Sunday 29 May 2011

Group 14 Formulation!




Group Formulation
On the first week of this MC 100 course, our lecturer Mr. Deepak Menon instructed us to form a group consisting of five members respectively. Our group, which is Group 14 for Session B were randomly assigned by the lecturer himself as most groups were already formed and had sufficient members. Our group of 5 consists of four females and a male student made up of different races ie; Malay, Chinese and Indian, and other cultural backgrounds.
There are five phases when a team deals with decision-making tasks which are orientation, conflict, brainstorm, reinforcement, and emergence.
In the beginning during the orientation stage when we conducted our first meeting as a group, we hardly knew head or tail about each other as physical appearance was the only transparency we could use to form judgments about one another. There were mixed feelings involved as it being the first time of us meeting, none of us could understand the character, personalities and temperaments of each other. We started getting to know each other more in depth as we progressed along the first assignment. Each of us were given specific tasks and roles to be completed.
The second phase is brainstorming. In our group, we collectively found sources and information to complete this given assignment. Each team member was given the privilege to voice out their thoughts and opinion on how to better this assignment and their ideas were evaluated as pros and cons before we used them. As we worked on our first group assignment, each other’s strength and weakness surfaced but we managed to work together as a team to complete this assignment.
At the very beginning, communication took a toll on most of us as some of use the group members were not well versed in English. Also we were only familiar with the names of our other fellow team mates via the post our lecturer put up on e-learning; hence we did not know who our group mates were by face. Even though it took us time to get familiar with the names of each group member, we still were able to kick start and complete the assignment. These were the few conflicts we faced but in the end we managed to overcome it as a team keeping a positive and open mind and also being flexible with each other’s character and style of work. Many people think conflicts are a negative impact on a team but not many of them know about constructive conflicts which help to boost team members self-esteem and builds trust within the team itself.
Reinforcement phase in our team was observed close to the deadline of the assignment submission. Each of us used email as a medium of communication to follow up with the progress of the assignment and give comments/ feedbacks on each team member’s respective work. The final phase is emergence; whereby all the team members gave their opinions and final verdict of the assignment before we submitted the final copy. Once the consensus has been made, as a group we collectively agreed to hand in our assignment.
In nutshell, even though we only had about a week to get to know each other, we learnt that every individual looks at life and an idea from a different perspective altogether. Even though in terms of communication, not all of us were at par, yet we respected each other’s ideas and incorporated them in this task to complete this assignment.
                                                                               


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