Monday, September 29, 2008
Week6 #1
In chapter 17,Hirokawa states that goal setting is important for group activities and decision making. In the chapter, " goal setting" is that " establishing criteria by which to judge proposed solutions." ( Griffin, E. ) ( P 224). In a group , if every member in the group understands the goal of the group, he/she will try to achieve the goal. Also, the goal can make the group more successful. If the group doesn`t set a goal, members of group don`t know what they try to accomplish, feel that they have nothing to do with the group, and are tired to attend the group activities. In this case, the group is failed. I`m so lucky never have a group like that. Does someone have the experience of group failure beause of no goal setting?
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3 comments:
Hello,
You make some very good points about the importance of setting goals. While I have never had a group who did not set a goal, I have had experiences where people didn't agree on the goal and the priorities of different group members were different things. For example, one group member decided in a Marketing class that the goal should be to generate an advertisement that was shocking and would be controversial whereas everyone else thought that the importance of the ad was to create brand recognition.
In the end, it was chaos because the team was not unified and in agreement. When a team is unified, the final product or service will be much stronger because everyone is striving for the common goal.
Another example is the United States. If the government/people of the USA had ONE common goal and we all strived to achieve it, we probably would. However, because different people have different priorities, sometimes all of our goals aren't achieved and people are not happy with the outcomes because they were not in agreement with the goals.
Colleagues of mine from when I was at the University of Kentucky did research on goals in organizations and found that the perception of shared goals was more important than actually sharing specific goals. Organization members were asked to complete a questionnaire about the degree to which they thought people in the organization shared goals. Then they were asked to state those goals. Lots of agreement on the former; not much agreement on the latter. But in terms of working together, productivity, satisfaction, and similar measures, it was the perception of shared goals that counted.
The motives behind the group interaction are also important. As others in this class have stated, many students are forced into group dynamics by working on projects and discussions. Group synergy is apparent by the goals set in the group. If one student simply wants to pass, while the other wants to ensure the highest score possible, there may be obvious group discussion or action-based conflicts based on the goal setting process of the group. I can imagine the frustration on both sides of the group, in which school may be the highest priority for the high-achieving student, yet may be a second-priority, to job or other commitments, for the student who simply wants to pass. Under these circumstances, it is easy to assume that the group will not be highly productive.
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