Management

Throughout my time as a student, I have been involved with many group projects and have usually found success in them. Despite these results I hesitate to call the teams I have worked on successful, At least in the conventional sense. I will proceed to explain how teams I was part of succeed and what aspects they failed in, as well as the general structure of those teams that I was a part of. I will not mention any singular team as most if not all of the groups I have been a part of have followed these trends. 

When it comes to organizational structure, my groups tended to follow a strange mix between the one boss and all network styles of management. I say this because there is a difference in between the one boss style of management and what my groups end up being which has remained consistent with whoever I work with. Ordinarily, “one boss” structure means that one individual is in charge of distributing tasks and information with their subordinates and communicate directly with them. In my case, while I would normally be in the same hierarchy as my other groupmates when it comes to allocating and doing assigned tasks usually find myself in charge do to actually being proactive. In this way, I am like the boss of an organization. However I do the work that would normally be given to a subordinate and in fact, end up doing the lion’s share of it. This is due to a lack of motivation and effort from the rest of my group, and while I realize that being part of group means that you have to sometimes pick up the slack for your teammates, doing just about all the work yourself feels like it defeats the purpose. This will be elaborated on more in the next paragraph.

When it comes to the features of highly functional teams, my groups tend to not meet all of them or accomplish effectively the same result in a different manner of speaking. When it comes to sharing purpose dictated by a manager, it could be argued that my team always does this if the teacher is considered the management in question, and while I could be considered management in that I try to organize everyone, I do not take the hands off approach described. On the other hand, measurable goals is something that is frequently provided by the teacher and thus usually accomplished by default in the form of a grading rubric. Manageable sizes are also automatic as most of my groups tend to range from two to five people, including myself. Unfortunately, a mix of expertise is extremely rare. Sometimes groups are assigned and the skills of everyone involved are not taken into consideration and other times, I simply am unaware of the skills of others, meaning I cannot make the best decisions regarding team compositions. As for the working relationship, it is usually next to nonexistent as I have mentioned previously. There are some instances where I see it done properly but even then, it is clear that some people put in more effort than others. Finally there is collective accountability which is the most complicated, at least for me. While everyone is usually graded together, it means that some people will just take credit without putting in any work. Also, throughout college I have been given opportunities to address these issues by telling an instructor if I felt like someone did not really contribute. Additionally, I will always try and emphasize my own contributions and throw my teammates under the bus rather than be dragged down with them. Whether this is considered opportunistic or not depends on whether you believe in penalty by association. 

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 27, 2019 at 10:28 AM

    I don't want to second guess other instructors, so instead I will respond with an example from how I taught our class the last time. I put students into teams of three and unlike this semester I had each time write a review paper of some economics article that was relevant to the class produce a first draft of that as well as a second draft. Then I had them make something I called a virtual elevator speech, which is like the early PowerPoints for our class, in slideshow mode the presentation auto played with musical accompaniment, the slides were mainly images, and the text of the paper was in the Notes area. There was no pedagogic reason for the teams. The entire reason was to get the number of papers down to a reasonable number for me. I marked up the first drafts. This was time consuming. It was my time constraint that drove having teamwork.

    Many of the groups functioned as you report above. And in those cases where one person does the bulk of (perhaps all of) the work, the student is typically diligent about doing other coursework as well.

    I do think that some of what you report is simply shirking by the other students, as you indicate in your post. But in some cases I think the cause is otherwise. Student depression has been featured prominently the last several years in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, two places many educators look to for information about the current college scene. Loneliness is another biggie. Then, in class yesterday I showed some data about the income distribution of students at the U of I. Students from low income families may feel out of place on campus.

    All of these things might result in behavior that seems like shirking, but the cause is definitely not laziness. However, it takes time and skill to sort this out. I sometimes with the more diligent students would try some friendly interactions with group members that are not about the work the group is supposed to do, just about the people in the group. It would help people open up more and maybe make those who are not lazy willing to overcome their issues to make a contribution. Everybody is busy and this would be time consuming, but it might be a way to demonstrate some leadership. And if it proved effective in one instance, that might encourage trying again in other situations.

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    1. Lanny ArvanSeptember 30, 2019 at 12:49 PM

      Just testing from my regular gmail account to see if commenting is working.

      Delete

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