Being interdependent means to "depend on one another and share in responsibility for the group process" (32). Although working with groups can sometimes be difficult and frustrating, as long as you follow a system of motivating each other and helping one another through difficulties, there won't be any breaks in the friendship.
Within your small group of friends, family, or co-workers; each of you have a responsibility to provide guidance and motivation for each other in order to keep that group intact. If one person in the group starts acting independently, others may follow. So each person has an effect on each other whether they know it or not. I'll take my group of friends from high school. Since we started college, all of us lived in the same area except one person in our group. After awhile he started to lose contact with us, which I understood because of the distance, but I noticed that each of my friends started to slowly drifting away until none of us talked or bothered to contact each other. It was a domino effect that hurt our whole circle of friendship. Now that we've noticed it, we all started to slowly get back to how things used to be.
I work at a gym teaching indoor tennis, and I work with a small number of co-workers. Because there were so few of us, each of us had a different responsibility to take care of. For about three years our system worked perfectly until one accident. One of my co-workers injured his foot and would not be able to teach for about six months. We had to keep the same schedule or else we would have lost members. So because of losing one co-worker my manager and I had to pick up his slack and work twice as much as we used to. One small injury not only effected him but us as well. We all worked together well until a speed bump comes our way and slows us down. Thats why working together is so important and being prepared for the worst if it does come our way.
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Hello,
ReplyDeleteI think you really explained the concept of interdependence and how important it is, with your example of your fellow co-worker being out for about six months. I also work in a “small group” setting at my current job and there are currently seven employees, ten, including the management team. There is rarely ever a day when everyone is there because of the different schedules and sometimes we only have one or two people for each shift during the day. Like you mentioned, losing one person in a small group can be detrimental to the whole group and also affect others as well (i.e. customers, other departments). However, I also think having a person or a few persons who are irresponsible and just “taking up space,” can also cause stress on a small group as well.