Developing Professional Skills BSM22004 Assignment Sample
Reflective Essay on Teamwork and Professional Skill
This reflective essay examines an individual’s experience of creating a coffee shop poster with a group. Using Gibbs Reflective Cycle and Tuckman’s team development model, it explores role allocation, communication, teamwork, feedback and group performance, offering useful insights for students seeking assignment help. The action plan highlights regular communication to improve collaboration and strengthen professional skills in future group assignments.
Individual Rationale: ‘A Day in the Life of our Coffee Shop’
Introduction
This essay reflects on the process undertaken for preparing the poster presentation task of the assignment. The poster was based on a day in the life of a barista at a coffee shop, and the essay presents an individual rationale from the process of participating in the poster task. The reflection itself is structured across the Gibbs Reflective Cycle, which covers six different stages of reflection for covering different personal perspectives which is useful for characterising the intended rationale (Ezezika and Johnston, 2022). While discussing the reflected experiences, the essay will also incorporate theories from the team working under Tuckman’s team development stages to show how the experience unfolded when working on the poster task (Bonebright, 2010). The conclusion will summarise the key points of the rationale and the action plan arising from completing the reflective cycle.
Reflection
Description
The group members agreed on dividing their responsibilities across three roles an assistant outlet manager, a barista and a cook. These three roles are essential and found in all coffee shops, and three roles were considered appropriate for the workings of a small coffee shop. Of the group, I volunteered for the role of barista, as the other group members felt their talents were more suited to fulfil the roles of an assistant outlet manager and a cook. By relating this description with Tuckman’s theory, I understand this represents the first stage of ‘forming’, where group members form their shared purpose as part of their identity with the roles (Young, 2023). When developing the poster, the group member assigned as the cook took the lead in researching the daily job requirements involving the functioning of a coffee shop. After agreeing on our roles, I agreed to design the poster whereas the group member assigned as the manager contributed ideas for the design process, the team role characteristics and other practical suggestions to guide the group. Feelings
The group’s ease of formation led us to select our roles in the poster’s scenario of a coffee shop, as well as in preparing the poster through a division of responsibilities. The overall process was relieving as there was no underlying tension or ill-feeling among the group members. From Tuckman’s model, the second stage of ‘storming’ in group dynamics presents the characteristics of conflict and resistance to becoming a collective team, which we avoided due to our unity and common agreement in the direction of the group’s progression (Young, 2023). Due to the small scope of the poster, I believe this removed the potential for creating team conflicts at the start. If the scope of the poster’s contents and the roles of the team members were more complicated, the typical 'storming' characteristics would have been felt in the group's dynamics.
Evaluation
In the group situation, what worked well was the alignment of shared interests, perspectives and openness of communication to smoothly progress the first two stages of team dynamics. As Tuckman’s model is linear in its designation of successive team dynamic stages, the third stage of ‘norming’ also progressed positively as there were no points of conflict that needed to be addressed and overcome in the previous stage of ‘storming’ (Kozlowski and Ilgen, 2016). Based on the research and inputs of the group members, I was able to develop the poster and its contents reflecting our shared vision for the scenario of a day in the life of a coffee shop worker. However, at this stage, I found that our total lack of conflict bypassed the outcome of normalising team dynamics in the 'storming' stage (Liao et al., 2023). As such, we were not giving each other feedback for our collective inputs in the poster, as we wordlessly agreed on the continued scope of our roles and responsibilities towards the workings of the poster. This presented a situation where I had to ask the group to communicate their awareness of how the progress was shaping and voice their concerns if our collective vision was not meeting practical outputs in reality. Had I not noticed this, it is possible that problems could have occurred, as we then started to communicate more expressively and frequently.
Analysis
As the underlying assumptions of the group dynamics were cleared out, the group performance resumed its smooth progression towards the ‘performing’ stage in Tuckman’s model. We voiced our thoughts, gave feedback and presented opinions on the minute details to create higher performance (Salcinovic et al., 2022). The high performance of our group, as a team, flowed from this position by ensuring a frictionless development of the group's goal of preparing the poster task. Again, as the poster was small in scope, the opportunities for problem-solving or having to make complex decisions collectively were reduced, resulting in our smooth continuation towards the completion of the task. This also led to the completion of the group's work, which is the 'adjourning' stage in Tuckman’s model (Bonebright, 2010).
Conclusion
From this experience, I learned the importance of being cautious in ensuring our team was voicing our opinions, giving feedback, and generally being expressive more spontaneously to shape the group dynamics more effectively. It helped me to understand how communication may not be guaranteed even when the group dynamics start seamlessly and helps me to keep this in mind if I experience a similar group working situation in the future.
Action Plan
In future scenarios involving group work, I will ensure that the group members communicate as a practice even when they assume their ideal roles wordlessly. I will use daily chat groups to ensure this seamlessness in communication occurs when the group is not physically present as well (Gervits et al., 2016). This will help maintain the transparency and continuous occurrence of communication at all times.
Conclusion
In summary, the main highlight of the experience was finding out the practical application of Tuckman’s model in the formation of the group, and how the group was able to agree on their ideal roles for both the presentation and the segment of a day in the life of a coffee shop worker. The action plan defines the importance of communicating routinely between team members, even when team dynamics are flowing in a successful completion of stages.
References
Bonebright, D.A. (2010). 40 Years of Storming: a Historical Review of Tuckman’s Model of Small Group Development. Human Resource Development International, [online] 13(1), pp.111–120. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13678861003589099.
Ezezika, O. and Johnston, N. (2022). Development and Implementation of a Reflective Writing Assignment for Undergraduate Students in a Large Public Health Biology Course. Pedagogy in Health Promotion, [online] 9(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/23733799211069993.
Gervits, F., Eberhard, K. and Scheutz, M. (2016). Team Communication as a Collaborative Process. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, [online] 3. doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2016.00062.
Kozlowski, S.W.J. and Ilgen, D.R. (2016). Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, [online] 7(3), pp.77–124. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2006.00030.x.
Liao, H., Harris, T.B., Li, N. and Han, Y. (2023). Team conflict at the core: Exploring the influence of critical team member conflict on team creative functioning. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, [online] 97(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12477.
Salcinovic, B., Drew, M., Dijkstra, P., Waddington, G. and Serpell, B.G. (2022). Factors Influencing Team Performance: What Can Support Teams in High-Performance Sport Learn from Other Industries? A Systematic Scoping Review. Sports Medicine - Open, [online] 8(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-021-00406-7.
Young, S.P. (2023). The Stages of Team Development: Examples From the Real World. Management Teaching Review, [online] 9(2). doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/23792981231170617.
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