Jennifer Styers 3/21/11 Group Work Log 4- Mine Field The purpose of the activity mine field was

to understand group roles and how one persons role, attitude, feelings or work ethic can affect the whole group and the outcome that will occur. As a learning experience this may not be the role that we would have in a group usually but it helped the class understand how to interact and try to effectively work with a role that they could encounter. For this activity we were all handed a different role some had task oriented roles, social roles or individualistic roles. For my group I was the blocker I did not want the group to progress or move in any way. By taking on this role I sat in the floor while the rest of my group was trying to move around. Within my group we had a gate keeper, who tried to get every member to communicate. He didnt have a problem with because we had a encourager, who tried to motivate me and kept talking to me so that I would get up and become a part of the group. My team did not win the mine field challenge, partly because I did not help throw any balls into our corner and kept a small radius of where the other members could go. When we first set out to start the task my group had decided that we would create a plan, and try to get as many balls as possible by working as a team and pushing them all unto our side of the room. Though we knew we were going to get roles this plan was not carried forth I think because we were trying to act our part during the game. This was also how the group first formed by trying to evaluate the task at hand, after watching the first groups who did and strategizing what we would do, as a common interest to win. The team tried to establish a norm through the

plan that we created to move all the balls into our corner by working together in the line but the norm did not work out because some of the team members had to play the role of the deviant. I think that this was one of the first activities where we started to see the groups actually have conflict and tension to manage. Since there were deviants in groups such as the blocker, aggressor, dominator, help seeker and such this created a different environment for the exercise. Conflict and tension was trying to be managed by those who had social roles or task oriented roles, but since the people were taking their roles seriously or to the extreme it was never truly managed. We stayed in the storming stage and had both secondary and tertiary tension due to the activity at hand. Cohesion was never built either but it was fun to watch as others took on individualistic roles. Defining a leader in my group would be hard Rae was trying to help motivate me to get up, and was trying to give direction to the rest of the team. Matt was suppose to be the gate keeper who I believe should have taken on the role as a leader, though suppose to be keeping communication flowing they could have done that by giving instructions and ask members to get to work. This exercise will be helpful in the future because it taught us that there are all these different roles in the work place, and that to manage them you may have to become a role or find someone who can help the deviant in the group. Also I think it showed that you need to manage and fix a person if they come into an individualistic role early on in your group. I think that this activity was great and it showed that there will be conflict and tension in a group setting, I wouldnt change anything about it.