Page 129 - Effective group discussion theory and practice by Adams, Katherine H. Brilhart, John K. Galanes, Gloria J

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fail. Members who helped their groups succeed were knowledgeable and skillful,
highly motivated to complete the task well, willing to listen and share information,
and expressed pleasure—as well as fear—about the task. On the other hand, group fail-
ure was attributed to members who were selfish and resentful, were either overconfi-
dent and cocky or demonstrated no enthusiasm for the task, failed to share
information, and were poor listeners. Your traits and personality characteristics, dis-
cussed later, are the fundamental input variables that contribute to your competence
Trait as a group member.
A relatively enduring, A trait is a consistent pattern of behavior or other observable characteristic and
consistent pattern of is influenced by both genetics and environment. Some traits (e.g., your eye color) are
behavior or other unchangeable, but others can be modified. When we refer to traits in this section, we
observable acknowledge that you may have a predisposition to behave in a certain way, but we
characteristic.
also think you have some ability to change your behavior. Our behavior is also deter-
Attitude mined by our attitudes. An attitude is a cluster of values and beliefs someone holds
A network of beliefs about another person, groups of people, object, or idea. We infer attitudes from what
and values, not people say and do. We study individual traits, characteristics, and attitudes in a small
directly measurable, group course because research has confirmed that some traits and attitudes are better
that a person holds for groups than others. 11
toward an object, A number of personal traits have been shown to influence behavior in groups,
person, or concept; including psychological sex type and verbal argumentativeness. We will now dis-
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produces a tendency cuss four general traits and characteristics that have a significant bearing on the type
to react in specific of group member someone can be: communication apprehension, cognitive complex-
ways toward that ity, and self-monitoring. These traits and the personality characteristics we discuss
object, person, or
concept. later represent examples of deep diversity that we described in Chapter 4.

Communication Apprehension
Communication Communication apprehension is the anxiety or fear that people experience when they
Apprehension try to speak in a variety of social situations, including in small groups. Sometimes
Anxiety or fear of called shyness or reticence, communication apprehension (CA) has been extensively
speaking in a variety researched, particularly by James McCroskey and his associates. They note that high
of social situations, CA has far greater negative repercussions in group settings than other settings. For
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including in group example, high CA group members speak much less than members low in CA, choose
settings; reticence; seats where leaders can overlook them, make more irrelevant comments, are less
shyness. likely to become a group’s leader, and are more likely to express strong agreement,
even when inwardly they disagree. High CAs are perceived as making little contribu-
tion to the group, with others seeing them as less desirable members than low CAs.
High CAs even have a lower opinion of themselves than other members have of them. 15
Some reticence about speaking has a cultural origin. Porter and Samovar explain that
in certain cultures, particularly high-context ones (see Chapter 4), people do not rely on
verbal communication to the same extent as people in low-context cultures like the United
States and are sometimes suspicious of people who talk a lot. A member from this type
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of culture may have a very difficult time adapting to the noisy, verbal, direct communica-
tion style of most Americans. It is particularly important for others in the group to recog-
nize and be patient with this possible source of reticence to communicate.

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