TEAM AND SOCIOMETRY

MODULE 2

 Team Interaction Patterns: Who Talks Most and to Whom

Patterns of team interaction during meetings greatly affect the team's communication, and, in turn, the creativeness of its members. A TRUE STORY: I stumbled onto the impact of team interaction patterns when I served on a committee I found particularly frustrating. I disliked those meetings, and I couldn't figure out why. I asked one of my colleagues what he thought. All he said was, "I wish he (the team leader) would stop talking so we could talk." Yet we both agreed that the team leader did not talk that much. Rather his timing threw us off. He followed an interruptive pattern in which he always made a short comment whenever anyone else said anything. This stopped free discussion.

 So I asked the team leader how he viewed the meetings. "It's like pulling teeth to get that bunch to talk," he said. How remarkable. We wanted to talk, and he wanted us to talk, and yet we all allowed an unproductive team interaction pattern to stop an open discussion. I asked him what he would prefer, and he described an ideal interaction where each team member talks freely in order to move the team closer to its goals. Asked how we could achieve this pattern, he said that he would stop talking. Wow, he realized that he was partly responsible for what happened. I suppose in his mind an interactive pattern would emerge if he stopped talking.

 When he did stop talking, a long silence ensued. Finally someone asked if he felt okay. At his insistence, the discussion continued without his usual short comments. Very quickly the old interruptive pattern appeared as another person took over the role of team leader. Apparently we liked this dominant team leader pattern. Thus I learned the power and effects of Team Interaction Patterns. Actually, these patterns produce good results in the right situation. They only become anti-creativity when a team uses one pattern almost exclusively or uses a pattern at the wrong time.

 Teams use many patterns: Spray And Pray: One person talks in a longwinded monologue, and hopes, in the absence of feedback, that people remain interested and understand the monologue. Tinkers to Evans to Chance: Three people form a dominating clique and exclude other people from the discussion. Endless Dialogue: The team leader and one person engage in extended dialogue, often with little apparent substance.

 The Outsider: One team member uses silence, doodling, reading, and facing away from the team center to show lack of attention. The interaction patterns of your team will tell you a lot. Do your team's interaction patterns prove useful? Do they move the team toward desirable goals or do they waste valuable time? Are they anti-creativity? Worse yet, do you contribute to the problem?

 Share this concept with your team and discuss it at the end of a meeting. Ask everyone to identify at least two team interaction patterns that occurred during the meeting and assess their helpfulness. Were they anti-creativity? And discuss ways to improve the interaction patterns of your team to help achieve your goals and improve team creativity. What creativity triggers might you employ? Consider this an important part of self directed team building and one way to help your team move toward creativeness and excellence.

 Sociometry is a method for, describing, discovering and evaluating social status, structure, and development through measuring the extent of acceptance or rejection between individuals in groups. Franz defines sociometry as a method used for the discovery and manipulation of social configurations by measuring the attractions and repulsions between individuals in a group.

 It is a means for studying the choice, communication and interaction patterns of individuals in a group. It is concerned with attractions and repulsions between individuals in a group. In this method, a person is asked to choose one or more persons according to specified criteria, in order to find out the person or persons with whom he will like to associate.

 Jacob Levy Moreno coined the term sociometry and conducted the first long-range sociometric study from 1932-38 at the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson, New York. Jacob Moreno defined sociometry as the inquiry into the evolution and organization of groups and the position of individuals within them. He goes on to write As the science of group organization -it attacks the problem not from the outer structure of the group, the group surface, but from the inner structure.

 Sociometric explorations reveal the hidden structures that give a group its form: the alliances, the subgroups, the hidden beliefs, the forbidden agendas, the ideological agreements, and the stars of the show Measurement of relatedness can be useful not only in the assessment of behavior within groups, but also for interventions to bring about positive change and for determining the extent of change.

 A sociogram is a graphic representation of social links that a person has. It is a graph drawing that plots the structure of interpersonal relations in a group situation. Sociograms were developed by Jacob L. Moreno to analyze choices or preferences within a group. They can diagram the structure and patterns of group interactions. A sociogram can be drawn on the basis of many different criteria: Social relations, channels of influence, lines of communication etc. Those points on a sociogram who have many choices are called Stars. Those with few or no choices are called isolates.

 Construction To construct a class sociogram, ask each pupil to confidentially list two students to work with on an activity. The topic does not matter; in most cases the social relationships will be relatively constant regardless of the activity. Make sure they put their own name on the top of the paper. Write up this data as a chart. Different-sized circles, as in the diagram, give visual impact to these relationships and make it easy to discern the various degrees of popularity. This can be done either on a computer, or by hand tracing. Arrows indicate who is choosing who.