Chapter Overview

The study of group communication may be among the most valuable educational investments a student can make. Personally and socially, the ability to work with and in groups has enormous potential for increasing your success and the success of the people around you--success in reaching goals and success in achieving potential.

Communication is a process. A model of that process includes an exigency, a source/encoder, messages, channels, a receiver/decoder, feedback, noise, context, and culture. Communication is transactional in that meaning is generated through the process of message exchange.

A number of important terms were defined as a way of making clear the focus and limitations of the book. The focus is on group communication, as opposed to interpersonal communication or mass communication or public communication. Therefore, the scope of this book is limited to the study of communication in contexts where three or more individuals relate to one another out of some common goal. The kind of group that is of most interest in this book is the small decision-making group. Its members are aware of one another's roles, and they communicate face to face.

A team is a group that has reached a high level of productivity. It has developed cohesiveness, creates critical work processes, and provides leadership for its development and performance. A team is very similar to a mature decision-making group except that a team may have more formally defined roles and have an ongoing mission.

Decision making, in this text, refers to a group task, rather than to an individual task. In this regard group goals are achieved by means of group choices among alternative behaviors or conceptualizations.

Some of the most common group experiences are information-sharing meetings, decision-making groups, and special-event meetings. Each of these group experiences always involves certain task-dimension concerns, such as identifying problems, analyzing data, and testing alternatives, and relationship issues, such as developing cohesiveness, power, and its use, and managing personality differences.

Groups evolve ways of doing things that derive from the group's values through a process of trial and error and reward and punishment. From this evolution, a group draws its norms, its behavioral rules. Then, too, behavior within the group develops along both task and relational dimensions.

In large measure, learning to be a good contributor to a group means learning to provide leadership in the task and relationship areas. Leadership is not the prerogative of any one individual; rather, leadership is everyone's business. In this regard productivity is the outcome of talk about tasks, and cohesiveness is the outcome of talk about relationships, the two dimensions of all group communication. Although these dimensions are not easily separated, it is useful to try to examine each.

In our study we view small groups as information-processing systems. People and things are brought together, processing takes place, and products are created. Feedback about the processes and products then becomes input. Systems have a number of important properties that help us understand groups. The properties are wholeness, interdependence, hierarchy, goals, self-regulation, balance, and equifinality. The group as an information-processing model provides the basic structure for this book.

All these concerns lead to the argument that people in groups must have certain ethical responsibilities to their groups: to do their best, to behave in the best interests of the group, to play fair, to listen carefully and take an active part, and to take on a participant-analyst role.