My fraternity has exposed me to a wide range of group interactions which provide an interesting application of the input-process-output model by Kraut.
The natural input of a social fraternity is its members, who are focus of nearly everything we do as a group. Furthermore, our task(input) of bringing in new members requires a brotherhood that is both motivated and interactive. Despite being a smaller house, we work to compete by also using technological inputs such as Facebook or mailing lists to aid in our efforts to reach out to potential new members.
The primary goal of our fraternity, its output, is to bring in a substantial number of new members into the house each year. Recently however, we’ve struggled to produce the output(number of new members) that we hoped for. This has required us to put an even greater emphasis on our task of having a successful rush. In terms of member needs and group maintenance, we also aim to ensure that fraternity life is still enjoyable despite more difficult times.
The processes of group interaction have been essential to reaching our goals for rush as well as in maintaining strong bonds within the brotherhood. Socialization, combined with strong leadership have been key aspects of our day-to-day activities.
Despite having many leaders and a very close group of members, my fraternity still has had to deal with the problem of social loafing. Unfortunately, it has had a marked impact on our successes, especially due to our lower numbers making every persons’ contributions apparent.
With respect to the concepts of distance and proximity, as detailed by Kiesler and Cummings, my fraternity mostly collaborates within a very close proximity(within our physical house) for most things do. However, we do maintain an e-list for both current brothers and alumni. In my experience, however, the e-list has limited usefulness, as it is mostly used non-serious messages. When members try to discuss important business over it, the message is often lost in a sea of frivolous banter.
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It seems that your fraternity has a good base, but has a few areas that need improvement. You could refine the inputs and processes to improve your rush. At first blush, I would suggest adding other tools and tweeking some processes. For example, although many members use technological inputs to spread the word about your frat, I would recommend that they communicate face to face with freshman as well, as doing something as serious as joining a frat may require a real conversation to instil trust. If you require each brother to network with a certain number of freshman, I think you will increase the number of sincerely interested pledges. In addition, if you have add alumni or fraternity director to the e-list, you may be able to reduce frivolous banter and be more productive.
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It would be interesting to find out if any group interactions or parts of the input-process-output model would change if your frat had a different number of people. It seems that the leadership and close group of members is important to make your frat very appealing for new members. Maybe if a substantially larger number of new members tried to join, your group could lose the close proximity factor and distance would then be a factor in dictating group norms and behaviors among members. Overall, nice job explaining the input-process-output model.
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