Group work? Ideas? Working with others? These are all the things we have to deal with when working with companies. We must get familiar with new people, their workstyle, and being capable of listening to others’ ideas. When it comes to hearing others ideas, I love being engaged and having an open mind because they may think of something great that I could’ve never came up with. I never relalized how much psychology influences things such as work and organizations. Social perception is key when it comes to studying new people, we meet these ques determine how we interact or may believe what others are thinking.
My senior year I worked for a business owner that had her own clothing company. Oh, it was so much fun but some of the workers didn’t do so well when it came to getting adjusted to getting to know the new team. Our manager gave us a project in which we had to promote her headband which this is where the disagreement came along. When we got on a video call one of my coworkers explained how she believed a great scenery to promote the item should be in a park on the grass and I see how on one of the girl’s faces looked like she dislikes the idea and then stated how we should model the headband instead. They began going back and forth saying their ideas were better and failed to come up with an agreement. I used social perception to realize my coworker dislike due to her facial expression.
This situation relates so much to psychology to me and especially to the Tuckman (1965) model. This reminded me of storming due to the conflicts and disagreement. This happens due to the team members sharing ideas and their opinions. When different viewpoints clash during this stage it leads to tension and struggle when it comes to working as a team. The situation I explained previously related to that and shows how one of the four stages of development can also be related when it comes to businesses or even organizations. Groups and teams always go through issues in the beginning especially when they are unfamiliar with one another. Getting to know people comes with hardships at times and difficulty setting your pride or opinion aside.
Overall working in groups comes with it flaws, especially disagreements with other group members. There is always instances when someone doesn’t agree with someone else. Being united is key in order for things to function and workout so in my group there was no cohesion everyone wanted to focus on their idea instead of trying out an idea that would make everyone in the group happy. Disagreements happened and it caused us to be delayed with getting our project done and even showcasing it. With team effotts wse would have got our project done and if we went through all the stages of the Tuckman (1965) model my team would’ve done well at group work.
References
Coutts, L.M., Gruman, J.A. and Schneider, F.W. (2016) Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. SAGE Publications.