Nut Island

Item1. Do the people at Nut Island represent a cohesive team? Explain why or why not.

The cohesiveness of a group or team is the degree to which members are attracted to and motivated to remain part of it. A feeling of cohesion often can provide a source of loyalty, security, and esteem for team members. In a cohesive team, people value their membership, positively identify with it, and strive to maintain positive relationship with other members. Cohesive team is such a source of personal satisfaction; therefore its members are more energetic when working on team activities, less likely to be absent, less likely to quit the team, and more likely to be happy about performance success and sad about failures than members of less cohesive team. Members have more emotional involvement and commitment to the team and other team members.

There are two kind of dependence making a group or team cohesive: first one is informational dependence, which is reliance on group members on each other for information, resources, and feedback on performance. This dependence serves to generate the attachment that people have to the team and its members; the other one is normative dependence, which is reliance on group members for the satisfaction of social needs. This dependence serves to develop emotional attachment to the team. For example, people care about individual members, commit to the team and team mission, have a sense of belonging to the team. Combining these two dependence together will help create the cohesiveness. And then there are main factors that help create informational and normative dependence, in other words, cohesiveness as follows:

1. Shared goals and a common purpose: members in a team should create a mission and purpose that is clear and specific to the team, build a common commitment to and identification with the team’s purpose, identify specific performance goals that are tied directly to the team’s mission and activities, and clearly define...