Functional Perspective on Group Decision Making Theory

I recently finished a class and as part of the requirements, we had to do a group researcher project. We met in the library every Tuesday night for the duration of the class. In our first meeting, we had conversation about who knew what to see what the focus of our project would be, engaging in what communication experts call promotive communication. Promotive communication enables people to set goals they want to accomplish. We later chose to take the traditional successful path of researching through problem analysis, goal setting and evaluation. It seems like with every research problem I’ve done, there has been that one person in the group who always shows up late, if at all, or doesn’t do their fair share of the work. This time did not prove to be different. This guy would always come late and be disruptive by talking n his cell phone. The other group members, including myself would tell him to get off the phone so that we could finish our work and be productive, an action known as counteractive communication. Once he finally realized that we would not let him continue to disrupt our progress, we were able to get back on task and finish the project.