COM 230 FINAL

Is/Is Not Analysis

technique used to ensure that a group is, in fact, investigating a problem and not just a symptom of the problem.

Journalist's Six Questions

- Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? - Can help a group quickly structure how a problem is defined.

Functional Perspective

- Examines leadership as behaviors that may be performed by any group member to maximize group effectiveness. - Dean Barnlund and Franklyn Haiman identify leadership behaviors as those that guide, influence, direct, or control others in a group. - Describes the specific communicative behaviors that help a group function more effectively.

Cause-and-Effect

- "Fishbone diagram" - Helps groups visually examine the relationship between causes and their probable effects. - To prepare a cause-and-effect diagram - draw a long horizontal line on a piece of paper, chalkboard, or flip chart. - Then, angling out from the long line, draw lines - Then, on each angle, list possible contributing factors for each of the main problem causes

Action Chart

- A grid that lists the tasks that need to be done and identifies who will be responsible for each task. - One reason solutions are not implemented is that people are uncertain about who should do what. - Action chart provides needed structure and ensures that everybody is aware of what needs to be done and reduces the risk that nobody will do anything. - Developed by using the following steps: - Identify the project goal - Identify the activities needed to complete the project -Identify the sequence of activities (what should be done first, second, third, and so on). - Estimate the amount of time it should take to complete each task. - Determine which group members should be responsible for each task - Develop a chart that shows the relationship among the tasks, time, people, and sequence of events that are needed to accomplish the project.

Trait Perspective

- A view of leadership as the personal attributes or qualities that leaders possess - The research for this approach yielded very little useful information -Traits useful in one situation (such as leading troops into battle) are not necessarily the traits required for other leadership positions (such as conducting a business meeting) - A further problem is that it does not identify which traits are important to becoming a leader and which are important to maintaining the position.

Predictive Function

- Allows people to anticipate probable outcomes of various types of communicative behavior in the group. - If you can reasonably predict that certain outcomes will follow certain types of communication, you can regulate your behavior to achieve the most desirable results.

Task Leadership

- Any behavior that influences group process and helps accomplish the group's task. - Groups members' have the tendency to get off-track when convening to solve a problem, make decisions, plan activities, or determine policy. - Anyone can be the leader who keeps the group on-track. - Initiating, coordinating, summarizing, elaborating

Authoritarian Leadership Style

- Assume positions of intellectual and behavioral superiority in groups. - Make decisions, give the orders, and generally control all activities. - Groups with highly structured goals and high stress move toward this style

Systems Theory

- Compared to the body - A small group is an open system composed of interdependent variables, that receives input, processes the input, and yields an output. - Openness to Environment, Interdependence, Input Variables, Process Variables, Output Variables, Synergy, Entropy, Equifinality

PROMOD Technique

- Designed to make sure group members have an opportunity to first individually analyze the problem or issue under consideration and then systematically share that analysis with other group members. - Groups develop better, high quality solutions - Organized around four key steps ♣ Step 1: Individual Problem Analysis ♣ Step 2: Group Information Exchange ♣ Step 3: Individual Problem Resolution ♣ Step 4: Collaborative Group Integration

The five (5) steps to problem solving?

1. Identify and define the problem 2. Analyze the problem 3. Identify possible solutions 4. Select the best solution 5. Implement the solution

Symbolic Convergence Theory

- Fantasy is the creative and imaginative shared interpretation of events that fulfills a group's need to make sense of its experience and to anticipate its future. - A fantasy theme consists of the common or related content of the stories the group tells. - A fantasy chain is a string of connected stories that revolve around a common theme.

Social Exchange Theory

- Groups remain attractive to their members as long as the rewards of group membership exceed the costs. - Rewards include fellowship, job satisfaction, achievement, status, goal achievement, personal need fulfillment. - Costs include frustration, mental effort, anxiety, embarrassment. - Cohesiveness and Productivity are directly related to how rewarding the group experience is to its members.

Democratic Leadership Style

- Have more faith in the group than authoritarian leaders have. - Try to involve members in making decisions - Under conditions of relative certainty, groups lean towards a democratic style of leadership

Explanatory function

- Helps make sense of the processes involved when people interact with others in a group. - If people understand why some groups are effective while others are not, or why certain styles of leadership are appropriate in some situations but not in others, then they are better prepared to diagnose the needs of their own groups.

Rankings and Ratings

- If a group has many solutions to evaluate, one way to narrow the list is to ask group members to either rank or rate the solutions and then average the rankings/ratings to see which solutions emerge as the most and least popular. - Should be done after pros and cons list - Works best if you have more than 5-7 items - >12, have group members each rank their top five choices - By ranking each option, group members are forced to critically evaluate each alternative - Could also rate each idea, with a rating of 1 being a very positive evaluation and 5 being a negative evaluation.

Emergent Leadership (The Minnesota Studies)

- Most groups do not select leaders - Leaders emerge through a "method of residues", whereby group members are rejected for the role of leader until only one remains - The study found that groups accepted the contender who provided the optimum blend of task efficiency and personal consideration (mix of task leadership and process leadership)

The three steps of the theory building process

- Noticing consistencies in our experiences - Examining relationships among those consistencies - Building explanations -We can make predictions about events based on our explanations.

Structuration Theory

- People use rules and resources in interaction to structure social systems. - Helps explain why and how groups develop the rules and behavior patterns they adopt. - Especially useful in helping understand group communication within broader organizational cultures and explain change within groups.

Process Leadership

- Process leadership behaviors maintain interpersonal relations in a group and facilitate a climate satisfying to members and conductive to accomplishing the group's task - Focuses on the members' feelings - Releasing tension, gatekeeping, encouraging, mediating

Laissez-faire Leadership Style

- See themselves as no better or no worse than other group members - Assume the group will direct themselves - Avoid dominating groups

Steps for Force-Field Analysis

- Step 1: Identify the goal, objective, or target the group is trying to achieve - Step 2: On the right side of the chart, list all the restraining forces—those that currently keep the group from achieving its goal - Step 3: On the left side of the chart, list all the driving forces—those that currently help the group achieve its goal - Step 4: The group can now decide whether to do one of three things -Increase the driving forces -Decrease the restraining forces -Increase selected driving forces and decrease those restraining forces over which the group has control

Flow chart

- Step-by-step diagram of a multistep process. - Can help a group see whether the various procedures they have identified to solve a problem are practical and fit together - Can help your group work through logistics and identify practical problems of moving from an idea's conception to its implementation

Force-Field Analysis

- Technique based on the assumptions of Kurt Lewin (father of group dynamics) - Group needs to have a clear statement of its goal, which can be stated in terms of what the group wants more of or less of. - Group analyzes the goal by noting what driving forces make it likely to be achieved and what restraining forces make it unlikely to be achieved.

Pros and Cons

- When groups weight the positive and negative outcome of solutions, they make better decisions - Evidence suggests that groups often find more positive benefits than negative benefits

Functional Theory

- You use communication in order to accomplish something - Communication is the tool in which to complete a goal/task

SWOT Analysis

- technique used to help groups and teams identify and analyze big issues that influence the group or organization and can be helpful in both identifying and analyzing problems. - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats - S & W are internal factors within the group - O & T are external factors that serve as an outside positive force or something that may jeopardize a current positive action.

Pareto Charts

-A bar graph that shows data that describe the cause, source, or frequency of a problem. -Arranged with the tallest bars on the left and the shortest on the right. -Makes it easy to look at data and identify the source of the problem. -"The source of 80 percent of the problem comes from 20 percent of the incidents"

What is leadership?

Behavior or communication that influences, guides, directs, or controls a group.

Is/Is Not questions

What is (not) the area or object with the problem? What are (not) the symptoms of the problem? When is the problem (not) observed? Where does the problem (not) occur? Who is (not) affect by the problem?