. Overall I feel a churn in my stomach when a teacher mentions a group project because while some of the projects are successful, there are also others that are unsuccessful due to ineffective leadership and lack of collusion between group members.