Real Communication An Introduction

270 Part 3  Group and Organizational Communication

c In military organizations, roles are assigned to each group member with a clear

hierarchy of leadership and designated task roles. These roles are easily adapted

to emergency situations, when decisions must be made and actions taken

quickly and effectively. That’s a large part of Team Rubicon’s success. But it is

also true that the decisions involved in civilian jobs, higher education, and fam-

ily life might seem unimportant or insignificant to men and women returning

from life-and-death situations. This lack of purpose can be devastating for veter-

ans, especially when coupled with depression or post-traumatic stress. Through

career training programs like the Clay Hunt Fellowship, Team Rubicon hopes

to help veterans adapt their very specific skills to nonemergent situations, while

continuing to find purpose, community, and self-worth through service.

Activities

1. LaunchPad for Real Communication offers key term videos and encourages self-
   assessment through adaptive quizzing. Go to bedfordstmartins.com/realcomm
   to get access to:

LearningCurve

Adaptive Quizzes.

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THINGS TO TRY

Video clips that illustrate key concepts, highlighted in

teal in the Real Reference section that follows.

2. Consider a group to which you belong—your communication class, your fam-
   ily, your religious community, and so on. Draw a chart that depicts members
   of the group and the patterns of communication among them. What kind of
   network does the group most closely resemble?


3. Read up on the history of some influential but now defunct music group (such
   as the Beatles, Public Enemy, or Nirvana). Did the group go through all the
   stages of group development outlined in this chapter? How did the group deter-
   mine roles and establish norms? How did members deal with conflict? How did
   the eventual disbanding of the group play out?


4. Consider the adjourning phase of group development for a group you were
   part of that disbanded—Scouts, a sports team, the school newspaper staff—and
   think about what aspects of the group made for the hardest good-bye from the
   group. Are high-performing groups hardest to leave? Groups with the clearest
   established norms? What sorts of closing rituals have you experienced?


5. The telephone game, passing a message from person to person, is fun simply
   because of the inevitable message distortion that gets revealed at the end. Can
   you think of a time when a message was passed to you from an indirect source
   that you discovered to be blatantly wrong? Maybe it was bungled homework
   instructions or a wrong meeting time or place. Given these sorts of problems,
   what type of workplace might function best with a chain network?


6. Analyze the group dynamics from five of your favorite television shows. See if you
   can identify the various social and antigroup role types in each of the groups.


7. Next time you work in a group, pay attention to how the group works. Does the
   activity follow a linear model, or is the activity punctuated by periods of inertia
   and periods of intense activity? How does the group activity pattern differ from
   your own behaviors when you work alone?