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Communicating in Groups Applications and Skills 9th Edition Adams Solutions Manual instant download all chapter
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Chapter 6 – Working with Diversity in the Small Group
Summary
In Chapter 6 we present information about how students can begin to identify and capitalize on diversity
for better group outcomes. Several different types of diversity are discussed, including differences in
motives for joining a group, in learning styles and personality, gender, and in cultural backgrounds.
Further discussed are symbolic convergence and fantasy chaining as ways group members can bridge
their differences. We hope students will recognize that there are a variety of tools available for helping
them improve their own performance in groups, as well as the performance of the group as a whole.
When students observe their own or other groups, we want to encourage them not to rely solely on their
intuitions, hunches, and subjective impressions; instead, we want them to use the appropriate tools for
gathering more "objective" information to verify (or disqualify) their impressions about the diversity
within their particular groups. We also believe that the best way to teach students how to use these tools is
to have them practice identifying their differences in class.
Learning Activities
1. Have the students get into groups of four to six members. Ask them to identify five different
groups to which they individually belong in one column on a sheet of paper, then ask them to take
10 minutes to discuss with their other group members the motivations (task or socioemotional
oriented) behind their being in those groups, writing down those motivations in a column across
from the group column. Advise them that both motivations are often present in their group
membership, but that through reflection they should be able to identify the predominant
motivation. After the group discussion, have the class discuss the advantages of both motivations
to group development and outcomes drawing from their new understanding of their motivations
for group membership in their own lives.
2. Administer the Kolb Learning Cycle Inventory to the class, helping them to identify their
predominant learning style. Then have them break off into groups of four to six and discuss with
group members for 10 minutes their reflections on why they think they prefer their style of
learning over the other styles. Again, students will need to understand that each of them uses all
of the styles, but that they should be able to identify the one they rely on at the outset of a new
learning experience. After the group discussion, you can again facilitate a class discussion
whereby the advantages of each learning style are brought out in relief.
3. If time permits, administer the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, allowing students to identify their
personality type. Conduct a class discussion based on the text explanation of the different
personality types, encouraging the students to strategize ways that they might work with a
personality type different from their own. Encourage students to own the weaknesses of their type
described in the text and to acknowledge the strengths of types that have been frustrating to them
in the past.
4. Facilitate a class discussion about the students’ different family cultures using Christmas as the
focal point. Have students offer anecdotes about how their families do the Christmas holiday. Do
Copyright © 2015 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution
without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
they exchange gifts on Christmas Eve or on Christmas morning? Do they prepare a Christmas
feast, or go out to eat? How do they go about getting a tree? Do they celebrate Hanukah instead?
Are they from a culture that doesn’t celebrate Christian holidays (for example, Jehovah’s
Witnesses), and if so, is there a comparable holiday that those students can use to relate their
family cultures?
After 10 to 15 minutes of this, steer the discussions toward the concept of cultural practices as
arbitrary constructs. Some questions to ask might be:
a. Is any one way to celebrate a holiday the right way?
b. Can you imagine how you might celebrate an important holiday if you had been raised in
China? Israel? A different socioeconomic status?
c. How might you view the world differently if you were born a different race/ethnicity?
d. Can you accept that, just like families celebrating holidays in different ways, people from
cultures other than your own are simply processing the world from the perspective of the
culture in which they were raised?
5. Divide the class into two groups: females and males. Have each group share within their
respective groups the rules they learned about communicating verbally and nonverbally while
growing up. Afterward, facilitate a class discussion that encourages understanding about the
social prescriptions given to the sexes about how and why to communicate with others as a
female or a male. Questions to rise might be:
a. What rules about communicating are different between the sexes?
b. What rules are the same or similar?
c. Can you imagine being the opposite sex for a day and having to communicate using the
rules you have just heard about that the opposite sex has been taught to go by?
d. What are the advantages to the rules for male communication? Female communication?
e. How might you adopt some of those positive aspects of the opposite sex’s
communication style?
6. Read the following poem by Countee Cullen (African-American female poet, 1903-1946) to the
students (you may also distribute this or another poem to the students and have them read it
individually):
Incident
7. Initiate a “bull session” based on a topic that is common to all students and that is a likely source
of complaint and frustration (for example, the college registration process). Allow the students to
recount stories about their experiences with this frustrating situation until you identify a fantasy
chain developing. Then lecture on the fantasy as a developer of groupness, highlighting the fact
that the class has created said groupness through picking up the fantasy that one student offered.
Relate that concept to the fact that even though the class is composed of people from many
diverse cultures, genders, races, ethnicities, and personal backgrounds, they were still able to
create common ground by employing a fantasy that connected each of them with knowing nods
of agreed frustration and a “Been there, done that” sense of common relation.
8. After using the previous activity, ask the students to tape-record a meeting, especially if you have
broken the class into smaller project groups for a semester-long project. Have them listen to the
tape and identify fantasy chains, the function each chain served, and what the chain indicated
about the group’s collective identity.
9. “Walk together, Walk Apart” (adapted from Girl Scouts Activity Website,
http://www.scoutingweb.com/ScoutingWeb/SubPages/DiversAct.htm). Have two volunteers
come to the front of the class and face each other. Begin with having classmates identify
“differences” and as each “difference” is called out have the volunteers step apart. Then, have the
class identify “similarities” and as each “similarity” is called out have the classmates take a step
together.
While this activity highlights differences, it also forces students to see the many things we have in
common.
1. Sometimes students have a difficult time understanding the concept of fantasy chains. There is a
fantasy chain early in Part 1 (Leadership) of the video Communicating Effectively in Small
Groups that helps to explain this concept. In the video, the group launches on a fantasy about how
terrible the previous group’s publicity plan was for an annual seminar their organization presents.
By jointly trashing the previous group, the current group members are expressing their values and
saying, "We are so much better organized, harder-working," and so forth. Our students usually
understand immediately what a fantasy theme is and how it shapes a group’s reality. As an
alternative, the concept of fantasy theme is shown as a segment in the videotape Small Group
Concepts. This depicts a longer fantasy chain, with students discussing their too-slow-to-act
administration. Available from McGraw Hill Online http://highered.mcgraw-
hill.com/sites/0073534277/student_view0/videos__communicating_effectively_in_small_groups.
html
2. As an alternative, especially if you have used video resources throughout the semester, students
may be asked to analyze a group’s diversity from a film. Prospects include The Breakfast Club,
The Commitments, Lord of the Flies, The Poseidon Adventure, Twelve Angry Men, and Stand By
Me, Ocean’s Eleven, The Italian Job, and television shows like: The Office, Parks and
Recreation, Community and Outsourced.
Media Resources
1. Communicating Effectively in Small Groups, all four parts. Available from McGraw Hill Online
http://highered.mcgraw-
hill.com/sites/0073534277/student_view0/videos__communicating_effectively_in_small_groups.
html
2. The Breakfast Club (1985; 92 minutes). Shows how five high school students, each very different
from one another, become a cohesive group during a Saturday morning detention period. See Part
2 of this manual (on using media resources) for ideas about specific assignments
3. The Commitments (1991; 118 minutes). Shows how a diverse group of Dubliners form a
rock-and-roll band, and eventually break up. See Part 2 of this manual for specific assignments
4. Lord of the Flies (1990; 90 minutes). Based on William Golding’s classic novel, shows a group
of boys stranded on an island and the group/subgroup formation that occurs. See Part 2 of this
manual for specific assignments
5. Diversity: Food for Thought. (DVD, CRM Learning, 2720 Loker Avenue West, Suite Q.,
Carlsbad, CA 93010-6606; 1-800-421-0833) http://www.crmlearning.com/Diversity-Food-for-
Thought-P54324.aspx
6. Communicating Between Cultures. Suggests ways to communicate more effectively across
cultures. It also addresses the discomfort people often feel when dealing with issues of race or
gender. (video, 30 minutes; Insight Media, 2162 Broadway, New York, NY 10024-6620; 1-800-
233-9910)
7. Different Like You: Appreciating Diversity in the 21st Century. (DVD, CRM Learning, 2720
Loker Avenue West, Suite Q., Carlsbad, CA 93010-6606; 1-800-421-0833)
http://www.crmlearning.com/Different-Like-You-P56427.aspx
8. In the Company of Men. Examines the conflicting attitudes between company foremen and the
hard-core unemployed. Appropriate for showing co-cultural differences in attitudes. (1969, film,
52 minutes; William Greaves Productions, 80 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10011;
Introvert Extravert
Strengths Can work independently Interacts well with others
Careful before acting Active doer
Weaknesses Dislikes interruption Impulsive/Impatient
Misses opportunities to act Needs change/variety
Sensor Intuitor
Strengths Pays attention to detail Sees possibilities
Patient/Systematic Likes complicated issues
Weaknesses Cannot imagine future Lacks patience
Frustrated by complexity Jumps to conclusions
Thinker Feeler
Strengths Logical/Analytical Considerate of feelings
Fair but firm Maintains harmony
Weaknesses Doesn’t notice feelings Can be disorganized
Misunderstands others’ values Is not logical/objective
Perceiver Judger
Strengths Sees all sides of an issue Is decisive
Is flexible/spontaneous Persists in staying with a task
Weaknesses Is indecisive Stubborn and inflexible
Does not plan Decides with insufficient data
Individualism/Collectivism
Builders (1901-1945)
Characteristics
• Are cautious about spending money
• Will work hard at a single task
Strengths
• Are careful with resources
• Plan ahead
Weaknesses
• Too cautious with resources
• May lack spontaneity and flexibility
Boomers (1946-1964)
Characteristics
• Major consumers
• Value education
Strengths
• Are confident
• Will challenge “old ways” of doing things
Weaknesses
• Think they’re right all the time
• Expect others to hold similar beliefs/values
Gen-Xers (1965-1981)
Characteristics
• Distrust institutions, particularly government
• Are comfortable with diversity
Strengths
• Are independent thinkers
• Are sensitive to people; value relationships
Weaknesses
• Appear pessimistic and negative
• Are unwilling to put personal/life concerns aside to
complete task
N-Geners (1982-1997)
Characteristics
• Raised by over-involved (helicopter) parents
• Value diversity
Strengths
• Open-minded and tolerant; welcome different viewpoints
• Are optimistic
Weaknesses
• Seem to lack initiative; seem unmotivated
Katherine Adams and Gloria J. Galanes, Communicating in Groups: Applications and Skills, 9th ed. Copyright
1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014 by McGraw Hill, Boston, MA. All Rights Reserved.
There is a field where this perpetuity and this The Peasant’s Wall
escape from Time refresh the traveller with
peculiar power. It is a field of grass in the uplands across which the
wind blows with vigour towards distant hills. Here a peasant of the
place (no one knows when, but long ago) fenced in his land with
Roman stones. The decay of Islam had left him aimless, like all his
peers. He could not build or design. He could not cut stone or mould
brick. When he was compelled to enclose his pasture, the only
material he could use was the work of the old masters who had
trained his fathers but whom he had utterly forgotten or remembered
only in the vague name of “Roum.” It was long before the reconquest
that he laboriously raised that wall. Some shadow of Turkish power
still ruled him from Constantine. No one yet had crossed the sea
from Europe to make good mortar or to saw in the quarries again. It
is with a lively appreciation that one notes how all he did is perishing
or has perished. The poor binding he put in has crumbled. The slabs
slope here and there. But the edges of those stones, which are
twenty times older than his effort, remain. They will fall again and lie
where he found them; but they and the power that cut them are alike
imperishable.
It has been said that the men of antiquity had The Landscape of
no regard for landscape, and that those principal Antiquity
poems upon which all letters repose betray an indifference to
horizons and to distant views. The objection is ill-found, for even the
poems let show through their admirable restraint the same passion
which we feel for hills, and especially for the hills of home: they
speak also of land-falls and of returning exiles, and an Homeric man
desired, as he journeyed, to see far off the smoke rising from his
own fields and after that to die. But much stronger than anything
their careful verse can give us of this appetite for locality is the
emplacement of their buildings.
Mr. March-Phillips has very well described the The Theatre of
spirit which built a certain temple into the Calama
scenery of a Sicilian valley. Here (he says), in a place now deserted,
the white pillars ornament a jutting tongue of land, and are so placed
that all the lines of the gorge lead up to them, and that the shrine
becomes the centre of a picture, and, as it were, of a composition. Of
this antique consciousness of terrestrial beauty all southern Europe
is full, and here in Guelma, upon an edge of the high town, the site of
the theatre gives evidence of the same zeal.
The side of a hill was chosen, just where the platform of the city
breaks down sharply upon the plain below. There, so that the people
and the slaves upon the steps could have a worthy background for
their plays, the half-circle of the auditorium was cut out like a quarry
from the ground. Beyond the actors, and giving a solemnity to the
half-religious concourse of the spectators, the mountains of the Tell
stood always up behind the scene, and the height, not only of those
summits but of the steps above the plain, enhanced the words that
were presented. We have to-day in Europe no such aids to the
senses. We have no such alliance of the air and the clouds with our
drama, nor even with our patriotism—such as the modern world has
made it. The last centuries of the Empire had all these things in
common: great verse inherited from an older time, good statuary,
plentiful fountains, one religion, and the open sky. Therefore its
memory has outlasted all intervening time, and it itself the Empire,
(though this truth is as yet but half-received,) has re-arisen.
There is one great note in the story of our race The Greatness of
which the least learned man can at once The First Four
appreciate, if he travels with keen eyes looking Centuries
everywhere for antiquity, but which the most learned in their books
perpetually ignore, and ignore more and more densely as research
develops. That note is the magnitude of the first four centuries.
Everybody knows that the ancient world ran down into the
completed Roman Empire as into a reservoir, and everybody knows
that the modern world has flowed outwards from that reservoir by
various channels. Everybody knows that this formation of a United
Europe was hardly completed in the first century, that it was at last
conscious of disintegration in the fifth. The first four centuries are
therefore present as dates in everybody’s mind, yet the significance
of the dates is forgotten.
Historians have fallen into a barren contemplation of the Roman
decline, and their readers with difficulty escape that attitude. Save in
some few novels, no writer has attempted to stand in the shoes of
the time and to see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus
Aurelius or the stud-groom of Sidonius’ Palace. We know what was
coming, the men of the time knew it no more than we can know the
future. We take at its own self-estimate that violent self-criticism
which accompanies vitality, and we are content to see in these 400
years a process of mere decay.
The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is
hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not
expand, especially towards the close of that time. There was hardly
an industry or a class (notably the officials) that had not by an
accumulation of experience grown to create upon a larger and a
larger scale its peculiar contribution to the State; and far the larger
part of the stuff of our own lives was created, or was preserved, by
that period of unity.
That our European rivers are embanked and canalised, that we
alone have roads, that we alone build well and permanently, that we
alone in our art can almost attain reality, that we alone can judge all
that we do by ideas, and that therefore we alone are not afraid of
change and can develop from within—in a word, that we alone are
Christians we derive from that time.
Our theory of political justice was partly formulated, partly handed
on, by those generations; our whole scheme of law, our conceptions
of human dignity and of right. Even in the details our structure of
society descends from that source: we govern, or attempt to govern,
by representation because the monastic institutions of the end of the
Empire were under a necessity of adopting that device: we associate
the horse with arms and with nobility because the last of the Romans
did so.
If a man will stand back in the time of the Antonines and will look
around him and forward toward our own day, the consequence of the
first four centuries will at once appear. He will see the unceasing
expansion of the paved imperial ways. He will conceive those great
Councils of the Church which would meet indifferently in centres
1500 miles apart, in the extremity of Spain or on the Bosphorus: a
sort of moving city whose vast travel was not even noticed nor called
a feat. He will be appalled by the vigour of the western mind between
Augustus and Julian when he finds that it could comprehend and
influence and treat as one vast State what is even now, after so
many centuries of painful reconstruction, a mosaic of separate
provinces. He will calculate with what rapidity and uniformity the
orders of those emperors who seem to us the lessening despots of a
failing state were given upon the banks of the Euphrates, to be
obeyed upon the Clyde. He will then appreciate why the Rome which
Europe remembers, and upon which it is still founded, was not the
Rome of literature with its tiny forum and its narrow village streets,
but something gigantic like that vision which Du Bellay had of a
figure with one foot upon the sunrise and its hands overspreading
ocean.
Indeed this great poet expresses the thing more vividly by the
sound of three lines of his than even the most vivid history could do.
This was the might and the permanence from which we sprang.
To establish the character of the Empire and its creative mission is
the less easy from the prejudice that has so long existed against the
action of religion, and especially of that religion which the Empire
embraced as its cataclysm approached. The acceptation of the
creed is associated in every mind with the eclipse of knowledge and
with a contempt for the delights which every mind now seeks. It is
often thought the cause, always the companion, of decay, and so far
has this sentiment proceeded that in reading books upon Augustine
or upon Athanasius one might forget by what a sea and under what
a sunlight the vast revolution was effected.
It is true that when every European element had mixed to form
one pattern, things local and well done disappeared. The vague
overwhelming and perhaps insoluble problems which concern not a
city but the whole world, the discovery of human doom and of the
nature and destiny of the soul, these occupied such minds as would
in an earlier time have bent themselves to simpler and more feasible
tasks than the search after finality. It is true that plastic art, and to a
less extent letters, failed: for these fringes of life whose perfection
depends upon detail demand for their occasional flowering small and
happy States full of fixed dogmas and of certain usages. But though
it lost the visible powers antiquity had known, the Empire at its end,
when it turned to the contemplation of eternity, broadened much
more than our moderns—who are enemies of its religious theory—
will admit. The business which Rome undertook in her decline was
so noble and upon so great a scale that when it had succeeded,
then, in spite of other invasions, the continuity of Europe was saved.
We absorbed the few barbarians of the fifth century, we had even the
vitality to hold out in the terror and darkness of the ninth, and in the
twelfth we re-arose. It was the character of the Western Empire
during the first four centuries, and notably its character towards their
close, which prevented the sleep of the Dark Ages from being a
death. These first four centuries cast the mould which still constrains
us; they formed our final creed, they fixed the routes of commerce
and the sites of cities, and perpetually in the smallest trifles of
topography you come across them still: the boundary of Normandy,
as we know it to-day, was fixed by Diocletian. If there can be said of
Europe what cannot be said of any other part of the world, that its
civilisation never grew sterile and never disappeared, then we owe
the power of saying such a thing to that long evening of the
Mediterranean.