Team Production

I am currently taking a Leadership in Groups and Teams course, and last week, our class was assigned to sell a product and make a profit in our randomly assigned groups consisting of five members. Once we were finished with making our sales, we were to write a reflection paper explaining how we chose the product that we sold, where and how we sold our product, and what we learned during the process.

From the beginning of the project, there was a low level of commitment from most of the group members. Three out of the five members would show up 30 minutes late to group meetings, didn’t contribute ideas for the sale, and never responded to the group messages. As the project progressed, the work slowly staring falling onto the shoulders of myself and one other member. Ultimately, the assignment became largely the product of the two of us with small inputs from the other members. The two of us came up with the idea to sell donuts on the quad and decided to donate all the profits to the American Cancer Society. Luckily, all the group members showed up to help with the sale, but the reflection paper was once again mostly written by the other member and myself.

In comparison to Haidt's marble idea in his article, the other group member and I were willing to pull the weight of the other members and partake in this gift exchange (increase in production) because we all receive a single grade in the end. Even though most of the group members didn’t contribute much, the additional work by the one group member and I resulted in all of us receiving a higher grade. The situation would have been drastically different If we were each graded individually and the professor could somehow determine how much work we each contributed to this project. Because the result wouldn’t derive from a collective production, there would be no incentive for anyone to help each other out.

From previous experiences with group projects, social loafing seems to be inevitable and I am wondering if altruism would be applicable to this type situation. As I’m reflecting on the group process and the unfairness of the situation, I can’t help but think that maybe I could have done things differently. In the article about altruism, Brooks stated that, “if you expect people to be selfish, you can actually crush their tendency to be good.” After getting discouraged about our first unsuccessful group meeting, was I too quick to assume that no one was going to do the work from the beginning? Could I have done a better job of communicating with the fringe members? It is possible that other group members could’ve been going through personal problems or maybe had a heavy work load in other classes. Whatever the issue may have been, our group could’ve definitely done a better job of communicating with one another. Similar to what we discussed in the first week of class, I am reminded once again of the importance of collegiality and how it plays such a vital role in group productivity.

Managing Income Risk

In class we talked about how losses are affected by the actions that we take and who we are as people. In order to reduce certain risks, we make decisions that provide a little clarity into the uncertainties of our lives.

As I am approaching the half point of the semester, I started to reflect on my previous and current decisions regarding college and wanted to analyze how these decisions might affect my future. Being a rational person, I believe that most of the choices that I make have been made with an eye toward the future to reduce income risk. Although I don’t have a clear picture of what my future will look likes, I like to partake in choices that will minimize risk in the future.

During my Junior year of high school, I would say that I viewed a college education and degree as a type of “insurance” that would minimize my income risk in the future. Given my interests, various social norms, and my situation at home, I was 90% sure that I was going to attend a 4-year university. However, looking at both choices (going to college or not going to college), they both entailed income risk reducing outcomes but with varying degrees of security.

Going straight to work after college would have been good for me in the short run in that I would still have a relatively steady income. However, I would have to take a risk into knowing that many of the jobs without a college degree would pay significantly less than jobs that require one. Also, it’s hard to say that many jobs that don’t require a degree would be able to financially support me and pay all my bills. If I was focused on the here and now, this is the choice I probably would have made because going to college would mean I would have to commit four+ years of my life to schooling without much income and accrue debt with student loans. On the contrary, going to college results in an accruement of human capital and a degree that would allow me to have a higher paying career that would ultimately allow me to maximize my utility.

Below is a graph from the New York Times to illustrate the difference in income between someone with and without a college degree.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/upshot/is-college-worth-it-clearly-new-data-say.html?abt=0002&abg=1

Once I came to the decision to attend college and got admitted into one, I had to make financial decisions for how I was going to pay for the tuition and other fees that the school required. First, I had to assess the financial state of my family and how much we would be able to pay for the tuition. The most risk averse behavior would have been to not take on any loans as loans would only add to the risk of income, but I have outweighed going to college far more profitable to not take on any loans. When taking on student loans, I made sure to only take federal loans with lower interest rates so that I would have pay back “less” in the future compared to other loans.

Lastly, I ended up picking a major that best suited my interest and abilities. In addition to my preferences, I also took into consideration the job prospective for the various majors offered at UIUC and ended up choosing Economics. Currently I am continuing to take risk averse actions as I am making myself more marketable through getting involved in various organizations.  

Ultimately, there is no magic formula that will guarantee my success with zero income risk, but taking risk averse actions would definitely alleviate the risk to a certain extent. Through this reflection I was able to see that we can’t always make the choice that is maximally rewarding because sometimes it’s simply not possible. We have to take into consideration the circumstances that we are in and realize that things are not always black and white.

Reflection Post

After reviewing my blog, I was able to make a connection between two posts and saw a theme of collegiality and trust where I seemed to value the relationships that I make in the workplace. In my post about my experience in an organization, I talked about how the biggest reason why I had a negative experience at the organization I was part of was due to a lack of collegiality. For me, once this mentality of “all for one, all for one” mindset that we have previously talked about in class was gone, the task itself during work was not enough of a motivator for me to continue working. I wanted to trust the people that I worked with, and having to constantly work with new people did not allow me to do that.

Similar to my post about experience in organizations, I mentioned how having a strong sense of collegiality at my high school summer job was a key factor in it being considered a successful organization. Many of us who worked at the bookstore were returning students and have a made an effort to make a relationship in the team. Acts of kindness or trust that coworkers would support you promoted productivity among our team and allowed us to successfully finish our tasks.    

Although I have talked about collegiality and gift giving in one of my posts, trust is something that has not come up in my blog. I am seeing now how trust among members is an important component of any organization. Once there is trust among the worker that someone will be able to successfully execute their task or help you out in times of tough situations, you start to emotionally invest yourself in an organization and feel truly as if you’re a part of something. Even the group projects, I see how Professor Arvan is trying to promote this sense of trust among our group members so that we will ultimately be able to have a well-written paper as a result.  

I would say that my process in writing these blog posts has transformed tremendously. My first couple posts were quite difficult to write because I would try to write these blog posts in one go. This was very inefficient and time consuming because I was blindly trying to make connections when I didn’t have the big picture in mind. Since then, I have taken steps to “prewrite” before writing the actual post. I have a general idea and flow of how I want my writing to look like and this has cut down the time for writing my actual blog posts. It allowed me to organize my ideas and I was able to use my time more efficiently when on the computer.