Team Collaboration and Award Distribution

The explanation of early development in group collaboration is a reference to a valuable milestone of human evolution.  It is long been known that the collaborative efforts of a group are for more efficient than the effort of an individual on similar tasks.  Early humans discovered this concept long before any era of modernization, and this notion has maintained its perennial nature to this very day.  From early hunter-gatherer groups, evolved small farming towns that eventually blossomed into large industrialized cities inhabited by thousands of different individuals, all providing, in some way, to the common good of many.  The average humans have come to know that efficiency lies in the efforts of many rather than the efforts of the few.  As a result, production and wealth have reached levels that some may have never thought possible.  The problem with this is that the boom in wealth that our modern societies have come to be familiar with, may not be shared equally between the different members of the economy.  A little strange since we are all taught from young age to be fair and share.  But the main question of today is how much should we share for it to actually be considered fair.

In answering the question of equity in team collaboration, I can provide an example from my place of work, at the I Hotel and Conference Center.  Every weekend, usually on football game days, we provide parking services for fans going to the game.  The spots are usually in high demand due to the large amount of ticket holders and the minimal availability of parking here on campus.  Normally, the conference attendants are in charge of running the lot, but the hotel managers still get a cut of the profits we make during the day.  Also, the conference attendants only get a fixed amount of the total money pot, so after a certain amount of cars, we have already made the maximum amount we can make on the day.  If we do not park an appropriate amount of cars however, we suffer deductions, so it is usually in the conference attendants' best interest to elicit efficient parking procedures throughout the day  This situation has two examples pertaining to the article.  One where equity between conference attendants spurs parking efficiency, and the other where the managers take more of the money, even though they spent no time dealing with the parking fiasco.  The later situation can often be demoralizing to us, and therefore contradict our motivation to park as many cars as possible, and instead park a certain amount until we are sure we will be satisfied with our part of the cut.  Furthermore, the deductions if we do not get many cars often cause us to question the morality behind the process and this relates to the matter of procedural fairness that the author of the article touches base on.

First, we talk about collaboration leading to equity.  As mentioned before, all the conference attendants suffer the same consequences regarding deductions, and we also all receive the same pay out.  If one person is not doing their job, than the parking process fails.  In this sense, if only one pulls the rope, and the other attendant does not, than we get less marbles than we would normally have.  So in order for all of us to receive our determined payout at the end of the day, which is usually not much more than our hourly pay, we must all do our job, and pull on our end of the proverbial rope.  Because of this, it is in our best interest to work together, and work with each others' interests in mind.  It is not the same as the initial condition with the rope in the article, simply because there is no inequality produced for us each doing our share of the work.  However, this process still holds the same collaborative principles that were presented in the article.

Finally, we discuss the inequality in regards to management.  Our managers have no part in the parking process during game day.  They do not have to deal with drunken and disorderly tailgaters, or deal with the hostility of fans we are forced to turn away after the parking lot fills up.  Either way, they still get a higher cut of the day's payout before the rest of the earnings get sent to the hotel conglomerate.  The problem with this is many of the conference attendants feel this is unfair.  They do more of the work but get less of the pay.  The article does not touch on this kind of situation, but it still deals with the idea of inequality in the economy.  Collaboration is stifled between the attendants and the managers interests as a whole and because of this, at times, we park less cars than is desired by the hotel.  It should be known, that after we hit our quota, we suffer no more fear of deductions and more cars simply means higher profits for the hotel.  Because of this, only the hotel managers lose out on the extra money they can make if we were to utilize complete efficiency in our procedure.