Archive for year: 2014

In this weeks episode the two teams finally merge into one team and it is every man for themselves. Which means no one is safe! Old alliances face the new alliances which question where people stand within the tribe.

Some of the nonverbal communication I saw this week was mostly with the team members eyes. Their eyes tend to get really wide or really narrow when someone is talking them and as the person is speaking to them they are thinking of which alliance to go with. Julie on the other hand wasn’t communicating at all, she was avoiding the entire tribe as well as hoarding food and then lying about no having anything to eat.

There was also some body language that people were giving to others. For example; Josh and Jeremy they hate each other and they are both trying to get two alliances together in order to get the other man out; and when they walk passed each other their body language changes as if they are trying to show that they are both the “chef” of the tribe and that the other man must go.

In the end Julie decided to leave the game. After three long exhausting weeks of being away from her loved ones she finally cracked. She went behind everyones backs and told the host of the games that she was done and is giving up on the Million dollars. With  Julie’s volunteer of leaving the show there was no tribal council that night which saved someone from going home.

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Write an analysis of how your dominant and less dominant conflict styles affect your leadership abilities and outcomes.  How might using a different conflict style improve the outcomes?  Provide specific examples to support your argument.

The questionnaire results labeled my conflict style as collaborative. Which I agree with, when faced with a conflict I always try to get both parties to work things out, where they can come up with a solution that benefits them both and not just one. I feel that it makes a difference in the way I perform a leadership position when I use a collaborative form of conflict style. Mainly because through the use of this style I seek out to get everybody involved in the outcome of the situations, and I try to keep things from being one sided. If I were to use a different conflict style I think that the outcome of the situation would be completely different. For example, if I were to use my less dominant style which is avoiding, I wouldn’t seek out to get everybody in the same page. I would simply “avoid” the whole situation and hope that it plays and gets resolved on its own. My thoughts would probably be why put any time towards resolving the situation if eventually things will turn out the way they have to. However, if i were to use a different conflict style to help improve the outcomes aside from the one that I use, it would be maybe compromising and only in specific situations. For example when dealing with a small group of children.  Everything would be a lot easier if we picked our own battles. Basically what this means is that its a lot easier to make the children think that you are  giving them something in return for their participation when the reality is different rather than arguing with them or trying to make them see your way (we can all be stubborn in our own way) which can sometimes make things more difficult. In situations like this compromising would be a good way to resolve those types of conflicts.

Describe an actual conflict you had with a family member, roommate, or coworker

1. Describe the positions and interests of you and the other person in the conflict.  Describe how you could fractionate the conflict.
2. Using Fisher and Ury’s methods, describe how you could separate the person from the problem and how you could work together to address the conflict.
3. How could you have helped the other person in the conflict save face?  How could the other person help you save face?

I few years ago I got into an argument with my roommate. The argument had to do with bills. We had just moved in together after living at the dorms on campus, so we were still figuring things out. The argument had to do with the division of the bills, basically what each of us had to pay. Her argument was that she didn’t have to pay have of the bill but less than that because she wasn’t going to be spending much time in the apartment that month. My argument was that the agreement was that we both had agreed on splitting all of the bills in half and it included the one that she was arguing that she didn’t have to.  Things at one point ( don’t really remember how) escalated to the point that a friend had to step in. Now if I would to separate the person from the situation and save face for her and me  I would probably put into practice the idea of active listening ,which is probably something that neither of us was using.I feel that by doing so we would have both seen where we coming from with our position and the situation wouldn’t have escalated.

In this episode the dynamics were changed by the swapping of the tribe members. There was a new force to reckon with tribe members were united with their loved ones. This was especially the case for the coyopa tribe which lost the challenge and faced having to vote someone off of the island. The group couple and family members had to listen to one another and also listen to other tribe groups. It seemed that listening became critical as the tribe pairs tried to decide who they were going to vote off next. They asked one another information to understand group dynamics from the previous tribe grouping and to understand how people behaved in the previous tribe prior to the swap.  It seemed that they were using listening to evaluate and to analyze tribe dynamics. The thing that stood out to me the most is the fact that very few conversations between tribe members are filmed throughout the episode. Of course the interesting dynamic interactions that do take place have to be illustrated to give the idea that the tribal members are consulting one another. However, it seems as though the players are constantly listening and observing tribe members. They are listening to the way they behave and interact as well as the things they say. On survivor the cast is constantly listening understand, remember, interpret and evaluate other players. This helps them make decisions on forming a strategy for the winning the prize and staying on the show. All the while we studied group communication in the sense of the show I had not considered what a large role listening played in the show. I was mostly concerned with the things being said by the cast. It is now very apparent that listening plays just as much of a role in what happens in groups as what people say.

On March 2014 myself along with seven other CSUCI students attended Santa Rosa Island with Dr. Wormald and Dr. O’Hirok. We would be staying on the island for four days in which we would engaged in preliminary research at Santa Rosa Island to establish monitoring stations.  These projects consisted of stream morphology and water quality,seastar wasting syndrome and sandy beach morphology and infauna.