It's the Final Countdown...

My journey here, at the VCU and in this course is about to end. It is sad. I admit it. But let’s face it, the final stage of a group life, adjourning, is about to happen and I cannot do anything about it, it is a planned ending. I knew it when I came here, but as all the ends, this end just came too suddenly. Time has flown fast, too fast. As Levi (2007, 40) points out, “The adjourning stage can be stressful to team members because they are ending the social relations that they have developed.”  However, even though I’m wistful, I feel blessed. I can’t even put it into words how amazing this whole experience has been. It has most definitely been a great opportunity for me to learn; learn things about myself and things how I really can be a member of a successful team.

This will be my last post. In the summary I will use Levi’s (2007, p.4) words to describe my reflections and feelings about group dynamics: “The people in a team are connected to one another. They recognize this connection, and it binds them together so that they collectively share what happens to fellow group members. Team members interact with one another where communication is the central process of a team. The people in a team recognize and acknowledge their membership. Formal and informal rules and roles of the group control the interactions of group members. The people in a team influence one another, and the desire to remain in the team increases the potential for mutual influence. Finally, a team satisfies members’ physical and psychological needs, such that individuals are motivates to continue participation.”

For the paradoxes of group life I will refer to Smith and Berg (1997, 152): "Circles. One cannot escape the feeling that an exploration of paradox is like walking in circles. It is hard to know where you have come from and where you are going. But the more one lives with a paradoxical perspective, the more one develops a tolerance for circles and for the places where two apparently contradictory paths join."

Finally, I want to say something of my own: “This learning journey is about to end. But it will stay with me. I have learned what opposite forces are, they are paradoxes. My paradox is that this trip has faced its end but it means something new will begin. Paradoxes can also be like circles. My circle is that after this life experience I will travel this circle again even though the circle will be different. I will have this experience with in my new circle and it makes it different. It’s called learning and development. I know that I have travelled many circles before this but this circle is special. It has been rich, sunny, energetic, fruitfully, and colorful. It has painted my world view and it will stay in my heart for the rest of my life. The End.”

Intergroup Influences

So far I have discussed about the paradoxes of intragroup influences in group life. It’s interesting wow we can see those same thing as a phenomenon’s also between the groups, as intergroup influences.  In the text of Smith & Berg (1997) they present three paradoxes of intergroup influences: The Paradox of Scarcity, Perception, and Power. In the class it was very interesting when we started to reflect these paradoxes to the movies we have seen. How different things we saw happening in the movies. Of course we also saw similar things, but in the class I realized how important it is in adult learning to be able to share our thoughts and discuss in the class room. It’s probably the most effective way to learn, to share and discuss in groups and teams.

But what comes to these paradoxes of scarcity, perception, and power they relate very strongly to cooperation, competition, and communication, to the topics we had a chance to use in our lesson couple weeks ago. In my opinion the paradox of scarcity is about the competition between the teams, “we want to have it all” or “we want to be the best and most praised”. As we taught in our lesson, too much competition takes something away from effective cooperation and communication. Cooperation and communication plays an important part also in the paradox of perception. As Smith & Berg (1997) says in the text book, every individual sees things differently around the world. And the whole world is divided into various groups. If we don’t cooperate or we don’t have the skills to communicate with other groups or teams, we will face the paradox of perception because every group has to work on two forms of integration; 1. It must learn how to bring its members together so that a group can act as a unified whole and 2. A group must develop ways of integrating itself with other groups. By saying that I mean that it’s not only if “we”, the individuals in our group play well together and find the mutual way to interact, we also need to have perception to the bigger picture how to interact between the groups and teams. Power, in the end, combines it all; cooperation, competition, and communication. We need to loose our competitive side of ourselves and our group and be able to share the power to achieve the greater good. It also means we need to cooperate. Without cooperation we might face the situation of the paradox where we have two sides: the powerful and the powerless, the haves and the have-nots. “In this sense, power is an attribute of the relationship between groups, rather than of any group itself” (Smith & Berg, p. 197). Leadership plays important role in this picture, it creates the boundaries that are the life and the death of the group.