BUSN20017: A Reflection on Small Group Communication and its Impact

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BUSN20017 Assessment 3
Reflective Essay
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Introduction
Communication is important from a business point of view. Business communication can take place
may be externally or in-house. In today's day and age, the organization is responding to their
stakeholders effectively by making use of an effective channel of communication. This is a reflective
report that discusses the concept of business communication. Here, my understanding of the overall
course is elucidated. In total there are ten weeks that had been covered in the whole course and
various concepts and aspects of communication in a business entity have been covered in the course.
For this assessment, the topic of week 9 i.e., “Small group communication and processes” has been
selected. All these processes and my learning are briefly highlighted and stated in the section-1 of the
report. In section two, a small review of the literature has been given here. The next section covers the
application part of the two concepts that can help me in my future career aspirations. The report ends
with the concluding remarks.
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Section 1: Small group communication and processes
This week lecture began with the basics of group communication and processes. The lecture started
with a thorough discussion of the difference between the groups and the team. Before this lecture, I
was using the two terms interchangeably but this lecture helped me learn the basic difference between
them. The group is an agglomeration of individual coordinating and contributing their efforts. On the
other hand, a team is a group of people who are working on a common objective and challenges.
These definitions were enough for me to grab the real meaning of the two terms. I contemplate that
the former term has individual focus, whereas a team's focus in on the whole group. As the lecture
moved further with the presentation, my understanding of the team and group got clearer. I remember
that in one of the slide, the lecture explained a feature of a group. It said that in a group, the purpose
and goals along with directions are set by the manager. This grabbed my attention as I used to think
that group members decide and set them for the group after a thorough discussion on the positive and
negative aspects of the business. Conversely, in a team, the team leaders sit along with the team
members to decide the goals and set directions for the team member (Austin and Pinkleton, 2015). In
addition to this, the team leader also participates in the team efforts so as to get the work done on
time. This was something I have noticed but never try to understand. This was a first plus point of this
week.
I would like to appreciate the lecture in making the students understand the concept by incorporating
the real-life examples to which we students can easily relate. I remember the team and group
difference form the point made by him that why the football game has teams, not groups. The next
section was dedicated to the group development process. I was familiar with the concept as I read an
article on this. The processes contributing to group development, such as forming, storming, norming,
performing, and adjourning are no doubt easy to understand for me but there were many things that I
found I was not familiar with. The first thing was that the forming stage is crucial for the team as it
helps in gaining an understanding and getting insight into the goals and purpose of the group. Most of
the members in this stage are cautious as their behavior is compelled by the desire to get accepted by
other members of the team (Bennett & Olney, 2016). This was new to me. Furthermore, the forming
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stage part of the lecture to has new learning for me. I read more about the group development that
helped me in gaining a thorough understanding of this concept. Based on my understanding of this
concept, I realised that storming is the stage the managers need to take extra care as it has high
chances of conflicts among the members and head.
Once this is over, the concept of meeting and its importance in a business meeting. In addition to this,
the cost of each meeting was explained. To be very true, I have been a part of many social and
cultural group and I have attended many meetings. However, I have never ever thought that there are
categories of group meeting and there is some amount of cost attached to each meeting. In addition to
this, I got to learn about the questions one should think about before calling out a group meeting. In
fact, I realised that group leader should ponder on these question before calling out a meeting. This
would save the time of the team members as the issues are already figured out. In the due course of
this lecture, a section came where the lecturer discussed the planning and process of meeting. Various
rules were taught, such as temporal integrity rule, the rule of halves, the rule of three-quarters, the rule
of the sixth, and a few more (Bovee & Courtland, 2012). I could only understand the rules of sixths as
it was easy to understand. I learned that majority of the communication occurs within a context of a
relationship. One needs to give at least six positive comments for each negative comment.
The presentation highlighted that there many barriers to business communication and that can cost a
fortune to the company by virtue of miscommunication. These comprise poor verbal and non-verbal
communication, poor attitude of the member in the team meeting. In addition to this, some members
and team leaders are unwilling to implement the decisions. During the lecture, I realised that actually
happened in most of the club meetings. The best part of the week nine lecture was that it made me
learned the group decision emergence theory, wherein I understand that there are four stages of
emergence theory and each stage is crucial for group decision making.
Overall, this week helped me in understanding the concept of business communication and the
importance of team meeting. It was a learning experience for me and the learnings can help me in my
future aspirations.
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Section 2: Literature Review
According to Lesikar (2015), the small communication is characterised by interaction between two or
more individual that are connected by a common objective, shared identity, and mutual inference.
Small group communication in an organisation has many benefits. Bovee & Courtland (2012),
highlighted four benefits of small group communication. The first advantage emphasises on the
accessibility of the resources, such as time, money, talent, expertise, or ability and information. It has
been seen that a successful and high performing team or groups take the benefits of better
accessibility of the resources. The next advantage is that it results in a better understanding of the
concepts and their retention for a longer duration. The third advantage is that it brings diversity in the
decisions in the group. The fourth is that it provides creative idea generation. Some disadvantages of
working in the group. The first is that with group work, the problem of group coordination arises. The
second disadvantage is social loafing which means the performance of an employee decreases as the
number of group member increases. Communication gets also affected due to this. The third
disadvantage is that conflicts might occur due to a difference in opinion and poor communication
channel. The fourth disadvantage is that the poor attitude of the member might affect the flow of
information of the company.
Pearson (2017) highlighted the primary and secondary features of small group communication. The
primary features are related to group size, interdependence, and tasks. For efficient small
communication, the group must have a minimum of three members and not more than 15 members.
Kirkman & Turk, (2012) outlined that five to seven individuals are enough to have a prominent
communication. Increasing the group size will directly affect the influence of the information on the
small group. The concept of interdependence comes from the system theory that emphasises that
every component of a particular system work together in order to adapt to its surrounding
environment. Interdependence in the small group takes place when members coordinate to complete a
task. When something good or bad takes place with a particular member, it will affect all the member
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in the group. The task is the most crucial part of small group communication. With an efficient group
communication, the team members can carry out a task in an efficient manner.
Bovee, & Courtland, (2012) highlighted some barriers to effective communication in a small group.
These comprise differences in perception and viewpoint, use of non-verbal communication and
symbols, irrelevance to the receiver. In addition to this, stereotype and prejudice in the small group
often affect the group communication. To top it all, the cultural differences among the team members
also affect the group communication. It is important for the organisations to consider these barriers
while forming a team and establishing the team communication process. This would be helpful for
better efficiency of the team and effectiveness.
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Section 3: Application of the concepts for future aspirations
For this section, I have considered two concepts taught in the course. The first topic is week 7’s
cross-cultural communication and the second topic is week 4’s academic writing. The academic
writing is all about writing professional reports and documents. Being a part of the education sector,
writing a top-notch academic document is a part of the curriculum. It is important to write a
grammatically correct, professional document in order to grab good grades. In this week lecture, I
came across various conventions and generic norms of academic writing. In the future, if I have to
write a formal document, then these norms have to be followed. I understand if I have to write a
research paper, then I have to refer some researchers' work. For that reason, I have to use the right
reference style in order to avoid plagiarism and collision problem. In short, this week helped me in
understanding the concept of academic writing that will help me in my future research.
Talking about the inter-cultural communication concepts that I learned in the week 7 lectures, I
learned about various cultural communication styles. Being a student in a university where the
majority of students belong to other countries that have different culture and traditions, it is important
to understand their views. The cultural difference might impact the communication process and affect
the bond between them. Hence, the knowledge of intercultural communication can be very useful for
me. In addition to this, I have the desire to join a multinational company. Such an organisation
employs people from different background and countries and have clients from an overseas company.
Therefore, to have a better career in such companies, I need to make use of the concepts of
intercultural communication.
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Conclusion
Here, we have seen that business communication is an integral part of a business and if it gets
hindered, then this might create a big problem for the company. In the following report, there were
three sections. The first one discussed the concepts of small group communication taught in week 9 of
the course. It was found that there is a major difference between a group and a team. In addition to
this, section two covered the literature review part on the same topic. The third section discussed the
application of academic writing and inter-cultural communication taught in week 4 and 7,
respectively.
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References
 Austin, E.W. and Pinkleton, B.E., (2015). Strategic public relations management: Planning and
managing effective communication campaigns. Routledge.
 Bennett, J. C., & Olney, R. J. (2016). Executive priorities for effective communication in an
information society. The Journal of Business Communication (1973), 23(2), 13-22.
 Bovee, & Courtland. (2012). Business Communication Today, 10/e. Pearson Education India.
 Kirkman, J., & Turk, C. (2012). Effective writing: improving scientific, technical and business
communication. Routledge.
 Lesikar, R. V., Pettit, J. D., & Flatley, M. E. (2013). Basic business communication. Irwin.
 Murphy, H.A., Hildebrandt, H.W. and Thomas, J.P. (2017). Effective business communications.
New York: McGraw-Hill.
 Pearson, R. (2017). Business ethics as communication ethics: Public relations practice and the
idea of dialogue. In Public relations theory (pp. 111-131). Routledge.
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