Virtual Group Reflection

The most important thing I have learned about working in a group in Spine classes this semester is the importance of communication to be able to work efficiently and cohesively. Communication is not only important for developing trust between group members, but also for co-operation, remaining goal-oriented and progressing (Terry, 2013). I feel like a lack of sufficient communication negatively affected some of our group activities, which allowed me the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. Our group did not all exchange cell-phone numbers until week 9, so communication was limited to class time, pre-organised meetings and Facebook. This was clearly insufficient because two people, myself included, do not use Facebook which presented

On a few occasions, our group opted not to meet up on a Wednesday afternoon and instead we individually contributed our allocation of the work to a google doc and communicated mostly online. It has been found that ‘virtual’ team work has benefits such as flexibility over time, increased contribution from all members, better idea generation and convenience (Levi, 2013). Although these benefits were observed to some extent, I personally also felt like virtual interactions did not provide the same motivation and group synergy as a physical meeting and this has been observed in other studies (Kirkman, Rosen, Gibson, Tesluk, & McPherson, 2002). I also felt that because everyone was doing their own work separately, the end product was less cohesive than if we had just collaborated and communicated as we progressed through steps together. This would also have enabled all group members to have the same level of understanding of the concepts (Rebori, 2000) to make presentations and future activities easier to coordinate. A particular example of where I found communication via virtual mediums to be detrimental to our groups’ progression was during the report write up for assignment 2, where one of our members contributed their delegated sections to the online document, however because English isn’t their first language, there was confusion over what they were trying to convey. They could have