Chapter 6

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Teaching Resources

Chapter 6

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Discussion Questions

1) What does the opening story of the Seattle Storm tell us about leadership and teamwork?

  • How important is a leader for a sports team?
  • What do the choices made by the Seattle Storm players say about how leaders can empower teams?
  • Do these lessons apply to other kinds of groups and teams?

2) What does “teamwork” mean to you? How is it different from just working together as a group? Why do you think this concept is important to people who study and/or lead groups and organizations?

3) What makes a good leader? Think of some examples of people who you think are good leaders. What makes them effective?

  • What are the strengths and weaknesses of different leadership styles?
  • When would a transformational leader be important for a small group?
  • When would a democratic leader be better?
  • What can groups do to promote democratic leadership?

4) How well do the “deep roles” described in the textbook fit with your experience of groups? Do you find yourself playing any of these roles in groups?

5) Think of a time when you’ve seen role confusion or role collision in a group. Why did it happen? How do you think groups can avoid, or respond to, role collision and role confusion?

Classroom activities

1) Applying the embedded system theoretic framework to understanding teamwork

Part One: Individual Writing

Ask students to think of a group they have participated in that they think can best be understood as a team.  Examples might be sports teams or work teams, but students might have other ideas of groups that “feel” like a team to them, which is fine for this assignment.

Students should do a brief write-up (either in class or as a homework assignment) that provides:

  • A description of this group
  • A rationale for why they think it is a team.
  • A statement of whether or not they thought their group’s teamwork was effective.

Part Two: Group Discussion, Applying the Model

Students should share their description with a small group of classmates and discuss all the ‘teams’ they described. Ask students to pay attention to similarities and differences among the different “teams” that their group members describe.
Then, student groups should choose one of these teams and use the model provided in Figure 6.1 to analyze the teamwork in the group they chose. Students should be able to describe how the variables depicted in the model (i.e., training and support, external stress/pressure, task complexity, shared mental models, etc.) apply to the group they chose.

You may want to ask them to draw a model, using Figure 6.1 as a guide, to describe the teamwork communication in the group they are analyzing. If flipcharts or white boards are available, student groups could use these to draw their model, which would facilitate them sharing their model with the rest of the class. Or, they could draw it on a piece of paper and turn it in at the end of their activity.

Groups can report out to the class (a) what group they chose and (b) what the most helpful thing about the embedded systems framework was in explaining the teamwork in their group.

General Debrief Questions:

  1. What makes a group a team?  What similarities did you notice between the different groups that you discussed in your writing?
  2. How did you choose which group to focus on for applying the model?
  3. What parts of the model stood out to you as the most helpful in describing the communication in your team?
  4. Was there anything that you thought was important in the team that wasn’t accounted for in the model?
  5. What kind of advice would you give to this team, or other similar teams, about how to improve their teamwork?

2) Roles

Disclaimer/Note

The basic premise of this activity is that students should engage in group discussion while each member attempts to perform a particular role. Various versions of this activity appear in instructors’ manuals for other group communication textbooks (for examples, see instructional materials for Rothwell’s In Mixed Company and Keyton’s Communicating in Groups).  But, I provide it here because it is a useful way to get students thinking about the role(s) they typically play in groups as well as how roles emerge through interactions.

An alternative version of this activity is to have some groups have stickers on their foreheads listing their roles so that group members know each others’ roles, but not their own. The forehead-sticker version of this activity can be useful for helping students think about how groups sometimes assign roles to members through patterns of communicative behavior. This is useful for discussing situations such as: a group member becomes a “social loafer” after being consistently ignored and marginalized in a group.  Or, a group member becomes a reluctant leader because everyone looks to him/her for the answers. The instructional materials for Dan Rothwell’s text In Mixed Company provides a good description of how to lead the “sticker” version of this activity.

Instructions

Students should get into groups and prepare to discuss an issue of some importance to them. I typically pull a local news story or describe a controversy on campus or a question that they will care about. (One time I gave them an editorial from the student paper that argued that email and texting was making students less articulate and asked them to craft a response to the author. They got fired up about that). The basic instructions are that the groups should talk for about 10 minutes and do their best to come to a decision.

Each group member pulls a slip of paper out of a hat. The paper has a description of a role the student should play and instructions for what they should do to enact this role (see below). Students should keep their role secret from their group members. They should do their best to perform the role they are assigned, but they should try to be as realistic as possible and they should not tell their fellow group members what their assigned role is.

After ten minutes, stop the groups and let them share their roles with each other and talk about what it was like to play these roles. Then debrief as a class.

Description of Roles

Each slip of paper should list one role and some corresponding behaviors. Each student will choose one slip of paper and that determines the role s/he will play during the activity. The roles provided below are loosely based on Benne & Sheats [1948] description of functional roles.

Instructors may want to ensure that there is one of each type of role in every group, but it can also be instructive to let the roles be relatively random so that groups have different configurations of roles (two leaders, one social loafer and a blocker, for example).

Task Leader: You are, or should be, the leader of this group.  Be sure to take charge of the task to help the group get things done.

Information/Opinion Giver: You are a solid contributor to the group.  Provide information and your opinion whenever necessary.

Encourager/Harmonizer: You make attempts to reconcile disagreements among group members and help people work together well in the group.  Be friendly, warm, and responsive to others.  Try to praise and agree with other group members, even if you don’t agree with them, so that the group members can feel happy and work together well.

Clown: You enjoy keeping things light and funny, and you tend to not take this group very seriously.  Keep cracking jokes and finding the humorous side of things throughout the discussion.

Blocker:  You tend to be negative about the group and its task, you resist the direction the group is headed and tend to disagree or oppose things you don’t like, even if they represent the will of the group.

Social Loafer: You don’t much care about this group or the task and you’d rather be somewhere else doing anything except participate in this discussion.  You are willing to go along with the group, but you don’t have much to contribute and you’d like to do as little as possible.

Debrief Questions

One way to facilitate this discussion is to go group-by-group to ask them about their overall experience with the discussion.  Another way is to focus on one role at a time and ask questions about the leaders, the info givers, etc.  I typically do not ask much about the decision that they made, since the main objective of the activity is to get students to reflect on how roles emerge and play out in group interaction.

  1. What was it like to play this role?  What kinds of things did you say and do to demonstrate the role that you had?
  2. How did other people respond to you?  To what extent did their response to you help or hinder your ability to play your role?
  3. How did you feel about the other group members?  How did you recognize the role that they were playing?
  4. How similar was this role to what you usually do in groups?  Have you seen other people play this role? How do you tend to respond to them?

3) Status, Roles, and Leadership

Show a video clip of a group interaction that demonstrates people playing different roles and vying for status. One good option is to show part of an episode from the television show The Office, which humorously depicts life in a small office workspace. Many of the episodes demonstrate the misuse of power, status differences, and roles. One I have used before is “Health Care” (from Season one), but almost any episode will work. They are good demonstrations of what NOT to do in terms of leadership, status, and power.

Ask students to describe:

  • Who is the leader of this group?  How do you know?  What kind of leadership style does this person use? Is s/he an effective leader?
  • What kinds of roles are different group members playing?
  • Who demonstrates power in this group?  What do they do that shows you that they are demonstrating power?
  • How are status differences apparent in this group?
  • What can we learn from this group that we could make into a POSITIVE recommendation for other groups?  In other words, how can the mistakes of this group be a lesson for others?