Throughout the whole semester, all we learnt is how to cooperate, how to innovate and how to apply the theory into each task with our creative ideas. Actually, that’s really a big challenge for me, because in Aladdin team, other two partners are the classmates I have never worked with while other students chose their friends or former group members as teammates. Also, we need to cooperate with night class students to finish the huge task, no facing-to-face meeting but only Internet communication. At first, I was quite worried that we could not communicate smoothly and had disputes. Luckily, I met a group of good teammates. Although we would disagree, got lost in the requirement and had comments on other’s behavior, we tolerated and help each other, finished the project as well as keeping good relationship with each other finally. A wonderful experience it is and gives me some reflection about how to make teamwork well done in the future.
As the best-known scheme for a group development
advanced by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, which identified four stages of
group development, including the stages
of forming, storming, norming and performing, we also
experienced these stages and have different issues and feelings in each. Let’s
see what happened.
1. Forming
stage:
The forming stage represents a time when the group
starts to come together and is characterized with anxiety and uncertainty. The
focus for group members at this time is to become familiar with each other and
their purpose, not on work. When we first meet together on Skype, we just
introduced ourselves, discussed the feelings about this course and the project.
No promises or commitments at this time. Generally, the typical outcomes of the
forming stage include gaining an understanding of the group's purpose,
determining how the team will be organized and who will be the leader,
discussion of major milestones or phases of the project. But we were far from
these and did not well in the first meeting time. We had a friendly short chart
and intend to make out a clear timetable and outline which failed due to
someone was still unfamiliar with task requirement. We had no leadership and
direction, every thing goes unwell in fact.
2. Storming
stage:
Since our process was slower than other groups, with
the understanding of the mission requirements, we walked into next stage,
including the topic and content determination. Actually, this stage is where
conflict and competition are at its greatest. Because now that group members
have an understanding of the task and a general feel for who they are as a
group and who group members are, they feel confident and begin to address some
of the more important issues surrounding the group. I divided this period into two
mainly events and analyze them with the concepts leaning in the class.
Negotiation
Negotiation is a process in which the two participants
attempt to reach a joint decision on matters of common concern in situation
where they are in actual or potential disagreement or conflict (Donald, 1989). We
tried to gain an advantage for ourselves by the end of the process. The same as
night group 13. As we chose to act as a furniture design company while they are
the manufacture company, we need to negotiate the cooperation content, process
and each requirement to achieve a win-win situation. This situation is not only
for the project on each virtual company, but also for our each group’ profit that
we can correctly and effectively finish our own parts. Thus, the cooperate
content and form is really important. Conflicts would be generated in the
process.
Conflict 1:
Task conflict-Shall we add new function to the web?
With the content, we suggest add personalized customization
function to our virtual company where customers can choose color, size and even
design by themselves. Through this way we can make our project be more
creative. But this is from our point of view. The night class teammates believe
it will increase the cost and reduce the feasibility. Of the most importance,
it is difficult for them to write the assignment because as the manufacture
side, there is no benefit for them to make independent production. Thus, they strongly
disagreed about our thoughts. What we should do is to persuade them as well as
make consensus. I act the negotiator role in this event because I am the only
one who is familiar with furniture design industry and I am confident I can
persuade them.
My tactics:
Perspective-taking
Perspective-taking is the active consideration of
another party. It likened to the consider-the-opposite strategy. Perspective
taking is a cognitive capacity to consider the world from another individual’s
viewpoint that “allows an individual to anticipate the behavior and reactions
of others” (Leigh, 2009). In order to guide the counterparty see the world form
my party, I decided to illustrate the benefit about this creative point from
their perspective. Firstly, I asked the effect they want to achieve. Frank (one
of the partners) told me as the manufacture, he wants to increase their company’s
reputation, expand the service scope and can be transformed into a furniture
company in the future. Thus, after gaining what they want, I changed the way,
telling them the benefit of the new function from their interests. I told them,
through personalization, they can get some data about what kind of material is
much popularity, which is the common size so that they can buy those popular
material as well as to produce some general size of the furniture parts to
improve their production efficiency, etc. These areas were not considered by
them at first, leading to the concern that they could not write their benefits
in their parts that their marks would be influenced. Therefore, after I was standing
in their perspective to help them solve this problem, they accepted our suggestion.
Only one point they still disagreed due to the feasibility for both our two
sides-totally allowed customers to make individual design. So, we make
concessions about this to in order to build good relationship with them while I
still gained the some profits for our side. Based on three types of
negotiation, this process is somewhat like “soft-bargaining”. Since we are not
real company and both sides consider more about their actual interests- the
project, so this style really worked well in under this situation in my
opinion. It can say, we reached a win-win situation in this problem.
This negotiation process is a platform for me to apply
the theory into practical application. As I mentioned above, I used a suitable
tactic to help my party get our goal. This can be regard as an integrative
negotiation, which often attempts to create value in the course of the
negotiation (“expand the pie”) and focuses on the underlying interests of the
parties rather than our arbitrary starting positions, approaches negotiation as
a shared problem rather than a personalized battle (Gregory,2009).
In terms of the conflict itself, we chose collaboration
conflict-handling style to manage the conflict. I t means we find an iterative
solution when both sets of concerns are too important to be compromised. We
considered not only the task but also about the relationship.
Besides this, we also met with another conflicts in
this stage.
Conflict 2:
Process conflict-Is deadline important?
Since we had determined the web content and the goal
of the project, in the next meeting time, we need to work out the outline,
deadline and expected as well as to assign the task. In this process, due to
the different habits-they major in engineering while we study management, the
conflict occurred which can be regarded as a process conflict as its definition
said, process conflict refers to disagreement over the methods or procedures the
group should use in order to complete its tasks. It occurs when strategies,
policies, and procedures clash (Houle, 1989).
In the task assignment, they wanted to complete all
parts by each group, which means we need to write two different versions about
the project, because the writing point of view was different as the
requirements said. However, we thought since the content involved some parts of
cooperation, separating it may lead to inconsistent project and also lost the
meaning of this cooperation intention between morning and evening classes. For
this, we insisted on the consistency of the scheme and told them the benefits,
including time saving. Thus, they chose accommodation style to handle this
because they finally agreed with our point and found they are wrong in the task
assignment to some extents. We made an agreement that in terms of web function
and cooperation process, each group assigned one member to write it and then to
make a small modification in order to fit our own position. Other assignment
requirements would be finished by each group itself.
Then, when discussing the deadline about each part, we
hoped to make a schedule about when to finish each part and when to make a modification
since time was limited, while they did not want to do that. Due to the Easter
holiday and the absence of their one member, they wanted to plan another day to
confirm the deadline after holiday so that they can wait the absent member come
back to have an internal discussion later. However, I concern that this
uncertainty would slow down the whole scheme, especially after the holiday
there were a lot of other paper we need to finish, this arrangement would
surely lead to perfunctory completion when time urgency. But I did not share
this with the group because the meeting that day was very late and I had to
leave HK. All our Aladdin group members did not insist on it either, which
means we ignore the conflict and just let things happen. It was proved later
that it was unreasonable. (Be explained clearly in the following paragraph). So
back to think about it now, this procedural conflict should be preemptively
minimized by adopting formal rules (e.g., bylaws, constitutions, statements of
policies) that specify goals, decisional processes, and responsibilities (Houle,
1989). We cannot ignore it or just let it happen. What we should do is
determine everyone’ task, content, responsibility and the completion time in
case of unfair or halfhearted situation came out.
3. Norming
stage:
Since our group receives the clarity about how to do
the project and what resource can we share form each other, we move on to the
third stage of group development-the norming stage. The norming stage
is the time where the group becomes a cohesive unit. Group members actively
acknowledge the talents, skills and experience that each member brings to the
group. A sense of community is established and members are flexible,
interdependent and trust each other. It is a virtual community for us. Unlike
the normal community, we both provide support, information, friendship and
acceptance (Wellman, 1999) though the Internet platform almost once in two days.
We communication via Skype, group chart, email and even Wechat- help us timely
to contact with each other. Information flows seamlessly and is uninhibited due
to the sense of security members feel in this norming stage. My role in this
stage is to sort out the company background for them in advance and provide
help in case of them writing the error contents due to the unfamiliar with
industry. My commitment for the group was I would finish my part as soon as
possible and try my best to help them. Actually, I did quite well on this and
got a good feedback from my peers. The evening group once made a commitment
that they would finish the web function part well and sent it to us quickly,
but they did not realized this. As least, they did not satisfy us and the third
conflict happened in this issue.
Conflict 3:
Task conflict-How to deal with low quality parts
As I mentioned above, we did not work out the deadline
and the length of content. What’ more, since one person were absent in the
meeting and did not appear in later discussion, we did not ask evening group
about if this guy got the concept we had talked with. So the unexpected outcome
came out. When we asked them to get the function part, the only person who was
on the Internet said he was responsible for that part. So we waited a day until
another person came. However, she told us due to the pressure of her own presentation,
she could not finish it until tomorrow. So we waited another day again. During
this time, we were preparing our power point, without this function part, it
was hard of us to take the next step. I still remember it was just two days
before the presentation day, when we were disappointed when received their articles.
Then content was not clear and comprehensive as we discussed before. Their
attitude toward this task also made us uncomfortable although they were really
busy about other subjects.
In order not to hurt the relationship with us, we did
not make comment on this, which means we avoided this conflict. We just let us
calm down and refinish this part by ourselves. We spent two more hours that
night to clarify each function and put much effort on how to express it. We
Aladdin group assigned the task to three parts, Jewel was responsible for PPT
production, Jason was responsible for content improvement while I was
responsible for telling the night group about the content we redesign to make
sure we use the same version.
So, the conflict was peacefully solved at the end. I
really appreciate the way we manage this conflict. Because if we argue with
them about their performance, not only would damage relationships, more is
leading to a waste of time that we could not finish the project on time. After
all, we just had one more day to prepare. So we choose to help them to perfect
this part and avoid the conflict.
4. Performing
stage:
Since every goes well, we entered the forth stage, in
which group members are unified, loyal and supportive. Competence in all
members is seen, problem solving, experimentation and testing possible
solutions are high as group members are focused on task completion and
achievement. The whole group had agreed the final contents, so at this stage,
we restore to the original team-Aladdin and Sailing, to prepare for the final
presentation. Creativity was the main issues for us in this stage.
Creativity
enhancement:
The presentation is a platform to express our thoughts
and impart knowledge to the audience. As we leant the whole semester to be
creative (Andrew & Robert, 2000), all of us thought we should be more
creative in the final presentation. It should not be the formal style. Since
some research had found the relevance between creativity and
knowledge-acquisition while implicit theory does not see any connect those two
things (Boden, 2011), creative express way also benefits for others to listen. So
we tried role play style to elaborate our company. The feedback on this was
quite high. Classmates thought we were funny, brief and persuasive. For our own
group, what we get most is the experience about how to be creative and how to
cooperate each other well. After all, as a play, we need to understand all the
contents and make them in series. The traditional way is just ready for 5
minutes for each one. A lot of teammates even don not know other’s content. We
well expressed the spirit of collaboration and I leant much from it.
Knowledge
management:
The last thing I want to emphasis on is the knowledge
management. It is a process to enable people to develop a set of practice to
create, capture, share and use knowledge to advance organizational goals. We
got a lot of data and information form outside world, if we did not sort them
well, what we gain would be the uncertainty and misleading rather than perfect
project. So in all the discussion period, the tactic we used is to listen to
one’s finding first, made a record about all the data, and then tried to
clarify these to see if any of them were helpful to be the information for our
task. With all the information, we made it into knowledge and applied it into
real practice of our project. It is a method to address knowledge connections
and relatedness of partner knowledge. Otherwise, we would get lost our way
because every individual has its own thoughts, we cannot manage those well if
we insist on ours and behave the way we like. Additionally, though knowledge
management, we could get new information and integrated it, which can help
perfect the project as well as our self development.
Conclusion:
In this virtual cooperation project, all of us made
our efforts to do it. Except the little conflicts we faced which have been solved,
I really experienced an excellent teamwork and learn much from this process. As
we know, virtual teamwork is so difficult that we cannot face-to-face
communicate to solve the problem and we don not know what the emotion the
partner on the other side owns. So we should be careful to deal with to
complete the task and maintain the relationship at the same time. On the other
hand, virtual work dose really save time and energy that we can access to each
other any time, anywhere. The use of chart room technology facilitated our team’s
work to some extent. But the email hampered our work at first since we would
not check the email any time. So this can be an experience that next time to
form a virtual team, we can directly establish chart room to contact each
other. Of the most importance, through this practical application, I can apply
some of the class concepts into reality and learn a key point that a well done collaboration
requires teammates to be awareness, motivation, self-synchronization, participation,
mediation, reciprocity, reflection and engagement, which will benefit for my future
work.
References:
Andrew Hargadon and Robert I. Sutton (2000), “Building
innovation factory”, Harvard business review, p157-p166.
Boden, M. (2001), Creativity and Knowledge. A. Craft,
B. Jeffrey & M. Leibling (Eds.), Creativity in education, 55-102.
Gregory, B. (2009). The
Viability of Interest-Based Legislative Negotiation, Harvard Law
& Policy Review (Online), vol. 3, p. 1.
Houle, Cyril O. (1989). Governing boards: Their
nature and nurture. San Francisco ,
CA
N. Venkatraman - John C. Henderson (1998), “Real
Strategies for Virtual Organizing”, Sloan Management Review, P33-P48.
Wellman, B, (1999). "Networks in the global
village: life in contemporary communities.”
