Like I said, more times than not, I often dreaded the concept of working with other students on projects. Everybody always has conflicts with one anothers' schedules, and it always seems that meetings take place at the most inappropriate times. So needless to say, in my abnormal psychology class my heart sank the first day of class upon hearing there was a large group assignment that was to be done at the end of the semester.
Meeting every member of my group went fine. Of course, there was the awkward small talk guaranteed with every new encounter, but bit by bit we picked away at the surface of each others' characters and all found something we extremely liked. By some weird coincidence we had all been competitive soccer players throughout our childhoods, and early teens. From talking to one another, we discovered we all shared a burning passion from the sport, and from then on all my group anxieties disappeared. Communicating about the assignment became effortless. Everyone was extremely comfortable with working around scheduling conflicts for group meetings, and whenever we got together we had a blast.
In time we even began to organize small pickup games between ourselves that we undertook when we felt pleased with the amount of the assignment we had already finished. Of course, this cohesion transferred over to our school work and we received an A on our assignment. I feel the reason this went so well was due to our similar personalities. I feel that when an athlete plays a sport for so long they develop a mindset in relation to their particular sport. Mostly due to long-term effects from large exposure to the elements of the sport in question. Because of this, I feel we all shared similar personalities through similar experiences with the sport. We all played in big tournaments, all played since a young age, and all were exceptional soccer players. As a result, we respected one another and thought similarly which created an extremely strong group chemistry that was reflected in our high grade on the assignment.
I wish all my group experiences went as well as this one, but unfortunately not all experiences are what we hope they would be. This had a lot to do with the time my fraternity made the decision to kick out one of its members. The decision required a unanimous decision, with every member of the house planning, and took a lot of preparation. Since I was on the executive board at this time, I had to work long hours with other members to determine how this process should play out. The problem was that our fraternity was so diverse, and with diversity often comes different opinions.
As a fraternity we were basically composed of nearly every high school clique you could think of. You name it we had it. We prided ourselves on the different characters we had within our walls, and felt because of this it made us stronger. On the contrary though, in this particular situation it made us weaker. Cliques soon formed after we proposed to kick the alleged member out for threatening the executive committee of our house. Some felt his threat was warranted and others certainly felt it was going too far. His plan was to sue the fraternity over fines which were rightfully appropriated to him for missing mandatory ritual practice. It was mandatory for all members, and any member not present was fined.
He extended this threat months on end, and often made life in the house unbearable. This is why we wanted him gone. However there were members of the committee who were friends with him, part of his so called "clique". Due to this, they shot down every proposition we brought forward on the matter. In the end the house determined to kick him out, after we decided a hearing was the only matter of action left. It went terribly. twenty members dropped immediately feeling as we had been unfair, and half our officers resigned at the time. This left our house in brief turmoil.
I definitely feel this happened due to conflicting personalities. Different people with different views, often makes it hard to arrive at a single conclusion. Also, the act of this one individual was the catalyst for all this disaster. We tried reasoning with him, but he was insistent on taking legal action, even when he had no credible ground to stand upon. His fine was not unusual, but what he chose caused great calamity and severed any cohesion we once had within the house.
I strongly agree with your opinion that personality is a strong indicator of whether team members can have a pleasant time. If team members find common personalities or even hobbies, they can be familiar to each other very soon; therefore, able to express their opinions more freely. However, if team members do not have similar personalities, they will think in different ways, without reaching any agreements.
ReplyDeleteBased on my own experiences, on the other hand, I view the other reason for your team work experience in fraternity house being disastrous is that you are trying to reach a hard decision. It is generally hard for people reach agreement in hard decisions, such as firing or withdrawing other people, than reaching pleasant decisions. Therefore, you might need to expect this kind of feeling in your further experiences.
I can see what you are saying in regards to making hard decisions. I did not take that into account when thinking about the problems we faced in that dilemma, but from this point forward I shall take that into consideration with future group endeavors. I'm glad you agree about the role of personalities in group cohesion, especially because my interest in Psychology makes me feel as though it is the major reason in why certain groups fail or work functionally.
DeleteIn problem solving, diversity is considered a plus as having multiple perspectives helps in seeing the whole picture and coming up with novel approaches to address the problems. But in administering a fair punishment, as you suggest, a difference of opinion can be problematic. People want to be both judge and jury (determine the appropriate punishment and determine whether a crime has been committed) and in that case one can cloud the other. I have had a similar experience in an actual jury trial for a felony case - the jury ended up hung, even though we had a confession of guilt! I also think these things tend to be very trying at an emotional level. They can eat away at you.
ReplyDeleteYou might ask, in retrospect, whether the cards could have played out any differently. If a less sever punishment had been requested at first, might you have gotten those in other cliques to go along with it? The question we will discuss in class on Tuesday is whether conflict is inevitable or not. And if the latter, what steps can be taken to mitigate it?
That is quite disturbing that the jury had ended up hung, even though the guilty party admitted their own indiscretion. However, it is interesting to see other situations where a difference in opinions can be problematic. Also, I agree that diversity is genuine when seeking different aspects and solutions to a particular problem. The problem in our case though, was that we were still growing men, and because of this, a lot of us still had some immature perspectives. We began to blame one another before we really became informed about every angle of the problem, and as a result, stubbornness took over accompanied by an aura of mistrust.
DeleteI feel that the situation definitely could have been handled differently, and a lot better in retrospect. Like you said, everyone wants to be judge and juror, and this created those with authority to feel as though they needed to flex the power they wielded. Furthermore, they could have communicated better with the entire fraternity house before invoking the punishment that they saw fit.