1). Groups are living systems based on interdependence and interrelationships. What happens to a small group when parts of the system do not function well? Provide two examples from your own small group experiences that show the importance of understanding interdependence and interrelationships.

Small groups work in many ways and there are hardly small groups that we can find totally linear and exactly like others. Each small group has their common goals and the members of the group would become interdependent on each other so they may feel their line of work is fair and respectful. When a group member falls out of the group's system or process chaos or entropy can occur, this can also cause the interrelationship to fail slightly or worse yet become completely ruined. When I mention failure or ruin of interrelationships I do imply that trust is the factor.

A weight room is where my first experience in small group activities occurred. My friends Joe and Peter were apart of the weight training class and we kept each other motivated. Our interdependence was found when we realized that we needed to motivate each other to keep the spirits alive. Another factor in our interdependence was spotting during bench press, we knew that if we did not have each other we could not bench press like we wanted and even if we did bench press without each other it would just lead to failure. While we were spotting each other for the bench press I suppose you could say that spotting itself was a large part of the interrelationship, spotting was a signal for each of us to take turns and make sure we don't get killed by the barbell. This was a system that we had for each other in the weight room and our common goal was to motivate each other to become physically fit.

In my second experience I was apart of a Tae Kwon Do skit which was required as the final for the Introductory Tae Kwon Do class at SJSU. Our group only consisted of 3 members. Jay the Shopkeeper, Jeffrey the triple knife wielding maniac, and Me the lottery winning innocent bystander. Jay was needed physically to provide the setting (the mini mart), Jeffrey was needed as an attacker (by using his three knives), and I was there to demonstrate techniques that we learned through the semester. We spent about an hour and a half practicing the skit and we knew that our roles made the skit successful. We now have a closer bond with each other since then and would not mind doing a skit together again. We gained interdependence through our common goal and details of the skit and we gained a better interrelationship through the skit itself because we had our own type of signals towards each other that only we could understand our script for the skit played a factor in our interrelationship since we knew when and where to be during the skit thanks to the script.