Reflective Writing: My Virtual Team Experiences
Jason, Rena and I randomly
gathered together in the beginning of the High Performance Collaboration
course. I worked with Jason before and never had cooperated with Rena. During
the whole semester, we accomplished a series of team-based presentations in
various situations. As time goes on, we gradually form our own communication
system and negotiation habit.
Communication
Technologies Used
When talking
about communication and negotiation, advanced electronic devices is indeed a
double-edge sword to us. On the one hand, it allows us to get access to others
anytime anywhere; on the other hand, working efficiency was very low as a
consequence of long replying period which impeded an effective discussion.
Therefore, we replaced QQ with Wechat which enables people to receive messages
in the very first time without a log in first. Everyone who has a 3G smart
phone is able to send text message, hold-to-talk voice messaging and broadcast
messaging via Wechat. Supported by Wechat, I don’t have to wait or blame for
others not sending me back immediately; in turn, we became more active in idea
exchange as a confidence of timely feedback from others. However, we choose to
negotiate with evening group members who are our partner to work out a virtual
collaboration project via QQ group to adjust to their practice.
Virtual Team
Meeting Only or Not
One problem I
have working virtually is that I found it takes long time to reach a concrete
decision as no one can really control a virtual meeting’s process accurately. Some
of us were multi-tasking, which prolonged meeting time. In inter-team virtual
meetings, virtual meeting give people in two groups no time to build
relationship; consequently, a lack of trust and understanding blocked many
opportunities of ideas and information sharing. Eventually, poor quality
outcome followed.
In order to save time and be effective, both we and the evening group agreed face to face meeting on the basis of virtual communication. It turns out that this new pattern worked well. Generally, we put our thought in order and cast aside those useless ones. Additionally, mutual understanding established with a sense of respect. Even though research says that face to face meeting doesn’t really bring any different in team outcomes (RW LLC, 2012), a mix of virtual and face to face did helped our project going smoothly and effectively. Before the face to face meeting, we are cautious typing words online in case any inappropriate expression irritate others; after the first face to face meeting, I dared to make some jokes online and David from the evening group expressed more ideas.
Making Decisions
Fairness
is the foundation in our decision making process, especially reflected in our
tasks allocation section because fairness is the most effective way to avoid
inequity problem. As our team has no official team leader, we basically listen
to who says first. Confronting the big final team project, one member suggested
writing blogs separately first and then modifying it together; we agreed.
However, one day after, we all found it difficult to go on without an outline
instruction. Then, we all agreed to arrange a meeting to discuss details before
we started writing. From this experience, I learnt that fairness is not enough
and the practicability of decisions also needs to be considered before the
final say.
Decisions
made by other teams about the same project are references to our decision
making. Rena is very good at collect fresh news of other teams, but, sometimes,
those references blocked our creative thinking. For instance, we were thinking
about divided our presentation into 3 segments just like what other teams did.
But it turned out a quite boring presentation in our rehearsal. At that time, I
was stuck in the middle of how to make each part more interesting. Fortunately,
a refresh of professor’s requirement enlightened us that inter-team interaction
(Barbara Bulleit, 2006) is critical. Therefore, we redesigned our presentation
a 3 men conversation style which was much easier for mutual understanding and
quite attractive as uniqueness.
All
in all, after a sequence of activities and discussion with my teammates, I
realized that no matter what kind of decisions we are making as a team basis, originality
is primary; followed by references consideration and practical measurement
facilitated with a fairness tasks allocation. There is one more thing we did
great is that we have a high uncertainty avoidance, which prevent us from being
ineffective in goals accomplishment.
Conflict 1- who
is going to present?
Do
presentation in every class is the trait of High Performance Collaboration
course. The first conflict or I preferred to say relationship conflict was
who’s goanna present. I was upset after being presenter continuously for 3
times while my teammates kept silent because they thought they were not good at
English expression. I refused to do it 4th time and eventually Jason
was put to the front. Personally, I didn’t appreciate their excuses and believe
that people should challenge things they are not good at so as to be better. In
a team, everyone should devote efforts rather than count on only one person.
Then,
I concluded that their low engagement was a consequence of no personal
incentives or rules restriction for presenter (engagement index). Under this
background, in order to avoid this situation, making group rules ahead would be
very helpful. Advance acknowledgement provide teammates time for preparation;
and preparation is a way to decrease their fear or nervous.
Conflict 2- what
is your status?
Inter-team
conflict was incurred by a debate with evening team on deciding the status of
the company they represented in our virtual collaboration project. Evening team
would like to define their manufacture company a top class nationwide while on
behalf of our small design company, we need to cooperate with small and
flexible manufacture company. I strongly disagree with their idea because it
made no sense for us to collaborate if so. However, I didn’t directly express
my thought but letting Rena to express our team’s concern to them. Eventually,
they made a compromise as Rena showed them the impracticability of their plan
and how to enrich viewpoints under our suggestion.
I
realized that in front of inter-team conflict, win-lose notion was a bad direction.
On the contrary, put ourselves into others’ feet help us to diagnose root
causes of conflict; and helping others to resolve problems is the way to
eliminate the conflict forever (Richardson, Hammock, G, Smith, S, Gardner, W,
Signo, M, 1994). Even if we can’t “expand cakes”, at least we guarantee we both
have “cakes”. If we partially reacted to this conflict, it’s hard to reach any
agreement or temporary agreement only leads to more serious problems in the
future.
Conflict 3- when
shall we meet?
Arranging
meetings with evening team was way much difficult than I expected. 6 people had
different daily schedule and sometimes, we can’t even figure out a single day
to meet in one week. People have different personal issues or class schedules
as excuses. We successfully arranged two times meetings with them, and they
never showed up as a whole. The first time, a girl in their team was busy with
personal stuff; the second time, another girl there was backing home. At that
time, I didn't act actively enough but chose to ignore the influences. It’s
their teammates’ responsibility to transform information we discussed not me, I
thought.
The
reality turned out that team members who didn't attend face to face meetings
maintained a very low level of belonging and behaved negatively in followed
discussion. Consequently, their team started their part very late which nearly
affected our own work as there are mutual sharing parts between two teams. Here,
I found out the importance of having a leadership in this temporary team’s
cooperation activity. Leaders will monitor the process of each team
respectively and give instructions when necessary.
Promises
Breaker V.S. Risk sharing
We
all made kinds of promises in each project; however, I have to say that not all
of them are kept in the end. When we first grouped, no any commitment made and
as what I illustrated in my first conflict, that’s very unwise. Till now, I
recognize that thoughtful commitment and promises arranged ahead effectively refrains
the team from ambiguous and conflicts.
Jason
spontaneously promised that he will be responsible with taking care of our blog
affairs; and he did what he promised. However, Rena and I were not very
satisfied with our blog’s outlook and structure. We expressed our concern and
suggestions to him at the very beginning but no big or obvious changes happened
afterwards. I have to admit that I gave up since I don’t want to ruin our
relationship and was not confident with my negotiation skills. What’s more, I
comfort myself that professors focus more on contents rather than format.
My
keep in silent behavior is clear evidence of my high conflict avoidance level;
and because of this, I didn’t insist on my ideas strongly or freely to express
my concern of group risks if members don’t like those thoughts. Whereas, after
the relatively low score of the first group written assignment, I recognized
the importance to insist on things that I believe are right if you have a goal
that you want to achieve. My goal is to reach a good score and I myself can’t
achieve it without cooperation with teammates. That’s why I spontaneously
responsible for the final blog paper checking. I read other’s writing seriously
and give constructive feedback for improvement. This time I notice my intention
to team members ahead and communicate with them nicely but specifically. They look much more cooperative this time.
Team Style and Members
Evaluation
Team
style is shaped by the interaction among members’ personalities from my
perspective of view. In Aladdin, none of we three members show strong
leadership or dominant style in communication and decision making. On the one
hand, the team seems harmonious and peaceful; on the other hand, every one of
us burn for a leader who tells us what to do so as to turn around the passive
decision making style in our team. As researches citied that personality is
very hard to change when people grow up and I would like to explain this as a
result of people usually just refuse to make changes.
Conflict
avoidance is a method of dealing with conflict, which attempts to avoid
directly confronting the issue at hand. From my perspective of thinking, I
think that Jason is such kind of person who pretended himself an openness to
experience style (is one of the domains which are used to describe human
personality in the Five Factor Model. Openness involves active imagination,
aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety,
and intellectual curiosity) because he seldom argue with others and always say “yes”
to any requirements; however, his performance eventually shows that he didn’t
do what he agrees and negatively reacted to feedback from others. This thing
just happened in our final project writing process; I turned his paper back
several times with always poor quality revised draft and that drove me
desperate.
According
to Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I’d like to category Rena into sensing and
thinking type. Individuals who prefer sensing are more likely to trust
information that is in the present, tangible, and concrete: that is,
information that can be understood by the five senses (Wikipedia). Instead of
figuring out some resolution depends on our own team, Rena prefers to acquire more
information to facilitate our decision making as she believes those decisions
are proved by most people and are put into practice; besides, one of the good
trait she has is that she won’t stop asking questions until she really get the
point; in other words, personally, she has a high sense of ambiguity avoidance.
Sometimes, it’s good to clarify misunderstanding or confusion; but, a habit
like this may trouble her teammates as the progress of team discussion were
dragged longer as she should be able to find those answers from the materials
we all have. In terms a thinking type, Those who prefer thinking tend to decide
things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems
reasonable, logical, causal, consistent, and matching a given set of rules. Thinkers
usually have trouble interacting with people who are inconsistent or illogical,
and tend to give very direct feedback to others (Wikipedia). In communication
with the evening group, Rena was much direct in communication because of her
thinking type. Led by a logic notion, she insisted on our team’s suggestion
about the evening group’s company status. Owing to that, she successfully
persuaded them because the other group couldn’t refuse her thought with any
logical and reasonable sources.
For
me, I had to admit that I wasn’t positive in the beginning of our cooperation as
I intentionally controlled my dominant style in discussion and want to hear
more of what my teammates say. If I acted actively, they will take my effort
for granted and leave everything to me. The result is that most of time, I was
the person to resolve the main problem. After several cooperation experiences,
I find out that keep silent in the team won’t help anything and then I speak
out. Actually, in the light of five factor model, I’m an extroversion people
who devote efforts and positive in adversities. I couldn't say that there is
any obvious adversity in my team but I still believe that our team doesn't work
very efficiently and
effectively. The evening group is also not passion about what we are doing.
Even though we eventually made it, the processes were not smooth. Therefore, I concluded
myself as a wrong self-positioning person first and then shaped it a little bit
better. If there is one more project waiting for me, I’m confident that I can
do much better.
Thinking it from another site, thanks for all
these difficulties and poor cooperation, I see how personality influences team
work as I analyzed above. What’s more, I recognized that preparation and
commitment are key roles to avoid adversities. Especially when it goes to virtual
world, trust and team loyalty are much harder to achieve as people rarely build
any relationship with each other to enhance understanding and working habit. If
I got another chance to work virtually with members, I see will I should start
first to build an effective virtual team.
Conclusion
In
general, a course full of team projects ranging from 10 minutes brain storming
to 2 weeks project designing, I accumulated a lot of precious team working
experiences whatever good or bad. Those are useful lessons to me. The virtual collaboration
project we deal with the evening team broadened my knowledge in practical
world. Unexpected problems push me to work for results and I enjoyed the
journey very much. Thanks for the opportunity.
References:
- RW LLC, 2012, The Challenges of Working in Virtual Teams;
- Barbara Bulleit, 2006, Effectively Managing Team Conflict;
- Engagement Index, No Incentives Means Low Employee Engagement; Retention
- Richardson, Hammock, G, Smith, S, Gardner, W, Signo, M, 1994, Empathy as a cognitive inhibitor of Interpersonal Aggression;
- Costa, P.T.,Jr. & McCrae, R.R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
