This week’s focus was on orienteering and navigation we had 5 tasks which were:

Orienteering – find 6 markers and work out what the symbol at each marker represented on a map.

‘Inner compass’ – while blindfolded turn to face the direction that is called – north south etc.

A game of connect 4 which where you competed against all the teams.

A matching game where you must match symbols from a map with what they represent.

A throwing game – after you are dizzy you have 4 stones to throw into buckets as the bucket’s distance away from you increases so does the points you gain.

Similarly to last week we were awarded points for each task and the winning team would receive a prize at the end of the day.

This is the third consecutive Monday we have spent with the Norwegian friluftsliv students and we are therefore getting to know them better and building relationships. This week my team consisted of Ida, Kristine, Jonas and Danny. Because we now know each other much better than in week one I found that the group’s social cohesion was very high this week especially within the individual teams however this does not mean our task cohesion was very high.

Task cohesion refers to the group’s joint aims for instance completing the games and coming first where as social cohesion refers to the relationships within the group. If social cohesion is high the group often enjoy each other’s company and this can help them stay together as a group. However having high social cohesion does not mean that the group will be successful, in order to be successful it is also necessary to have good task cohesion. I found that this was demonstrated today when some group members were not interested in the task in hand and focused on building on their relationships and therefore we did not achieve first place in any of the tasks. While social cohesion is said to be good for a group in the sense that it will help them stay together it is not essential, it should be noted that a group can have a low social cohesion while still achieving success.

Within the trip I also saw our group moving into the ‘Storming’ stage of Tuckman’s (1965) Group Development Model as people began to put themselves forward as leaders or tried out other roles within the group. This lead to some people disagreeing with each other while others took a step back and let the person who put themselves forward as leader take control when they may not have been the best choice.

For me this trip illustrated the fact that teams which get along well and have high social cohesion may not always be the most successful. Alongside this I also saw that our group has begun to creep into the ‘storming’ stage of group development and it will be interesting to see how we develop over the coming weeks.