Soc 110 - Group Leadership and Conflict Summary

Group Leadership and Conflict Summary

SOC-110

Shannon Laing

February 27, 2017

Cepero

Group Interaction:

     In a group or a meeting every person attending is agreeing to be a team member by attending the gathering with his or her peers in order to come to a common ground, where they can put their skill sets and areas of expertise to work, in order to reach a shared goal.  At work, a team meeting can be held to brainstorm for ideas to do such things as; increase sales, introduce a new product line; raise funds for future events; generate marketing information; and to do something as simple as to motivate team members and employees.

I firmly believe that if our ‘learning teams’ had been assigned or able to get together to discuss this assignment, it would have had great dialogue.  From reading the posts of my classmates, I feel as though we have a very strong class of people whom truly want to learn and engage in discussions to further their education and learning experience.  However, unfortunately this was not able to occur.  If the learning teams were assigned somewhere I personally missed it, and I am thinking that several others did as well.  So, as far as the group interaction is concerned, I don’t really have answers for those questions.  I did see one other person post an answer to the “Politics of Sociology” video questions, and that person and I agreed on all points, so there was not a lot of debate required or sought out.  I will continue on with the video analysis portion of the questions and do the best I can to portray a neutral assessment of the two videos we were asked to review.  The two videos were the “Planning a Playground” video and the “Politics of Sociology” video.  Both videos detailed the inner workings of team members in different settings.   This paper will discuss various issues, conflicts and ‘wins’ that the two group meetings had.  

Planning a Playground Video:

The main issue that this group of community residents faced was trying to figure out how they were going to raise funds to build a neighborhood playground.  However, throughout the meeting there were several conversational issues and conflicts.   The first issue that appeared to me, was that the ‘leader’ of the group, David, did not properly introduce himself.  He did not make it immediately clear that he was the one running the meeting, and this is especially important when you have a group of people who don’t know one another.  The second issue regarding David was his lack of preparedness.  He had not done any research into how much a playground would or could cost.  He did not have any specifications written down or safety guidelines that would have to be followed.  Often times the safety guidelines are amended on a state by state basis, which would have entailed David to, at the very least, download a copy of those exact state guidelines for playgrounds in his area.  Did David check into city zoning?  These are just a few of the items that David, being the leader of this group, should have researched and documented prior to the start of the meeting.  As a group, they discussed the price fairly appropriately.  There didn’t seem to be a lot of talking over each other or negative comments, at least not at this point.  The deconstructive conflict began when it was time to suggest ways in which to raise the funds for the playground.  Betty, who had already stated at the beginning of the meeting that she had only attended in order to meet people, made the first suggestion.  Betty suggested a bake sale, which worked well in the past for her church organization and functions.  That is when it all broke down.  The deconstructive conflict began when Phil and Ray began to mock and ridicule Betty.  The fact that David, as the team leader, did nothing to stop this, was a bit appalling to me.  Fortunately, it didn’t last long before they were on to constructively discussing approaching foundations as a means to raise the funds for the playground.  Betty saves the day essentially by telling the group that she has a friend who has a foundation that could potentially help them.