Functional Perspective on Group Decision Making

This past summer, for one of my classes, we were assigned a group project to do. There were five of us because the class was split into three groups. Looking back at this assignment, we certainly fulfilled all four of the functions discussed in this theory.

To start, we ran into the problem first hand. All of us had different schedules, which left us one day where we could all meet and work on the project. Some people didn’t have cars, some of us worked, and we only had one week to do it. I was glad we figured out a time on Sunday to all meet and collaborate. Since we had the problem of meeting together to work on things, we all decided to break up the areas of the project and tackle them individually. This sometimes is scary to do, because the quality of work in one person’s section could be completely opposite of someone else’s. However, with all things said and done, I feel we did a good job on analyzing the problem.

I wouldn’t say we really set goals, we set deadlines. Since we only had a week to finish this project, we had to have certain things done by the time we were meeting on Sunday. We obviously wanted to have a good presentation, but we didn’t have an exact outline of goals we wanted to achieve.

Within this project, we were doing a PowerPoint presentation also. When thinking of all the possible pictures and layouts of the slides, it became a little unorganized. We wanted to have a lot of options, but then people would feel picked on or not as important if the group nixed their slide idea. Our brainstorming definitely lasted longer than it should have, I think the more people in a group, the more conflict there will be. This idea as a whole became a little messy because we all did a certain number of slides, and tried combining them together. We didn’t follow the function of identification of alternatives exactly, because I do remember quite a bit of criticism. Although there were a lot of alternatives we had to work with, and we did finally agree on what we were and were not keeping.

The evaluation function comes into play towards the end of the project. Those last few hours of completion caused everyone to get a little nervous. We wondered how the presentation was going to go and who was saying what. Do we like what everyone produced? It was the fine-tuning part of our project where all of the positive and negative characteristics were evaluated.