What Are Group Norms Influence Group Communication?

Our everyday life is associated with being with wide range of group such as family, friends, working colleague, social group. Group is a number of individuals who work interdependently to achieve a common goal and group dynamics is the interaction between two or more people within the group settings. It is the behaviour of the group members, how they work, which impacts the performance of the group (Cronin et al. 2011). The interpersonal skills and behaviour of the group member results either doing well or harming overall outcome of the group (Whatley 2012). Groups are often made up of individual with varieties of ideas, personalities and approaches. For the group to perform well, cohesiveness is important so that individual difference can

These group norms can hinder or help a group in achieving its objectives. Group norms aids a group to sustain behavioural consistency between group members. Norms guides members how to act or not to act in certain situation (Hagger et al. 2014). We also develop a few norms like being punctual, making sure that everyone has a chance to put their views, follow the guidelines for the task and most importantly communication with each other. Effective communication is vital for the group to operate efficiently, in order to share information, reach agreement, arrange meetings and implement plan. In our small group of five we routinely saw each other face-to-face, make contact occasionally by phone and depended heavily on emails to share documents. If there was any change in the plan, we let other members know as soon as possible so that everyone has the same information. For example, if someone is going to be late or could not attend the meeting they send a message to all members so that everyone is aware. We also focused on following the guidelines such as time limits, how many should present and content of the

In our group, there was a shared leadership, we got hold of any opportunity to improve the efficiency of the group. This helped each member to be responsible for their own effectiveness and share equal responsibility according to their talent and expertise (Nazzaro & Strazzabosco 2009). All group member were supportive of each other, giving positive comments regularly to motivate teammates. We did not hesitated to ask for help when needed instead of struggling alone and wasting time. Civilized disagreement is also important for effective teamwork where each group member view others opinions constructively. Constructive conflict can occurs when team members feel safe to voice their opinions (Witte & Davis 2009). There was a disagreement about the video in our group. As our original video was 7 minutes long, we wanted to edit the video to about 4 minute, but one of our team member insist on presenting the original video because she thought that by editing the original video information we want to provide might be compromised. We argued that good editing can preserve the message we want to present and also help us to be within the time limit. Later when she saw the edited clip she was