CID1128 Hospitality Management in Groups Collaboratively

Introduction: 

To cope up with the present work culture and the dynamic environment that can be found in organizations, students as well as employees are required to work in groups collaboratively (Galegher, Kraut and Egido 2014). It needs certain tolerance and coordination that increase experience and they can learn interactively.

The key skills: these were built during the group presentation in Corporate Hospitality at GSM are-

• It generated a wide array of all alternative perspectives or the solutions of any problem.
• Working in groups has helped in getting a chance to work in a complex and large project instead of working individually (Hertz-Lazarowitz et al. 2013).
• In the presentation we could incorporate various point of views of different students because some of us were from different cultural background. They brought their special knowledge and experience to the presentation and explained their own orientations to us.
• We could explain our own methods and teach them to others for applying
• This has made us work under a structured experience and we can practice these skills applicable in handling future situations.

Some of the students had been beneficial through this collaborative approach because-

• The students who cannot explain their points in the classes, could speak in the groups.
• students could participate and interacted more efficiently
• group discussion has helped many students in overcoming their anonymity as well as passivity in the large classes
• collaborative works have paved our ways making us prepare for future profession.

For a team to work properly all of us were concerned to attend both the climate in the team and accomplishing our task in best possible way (Cheng et al. 2014). Although we had gained many of the skills from our experiences of the social interactions, this collaborative tasks proved to be beneficial for all of us. We have learnt to share information with others and used ideas for setting activities for accomplishing the assignment. The feedbacks have helped us to incorporate every idea in assessing and implementing the task.

Communication skills: in working in a group all of the team members are needed to speak their minds. They must be able to communicate explicitly on the emotional as well as intellectual levels. This effective communication will be helping in:

• expressing new ideas
• expressing own feelings openly but in a harmless way
• practicing to be a good listener. It helps listening carefully to the other’s ideas which is very essential in building a corporate mentality.
• Asking questions in order to clarify other ideas and senses.
• Sensing the feelings of the others based on their verbal or non-verbal communications.
• Learning to initiate conversations about the climate or process of the team when tension brews.
• Reflecting on the activities as well as the interactions of the groups and encouraging others to do the same. Unspoken issues and assumptions can prove to be harmful for the health of the team.

Skills for managing healthy climate in the group is mandatory for all the members. They need to demonstrate cohesion among them (Newsome, Waldo and Gruszka 2012). A sense of cohesion makes the members to exhibit various skills like openness, trust, support, respect, accountability, knowledge of responsibilities, problem solving, constructive feedbacks, self-awareness and self-disclosure.

Our team was formed for completing the assignment on merged school business. The purpose of this assignment was to analyse the case study and finding out complexities of the merger and recommend solutions on the strategies as well as practices to the management.

Group formation:

In this presentation, I was one of the group members and was responsible for keeping a good coordination within the team like a leader. Effect of communication is one of the major point in team work but the initial stage was group formation. Initially the members were selected and tasks of the team were decided (Cohen and Lotan 2014). The students themselves could form a group or can be assigned. In our case we selected our group members. Although we were known to each other as we were class mates but everyone introduced themselves and discussed their backgrounds and capabilities so that team can perform easily. I was chosen a team leader among all for making the communication clear and smooth (Dobao 2012). The leader was chosen according to personal skill and popularity. Then we exchanged contact numbers for keeping in touch all the time. After this, we discussed about the assignment on which everybody shared their experiences or perspectives. We structured a rough framework so that we can start to work on the assignment.

Understanding and managing groups:

For performing effectively in team it is essential to understand the team and manage its process properly. I found a hoard of new ideas from the range of events. These are:

• team works best if every member is given a chance to contribute to the group assignments and they are allowed to discuss in the meetings.
• I need to decide what I expect from the team at the beginning of the meeting and reveal them to all. I expressed my expectations for accomplishing the tasks within time and with efficiency.
• We in the group recorded all the ideas that came up with the discussions in the meeting and the decisions made during the process
• Proper allocation of the tasks as well as responsibilities among the group members is a very serious issue (Shernoff et al. 2014). For this I need to know strengths and backgrounds of every member. This is due to the fact that everyone was with different capabilities.
• Saving time for checking the outcomes of each other is mandatory in a team work.

Success: Through the event presentation we successfully learnt and took part in the collaborative work. W shoed equal commitment to achieve our objective. We all participated in task allocation, we successfully helped and got help from the others, we all handled the disagreements constructively and trusted each other (Grau and Whitebread 2012). We made sure that everyone knows the goal, we gave constructive criticism also accepted on our parts. We coordinated and mitigated the problems if someone feeling pressure due to the responsibility. We remained united even at the time of disagreement. We felt comfortable with one another while working. Regular open communications helped us to incorporate ideas and perform the task efficiently.

Problems and Required Changes: 

Some of the problems that I faced in this collaborative task were basically associated with personal traits of the team members. As the group was formed with students coming from different backgrounds, they had different perceptions for completing the task (Harrison and Rouse 2014). The chief problems were:

1. Some of the team members were acting dominantly. There were taking more share of the discussion. They started to tell their experiences and ideas but not ready to listen others (Remesal and Colomina 2013).Others who wanted to incorporate some new methods facing difficulty to get into the conversations.
2. We were lagging behind given time as some students were digressing from the designed framework and indulging in side stories.
3. Some of the students were introverts therefore, we could not listen to all ideas which was mandatory.
4. After getting know the case background we highlighted some issues. There we faced some disagreements that prevented us from getting a perfect solution (Cruickshank, Chen and Warren 2012).This problem moved the progress of our team down unexpectedly.
5. Finally, the most important problem that I as a leader faced was associated with task allocation. Most of the pupil wanted to take easier part and did not intended to take more responsibilities.

These problems must be attended and need to be discussed openly with all team members. Open is the only way to solve such problems. The members of the group must understand that the institution has arrange such tasks for increasing the collaborative mentality among the students so that they do not face problems in future (Tsay and Brady 2012). The key skills are to be built through this task. Listening properly to others, waiting for turn, allowing others to speak and tolerance are to be learnt for working in a team.

Recommendations: 

To improve the quality of the group project and getting better outcome, we must have solution to these problems.

• In order to avoid delays in the work initially we need to strictly follow the structure or the framework that was built initially. As a leader it is my duty to make all agree with the framework
• The team members must find the way to move forward. We can use resources and data for it.
• Spending very few minutes to listen to others for choosing the way. Suggestion about selecting the right way and next step is to be discussed.
• To discourage the dominating people use of humour is effective.
• Non-verbal actions can be used to encourage introvert students in participation.
• We need to look into the matters when we feel our groups are not progressing.
• The ethical issues emerged when students from other culture were discouraged by same team members, the leader must take initiative and strictly prohibit the practice.

Corporate events: The various corporate events that organisations arrange to enhance their business profile are-

• Seminars and Conferences.
• Trade Shows.
• Executive Retreats
• Incentive Programs
• Appreciation Events.
• Company or Organization Milestones.
• Team Building Events.
• Product Launch Events

Conclusion:

Therefore, it can be concluded that we learnt a lot from our group presentation. During the time of working together, various situations cropped up to test our decision making procedure. We successfully handled all the pressures as well as exceptions.

References:

Cheng, X., Li, Y., Sun, J. and Zhu, X., 2014, January. Easy collaboration process support system design for student collaborative group work: a case study. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 453-462). IEEE.

Cohen, E.G. and Lotan, R.A., 2014. Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom Third Edition. Teachers College Press.

Cruickshank, K., Chen, H. and Warren, S., 2012. Increasing international and domestic student interaction through group work: A case study from the humanities. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(6), pp.797-810.

Dobao, A.F., 2012. Collaborative writing tasks in the L2 classroom: Comparing group, pair, and individual work. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21(1), pp.40-58.

Galegher, J., Kraut, R.E. and Egido, C., 2014. Intellectual teamwork: Social and technological foundations of cooperative work. Psychology Press.

Grau, V. and Whitebread, D., 2012. Self and social regulation of learning during collaborative activities in the classroom: The interplay of individual and group cognition. Learning and Instruction, 22(6), pp.401-412.

Harrison, S.H. and Rouse, E.D., 2014. Let's dance! Elastic coordination in creative group work: A qualitative study of modern dancers. Academy of Management Journal, 57(5), pp.1256-1283.

Hertz-Lazarowitz, R., Kagan, S., Sharan, S., Slavin, R. and Webb, C. eds., 2013. Learning to cooperate, cooperating to learn. Springer Science & Business Media.

Newsome, S., Waldo, M. and Gruszka, C., 2012. Mindfulness group work: Preventing stress and increasing self-compassion among helping professionals in training. The Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 37(4), pp.297-311.

Remesal, A. and Colomina, R., 2013. Social presence and online collaborative small group work: A socioconstructivist account. Computers & Education, 60(1), pp.357-367.

Shernoff, D.J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Schneider, B. and Shernoff, E.S., 2014. Student engagement in high school classrooms from the perspective of flow theory. In Applications of Flow in Human Development and Education (pp. 475-494). Springer Netherlands.

Tsay, M. and Brady, M., 2012. A case study of cooperative learning and communication pedagogy: Does working in teams make a difference?. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(2), pp.78-89.