Insights from Group Activity

REFLECTIVE ESSAY
LEAD
Insights from Group Activity
In the seminar session held in the teaching weeks, we had exciting group activities to practice the knowledge we learned from class in real situations. From the exercises, I understood that effective leadership is critical for a group to continue operating successfully. Team productivity, which includes leadership and decision, is an essential issue in-group dynamic that lends itself well to differentiated learning. In the second week of teaching, we were given this activity about picking up people from a list to bring on a spaceship and learnt that team dynamics are among the things experienced in administration and are more than just the sum of individual membership bases (Forsyth, 2010). Rather than forming a team, based on the idea proposed by Hackman (2002) about building up a team, we realized we did not have enough people to develop an interrelated team, so we became a group to do the activity. The point of this activity is not mainly related to how we are going to make our choices but the way we worked together and analyzed our information. Inspired by McGrath (1984), we took advantage of the typology of team tasks and decided to do conceptual before behavioural.
At the beginning of the activity, divergent thinking occurred because we were told to write down our choices on paper, and we should not get our results from the group discussion. We defined how our personalities locate us in the group during this activity, and instead of being a leader, I am more supportive. Besides, understanding team behaviour through analyzing each individual’s different personalities was crucial in helping create collaboration and team synergy that enabled us to work as a team. We recognized the differences and acknowledged their role in decision-making. This first activity we did went smoothly, and by applying theories to our actions, my group was able to avoid any unnecessary arguments. Although we came together and shared our results to get a final decision in the group and started convergent thinking, our answers appeared to be coherent with few differences. We still spent some time deciding whom we should bring for the last few choices we had a conflict on. Some of us believed that taking the armed policeman with us would cause panic or start bureaucracy if he failed to control his emotion. However, the others thought that bringing him make it easier and faster to maintain the order since nobody would dare violate the rules with a gun. We, however, realized that personality might affect a person’s transformational leadership. For example, leading people in an authoritarian manner may come more readily to some individuals than others, owing to their nature.
On the other hand, another reason that elongated our process was the balance between the number of men and women. We had a hard time thinking if there were too many men or women because we were bringing the baby to the spaceship and intended to focus on reproducing the people chosen. However, when we realized that we needed a team leader, that was where we started solving the puzzle using different clues. Although there was an issue of power struggle in the group, we eventually managed to settle it out amicable, an...