Negative Group Experience Entailing The Lack Of Group Decision-Making

Group decision making is vital for not only businesses and organisations, but for everyday life. It has been well studied and examined where multiple theories and models have been created to describe group performance and group behaviour. This essay will discuss a negative group experience entailing the lack of decision making and group cohesiveness. This will be explored through theory and group development models. These concepts will illustrate the downfall of the group 's non-decision and will provide potential recommendations for future group performance.

In a university setting, a task group was formed in the beginning of the semester in order to make a class presentation at the end of the semester as part of the students ' assessment.

In order to make recommendations for the group, theory needs to be addressed. According to Robbins et al. (2007), social loafing is where individuals put in less effort in group work than they would individually. In both the times of inertia and the beginning stages the group showed signs of this, where the group members didn 't make time to meet and assumed others would do the work. Consequently, each group member put less effort into the presentation than they would individually. A way to reduce social loafing is to reduce the number in the group, so instead of six, have around four or five. Therefore, each member would have more responsibility and be more inclined to

If group norms were established in the forming and meeting stages this would decrease social loafing as everyone would know what was expected of them. Group norms can be further categorised into performance and allocation of resources norms. Allocation of resources norms are crucial because they assign roles to each member of the group and it clarifies what each member 's tasks are and their expectations (Robbins et al., 2007). This encourages effective decision making as each person would be in charge of their part and need to report back to the group, this will make the group make more effective decisions overall. Performance norms are important in establishing how hard a member should work and overall performance in the group (Robbins et al., 2007). A recommendation for better decision making surrounding the presentation would be setting a performance norm, such as aiming for a certain grade. This is a benchmark where everyone would know the required work ethic to reach it and would also reduce social