Reflection Paper 3

Team Forgotten

 Reflection Paper #3

             For our third and final reflection paper our group wanted to focus on the informal roles that exist within our group. The textbook defines informal roles as a role that emerges through group member interaction, used by the member with the appropriate communicative and group skills needed to fulfill the role function. Prior to this meeting we filmed our last meeting at Milner Library. We then analyzed the video to see what kinds of informal roles were apparent in our conversations. 

             The first informal role that we took notice of was a deviant role. The deviant role we found was special pleader. A special pleader is a person that introduces irrelevant information and supports it. Our special pleader was Murphy in our film. Murphy interrupts several times and adds to what is already being said. What he says isn’t particularly relevant or helpful, it just overlays and sometimes interrupts the flow of the conversation. It’s not a bad thing and doesn’t make our meeting fall apart or anything, but it isn’t really a necessary part of the communication process. 

             Another informal role that’s prevalent in our group is information provider or information giver. Groups in Process defines it as the one who contributes relevant information (Barker, 63). The information provider exercises the ability to synthesize information. In this role the member contributes information in the form of statistics, facts and quotations. Tyler was our information provider in the video that we recorded. He details exactly what we need to go over and how we should go about accomplishing our goals. He highlights what we have already accomplished as well as what more needs to be done. Tyler talks about volunteering at the event, how much money we will make and what times we needed to be there.

             Tyler also assumes the informal role of task leader. The text defines task leader as the one who takes charge, and has excellent problem solving abilities. Some of Tyler’s moments where he acts as task leader are not present in our video. But before we shot it we talked about how to even film the video and what programs to use. We then had to use problem solving to figure out how to get the video online. That ended up being harder than we expected but Tyler had a better grasp on how to use YouTube than the rest of us so that worked out fine.



 Video: Reflection Paper 3 Video