The importance of group dynamics to performance and creativity: insights from follow-up research on the TASI course
In 2024, the TASI course was back in its in-person format. As we already highlighted in this series, there were quite many new elements introduced in comparison to the previous years. One such novelty was the collaboration with a master student Sigrid Brydolf, who followed the course focusing on group work dynamics and how it affects performance and creativity in project groups. In this article, Sigrid reflects on her journey as a follow-up researcher of the course and shares many intresting insighst which we will certianly consider when developing the course in the future.
During the spring of 2024, I conducted my master’s thesis at the Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering (SEED) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Given my interest in transdisciplinarity in research and education, I decided to reach out to Kateryna Pereverza about supervising my thesis, a researcher at KTH specializing in urban transition governance. Together, me and Kateryna came up with the idea to investigate the influence of group dynamics on performance and creativity in student groups in transdisciplinary university courses, since group dynamics have proven to be vital for performance and creativity levels in small, temporary working groups, but has rarely been mentioned in literature on transdisciplinarity in research and education.
The transdisciplinary-oriented course held at KTH during the spring of 2024 served as a unique opportunity for me as a researcher to conduct ethnographic field research and closely investigate the issue of group dynamics in student groups. The course, called “Transdisciplinary Approaches to Systems Innovation (TASI)”, has a transdisciplinary approach to teaching, where students from diverse backgrounds work to propose solutions to real-life sustainability challenges in collaboration with local stakeholders. In this year’s course edition, the course was done in collaboration with Stockholm Municipality, and the students were supposed to apply the framework of modular participatory backcasting (mPB) to come up with innovative solutions for a sustainable city center in 2050.
Building relationships with project groups
For the purpose of my study, I introduced myself to the students at the beginning of the course, and thereafter performed my observations and analysis of group dynamics patterns in connection to performance and creativity. Before conducting the observations, I emphasized my role to the students, making clear that I would not be a part of any evaluation or grading in the course, nor that I had any expertise regarding the mPB framework that they were to apply in their projects. In this way, I attempted to avoid any suspicion or resistance to letting me closely follow the progress of the groups. This, together with the fact that I was a master's student like themselves, likely lowered the threshold for me to emerge myself into the groups during their meetings and project work.
Insights and observations
Throughout the course, I gained many interesting insights, not least regarding the challenges for students to work with transdisciplinary frameworks to address complex, real-life issues. At KTH, many students have engineering backgrounds and are not used to applying holistic and critical approaches to problem-solving. This was noticeable in this course through confusion and frustration among many of the students. For example, a central part of the mPB framework concerns framing and reframing of the problem formulation, which occurs at the early stages of the problem-solving process. Many students were somewhat concerned with this process since most of them were used to only receiving a problem formulation and instantly starting to find solutions for it, and not “staying with the problem” and critically examining the framing of it. However, while the expectation to reframe the problem led to some confusion, many students found the process intriguing and were able to see the benefits of it.
Something else that became clear for the students throughout the TASI course was that group work could not be divided between individual group members in the same way as in other courses. In previous group work experiences, students were used to being able to divide tasks, work on them individually, and come together in the end to put the parts together. However, in the TASI course, students quickly noticed that this approach to group work was not feasible, since the mPB framework required more direct collaboration and collaborative decision-making in order for the direction of the project to remain consistent and unified. Thus, the TASI course put higher demands on effective collaboration compared to “conventional” courses, which might have made the issue of group dynamics especially important to performance and creativity levels.
This higher demand for effective collaboration led to problems for some of the student groups since it ultimately pushed them to spend more consecutive time together, which created pragmatic concerns. To specify, some students might not have expected to participate in long, frequent group meetings, and due to scheduling difficulties, some groups struggled with meeting and spending sufficient time together. Here, differing ambition levels among group members also became visible, which created some tension and feelings of irritation within some of the groups. The groups that succeeded the best in this course managed early on to create a habit of meeting regularly and over several hours at a time to work on the group project. In these groups, the ambition and participation levels seemed fairly equal, and there was a sense of shared leadership and responsibility among all group members.
Something else that stood out during my observations of the TASI course was that some students were concerned with the grading approach in the course, which largely resembled “conventional” course grading. To specify, many university courses are outcome-focused, where the main deliverables are at the end of the course in the form of e.g. an exam, a report, and/or a presentation. The main deliverables are also at the end of the course, despite the course attempting to be more process- than outcome-focused in the sense that the insights gained by the students throughout the group project are largely what mirrors their performance. Further, having the main deliverables at the later stage of the course also created an uneven workload with a lot of pressure to perform at the end of the course. Thus, slightly altering the grading approach so that it becomes more process- than outcome-focused could mitigate these issues and potentially encourage students to “stay with the problem” for longer instead of rushing towards finding solutions.
Lastly, it became evident throughout my study that students often feel powerless when it comes to influencing the group dynamics of their groups. Some students expressed that they think it’s just a “matter of luck” if they end up in a group where the dynamics are favorable, and they don’t see themselves as responsible or able to significantly affect the group dynamics. While it is to some extent true that a single group member can likely not fundamentally change the dynamics of a group, the findings of my study indicated that there are in fact measures that can be taken to influence group dynamics in order to create more favorable conditions for problem-solving. However, this likely requires increased awareness and knowledge among both students and teachers about the significance of group dynamics on performance and creativity, and how group dynamics can be influenced. Another interesting concern is the fact that student groups are temporary and not permanent, which might reduce the motivation for some students to engage in group-serving behaviors. One student mentioned specifically that they don’t find it “worth it” to put in efforts to improve group dynamics, since it is “just a course” and they also have other responsibilities and priorities.
Conclusions
To conclude, the field research that I conducted within the TASI course at KTH was a unique opportunity to gain insights into student group dynamics and challenges within a transdisciplinary university course. It was evident that the format and approach of the TASI course were different from most other courses students had taken before, which led to some confusion and frustration among the students, but also deepened their understanding of complex problem-solving and transdisciplinarity. To better equip students with relevant skills for collaborative problem-solving and create better conditions for the success of transdisciplinarity university courses in technical universities, it might be necessary to increase the university-wide awareness of transdisciplinarity, teach students about the significance of group dynamics in collaborative problem-solving, and support students to deal with the complexity of wicked sustainability problems. The full text of my master's thesis is to be published in open access by the end of summer 2024. I hope it will provide useful insights for those interested in digging deeper into the challenges and possibilities to proactively work with group dynamics in their teaching, education, or work.
