Group Working Skills

Supermarket project was the Middlesex Pre-sessional course project group where I worked with another three people who teacher divided into groups. The goal of the group is to carry out research on a supermarket and to give a presentation about our finding regarding brands. Working in a group not only can see different strategic to solve problems and learn from different people's idea, but also have some problem might face, such as, people not follow the group rules and how to member relate to each other in group. To tell the truth, I was unfamiliar with my group member in the beginning and afraid of we will not do well at this report. But it surprised that the end of presentation, teacher gave us a good mark, though we had encountered numbers of problem during the research time. Roles, norms and goals were some concepts would use to analyse the group.

Each individual roles group member will display particular behaviour. One of student who acts like a dominator always wants to control others, have plenty of her own opinion and wants to be a leader. Once we were discussed about which supermarket we could research, and who will go to visit supermarket. She said I will go to the high-end market, and you must go another ones, this two market was the best choice to research. She decided by herself, did not discuss and want to control other member. One thing that she needed to change was tried to respect and listen to what other people want to say, not be selfish. Group maintenance behaviour helps the group members to get on with each other more effectively. Payne & Whittaker (2000) Another student, like a supporter and encourager, she always helped everybody in group, remember a time I was shy to say my own idea to group, she encourage me that I should talk my opinion or nobody will know. We can discuss different idea whether is useful or not. She really helpful for me to join in the discussions. The other student, he worked as gatekeeper, sometimes people want leave early from working time, and he would say achieve percentage of scheduled progress today then we can go.

To be successful the group should create some rules, such as maintain a positive atmosphere, not chat or eat during meeting time, pay attention to someone who was talking, be no time and never leave early and the frequency of meeting. In our group we did not have any rules before, it lead to people leave early when they think they have other things to do and wasted time to chat on the meeting since we did not deal with how many time we should finish the report, people might feel that we can finished on next meeting time. The norms that happened in group will be influenced by a number of factors as the frequency of meeting and the environment in the group operates. Payne & Whittaker (2000) Perhaps next time we should have rules before, to notice everyone and let the teamwork more efficiency to reach the goal.

After finished our presentation, I have