Group Communication Roles and Tasks

As we started to brainstorm what people were interested in our class and what they'd like to research, our class came up with five or six topics.  Our group is doing lit reviews for nonverbal communication, and I couldn't be happier with my topic and group.  We started off by doing our survey, coming together as one to put all of our ideas together to make interesting questions.  We started to experience interaction as we came up with questions and thoughts for our survey.  Since our group is considered a "small group" our communication was direct and participation was equal all around.  We essentially have become a team because we all put in our input, we all fully did our annotated bibliographies and we did them successfully.  Our collective identity is becoming stronger by class period. 

The one thing I like about our group the most is that we are all creative in our own way.  As I said before, we all bring something different to the table which makes our group synergy great.   The idea that many brains is better than just one brain is definitely seen in our group.  In no way are any of our group members not doing much for the project and just sitting back and relaxing also known as social loafing, which I have seen in PLENTY of at my experiences at Kutztown University.  I find our whole group as being information seekers and initiator contributors.  I say this because we are always throwing ideas out in the open, asking each other for clarification and asking for facts from respective articles.  I personally put the "Joker or Clown" into positive roles.  Although it is usually a negative connotation by diverting thhe group off task, I believe that cracking a joke here or there lightens up the mood and makes everyone enjoy their time doing the project.

We all take on maintenance roles by talking for a little bit before we get started at the task at hand. Doing so, increases our group cohesiveness and we feel good about our topic and we get a lot of work done.  Becoming too cohesive could decreases productivity because we would get off tangent more than we usually do.  I cannot see this happening to our group because we'd like to achieve good grades and more importantly feel good in the end about the work that we had accomplished.