In Mixed Company: Group Analysis

Throughout college I have worked in many different groups for various reasons. My experience of group work has been 90% positive. One reason I feel my group work experience has been so great is because of the fact while working with other students my work has been of greater quality. Working with others always allows me to come up with greater ideas and attain negative or positive feedback. After reading the first few chapters of, In mixed company: Communicating in small groups and teams, I realized this group dynamic is known as synergy. For a better understanding synergy is when a “group performance meets or exceeds expectations of what would happen if done individually”. The end work is usually greater than the sum of its individual parts. Synergy can be acquired in one of two ways. One of the first ways is that all of the members work together to achieve their shared goal. An example of this is when I was working in a group my freshman year that’s end goal was to receive an “A” on our project. Everyone in the group was very passionate about grades and doing well and we used that goal to work together. The second way
synergy is achieved is through diversity. Groups that have higher depths of diversity tend to produce more synergy than groups with less. This is because of the fact that in order to have synergy you need a wide variety of skills and abilities (Rothwell, 2012). Though it seems like a basic characteristic to have in a group, diversity is very challenging.
In order to make diversity work the members need to be selected based on internal factors and external factors, such as age, race, and gender.
Open discussion, feedback, active listening, and flexible decision-making are all necessary to have in a diverse group (Fritz, 2013). An experience I have had working with a group that was very well diverse was in my freshman year Philosophy class. Since this class was a general requirement age my group members ranged from the age 18-26 (different school standings). We all shared the commonality of the class and being students but our views, race, gender varied. However, this group was very successful and it was very good to hear all points of views. We all learned a lot about each other but at times it was challenging to agree upon what was important and what was going to get us a better
grade.
Synergy is not always achieved. Negative synergy is created when ignorance is shared among group members (Rothwell, 2012). When the members of the group are working together yet creating a worse result that is a result of negative synergy. One movie I can remember watching were I feel negative synergy is shown is in the movie Facing the Giants. This movie is about the struggle a football team had to go through in order to become in sync with each other to reach their goals. The team members are all very good players alone but throughout the movie it is a struggle for them to come as one and win (Facing the Giants, 2013).
Size does come into play in determining the amount of synergy that will be produced. When a group is bigger it deals with far more complexities. When I was on the cheerleading team here as Central Connecticut State University I can remember many times we produced negative synergy. There were many cliques on the team and a lot of girls who didn’t share the same goals as the rest of us and didn’t care as much. This made it hard to be a functional team. Small groups have the luxury of inhibiting disagreements (Rothwell, 2012). I believe a small group is a lot easier to work with rather then a large one.
Synergy is a very important aspect of making a group successful or not. Synergy is not an easy thing to accomplish and there are usually to two ways to achieve it. If it was not achieved the group will have negative synergy. Negative synergy I feel is more common and shows an unbalanced system. Diversity is a major part of creating a balanced system and the internal factors and external factors both count. Creating Synergy is a very huge accomplishment for any group, large or small.

References
Facing the Giants Wholeheartedly - YouTube. (n.d.). YouTube. Retrieved February 13, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyPkUXGq1S0
Fritz, R. (n.d.). Diversity for Groups & Teams in the Workplace | Chron.com. Small Business - Chron.com. Retrieved February 13, 2013, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/diversity-groups-teams-workplace-10998.html
Rothwell, J. D. (2012). In mixed company: communicating in small groups and teams (7th ed.). Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.