Group Dynamics in a COVID-19 World

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Love Friendship and Social Support

Improving one’s social life is an effective way of improving the quality of their lives in general. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted people’s lives economically, politically, and socially. Months after the beginning of the pandemic social gathering are still being discouraged, something that significantly affects how people interacts with their family and friends. Mental health experts are encouraging people to maintain a healthy social life in order to effectively deal with the effects of the pandemic in their lives. The stay-at-home orders have also reduced the chances of people making new friends, thus denying the chances of making life long social connection.

Health experts advise that one of the most effective ways of reducing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is by implementing discouraging social gathering; thus, friends cannot meet and form deeper relationships. With the social distancing has also affected the way people share intimacy by denying them sharing of proximity, for example, by hugging or shaking hands. The use of face masks has, on the other hand, cover the face; thus, people cannot see each other’s facial expression. This reduces the bandwidth of communication, thus denying people a chance to connect socially. All these can be resolved through the use of the internet and social media (Brannan & Mohr, 2020).

With most people working indoor and remotely, it is imperative to take deliberate measures to connect more with other people. The social media give people to connect with the rest of the world and better yet, connect with friends and family at any time. By scheduling time to connect with love ones, a person can form more profound and more meaningful connections remotely.

The reduced bandwidth of communication due to the denial of physical contact can be reverse by allocating social connections more time and having more in-depth and more honest discussions. The social media can also be used to make new friends, for example, a person looking to make friends can target people with whom they share interests, something that can find out from the information that people convey about themselves on social media.

What is Marriage/What is Family

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the significance of family and marriage to one’s life, due to the stay at home orders that forced families to spend time with each other. This has helped families and spouses know each other deeply, with others impressed and others disappointed, hence the increase of domestic violence incidences, and divorce rate.

Give that family is the basic social unit; its health has an impact on the general wellbeing of society. The economic effect of the COVID-19 has to lead to many people losing their jobs and since them to depend on fellow family members for basic needs like food and shelter. This has caused a further strain to the fabric of family and at times causing disputes among family.

Having forced family members to live together and interact with the COVID-19 pandemic presents an excellent opportunity to strengthen the family unit and help the family members know each other better. Family members who leave apart can strengthen the bonds between them by helping each other deal with the effects of the pandemic in each other’s lives.

For example, the siblings who have been dealing with their personal lives while apart can connect better and strengthen their ties by helping one other with things like helping each other find jobs or even lending money, where one cannot secure a loan from the financial sector. With the increased time times that couple spends with each other, people should now be more careful while making spousal choices (OpenStax, 2020).

Functions of Emotions

Our emotions have a significant impact on how we treat ourselves and the other people we interact with and inform us about ourselves and the world around us. Emotional reactions are usually unconscious responses to our environment as the body defends itself from danger. It is also imperative to note that if poorly expressed emotions can deny one social capital, and if expressed correctly in the social setting emotions can help create a bond among people. One can also express their emotions in the professional setting, for example, an artist expressing their emotions through their work, something that tends to grant then social, political and economic capital.

The most common emotional reaction towards the COVID-19 pandemic was fear, where every one of afraid of the owner and the wellbeing of the society at large. This has led to a lot of impulsive decision making and violence in extreme cases. In order to enhance the quality of their lives, people can study [proper communication methods in order to help them express their emotion better both in the professional and social setting.

People should educate themselves and each other on the various ways of enhancing emotional intelligence and helping them know that emotions are a motivating factor for both positive and negative behaviour. It is therefore essential for people to be aware when they are having an emotional reaction towards something and judge whether their the behaviour change due to emotions is positive or negative (Hwang & Matsumoto, 2020).

Culture and Emotion

Whether or not people express their emotions and how they express these emotions is heavily reliant on their cultural context. Some cultures encourage people to express their emotions, while others promote being calm and collected. It is, therefore, crucial for a person to be culturally aware while studying the emotions of the people there are interacting. This also helps us in determining how our emotional reactions if expressed, may be interpreted by those around us.

The COVID-19 pandemic has promoted the transfer of most interaction, especially at the professional level, online. This increases the chance of people interacting across cultures thus making it essential for people to educate themselves about the cultures of other people as well as how they express their emotions thus helping one understand them better during interactions.

Most meetings are now held online through conferencing software like Zoom that allows people to interact via video. This should, however, not be mistaken for face-to-face communications, due to the reduced bandwidth of communication. This makes it even harder to understand the emotional reactions of people from different cultures, something that can be corrected through careful integration of both verbal and nonverbal communication. It is also essential to actively decode the nonverbal cues used per a person used in communication by connecting them to their verbal communication, thus promoting a better understanding (Tsai, 2020).

Decision Making

With the transfer of most communication among team members to online, group dynamics have changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is, therefore, impactive to have optimally sized groups that maximize their productivity and that of the group at large. Even though bigger groups pool ideas, they involve more relationships and thus are more complicated.

It is also imperative to implement democratic leadership in the group to ensure that there is stability and that the group thrives beyond the members’ contribution into the group. The members should be asked to contribute their ideas that should be implemented in the group, with the most popular ideas within the group being picked. In order to avoid conformity, each member should be asked to justify their decisions, with evidence, thus depicting the entire though process (Barkan, 2011).

If well implemented the group dynamic can lead to the making of better decisions than individual because it involves the pooling of the ideas of all the group member. It is therefore crucial that even though people are working remotely due to COVID-19, team members should consult each other before making a decision. This, however, presents the challenge of groupthink whereby expert advice is undermined and the though of unqualified group members considered. This challenge can be solved by ensuring that there is more expertise hired into a group in order to provide various well-informed advice (Stangor et al., 2017).

Communication Climate

Maintaining a positive communication climate is best when cultivating healthy group dynamics. Here all members of a groups fell appreciated and respected, thus boosting their morale and making them even more productive to the group. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance of some individuals group members may be severely compromised.

It is therefore essential to have a communication climate that helps them deal with their current predicament in order to rehabilitate them to their back to their optimal performance by being supportive rather than eliminating them from the groups or any other compulsive measures. Even as team members communicate in a way that makes each other feel valued, it is also imperative to be assertive during communication for example through the use of nonverbal cue that complements their verbal communication (The Counseling Group PL, 2016).

It is also important for group members to continually evaluate the way they treat each other and improve their communication. It helps to keep improving the communication climate in the organization. Group members can be assertive, passive and aggressive depending on the circumstances and always ensure that they convey their message effectively. It is also imperative for team leaders in organizations to develop a communication strategy to be used in communication within a group, in addition to encouraging the members to be honest and feel free to express themselves (UniversalClass.com, n.d.).

Language

Verbal communication is an intricate part of the way we express ourselves through utterances that carry various meaning that is to be interpreted by the recipient. There are, therefore, rules that govern this language in order to ensure that information conveys the right wat and adequately received. This, however, essential to note that the number of utterances that one can make is infinite so long as other people can correctly decode the message being passed along (Lumen, 2020).

The cultural context of the language matters as people who have to communicate in a language other than their native language is likely to resent the language. Policing the way such communities or any other person uses the language can be perceived as oppressive (Gutierrez, 2020). It is therefore essential to allow people to use language in whatever way they wish so long as there is effective communication, something that can be used to help minority communities to interact more freely with the dominate population (Tatum, 2017).

References

Barkan, S. E. (2011). Sociology: Understanding and changing the social world. Boston, MA: Flat World Knowledge, Incorporated.
Gutierrez, J. (2020). bell hooks And The Extraordinary Power Of Names. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
Lumen. (2020). Chapter 3: Verbal Communication | Communication Studies. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
Stangor, C., Jhangiani, R., & Tarry, H. (2017). Principles of social psychology: 1st international edition.
Tatum, B. D. (2017). Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?: And other conversations about race. Basic Books.
The Counseling Group PL. (2016). 2 Minute Therapy- Are you Passive, Assertive or Aggressive? Video].
 

 
Tsai, J. (2020). Culture and emotion. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from http://noba.to/gfqmxtyw
UniversalClass.com. Understanding the Communication Climate. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
Hwang, H. & Matsumoto, D. (2020). Functions of emotions. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers.
OpenStax. (2020). 14.2: What Is Marriage? What Is a Family? – Social Sci LibreTexts. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
Brannan, D., & Mohr, C. (2020). 11.8: Love, Friendship, and Social Support. Retrieved 27 November 2020.