When
talking about the tough process of the teamwork we have suffered, the first
thing coming into my mind is the conflicts at the beginning of the formation of
team.
It was
the second time of our assignment. One of the teammates did a bad job. That
part was redone by the teammate twice and at last the other teammate adjusted
the final version to get a ‘so so’ result. We did not have much time to have some arguments due to
the limitation of the deadline. But after that, there seemed always be some
estrangement between each other. One of the teammates complained about that bad
job every now and then while the person who did the job was always silent but
seemed still having something want to talk about. Such circumstance lasted for
weeks until we have a dinner together and had a deep discussion.
After all
these settled and we reflect about the whole issue, we think that there
actually are some logical and related reasons that lead to the unhappy
conflicts.
【Result-orientation makes us blind】
When we are trying to judge the success of something, the first and
most method we used is directly look at the result. If the result is good, or
at least we think it’s good, everything else seems not such important; even if
the people have ever been late for meeting, bossy at the discussion, and talk
little at the Wechat platform, the great job they did seems can cover every
mistakes before. On the opposite, if the result is not very well, s/he might be
blame for many things related to the failure of the tasks; sometimes, even the
previous errors are mentioned again so that to highlight their ‘crimes’ are too
numerous to record. However, at such atmosphere, how many people ever think
about the efforts s/he spent so as to try to do a good job? Like I talked about
at the story of my team, we all do not want to redo that part, which is
time-consuming and should not be our job at all. But we had to do that as the
task was measured by group and we did not want to get bad scores. People are
always selfish or at least put themselves before the others. This is also the
reason that people tend to blame the teammates who have not done a good job
rather than try to understand them. Result-orientation makes us blind so that
we ignore that s/he has always been a hard-working guy who cares for every
assignment and even keep working deep into night just to adjust some details of
our work. S/he must have done the best based on their standard. The result may should
not be directly judged bad just because it was different from what we think it
should be; and our teammates also should not be ‘sentenced to death’ for the
job s/he has paid a lot of efforts on. This is harmful for the collaboration. It is always our
blame and misunderstanding rather than the time-consuming redo process that
hurt our teammates the most. Such result-oriented measurement method,
especially measured by our own standard, is surely harmful for the trust, collaboration,
progress, and long-term development of an organization. The people who face
blames may gradually become less active, unconfident, and estrangement from
other partners. All of these come from the misunderstanding of partners due to
their utilitarian result-oriented behaviors. After all, without the motivation of
beneficial goals existing on the commercial teams, the feelings and emotions
are very important and motivating for such study team. The positive emotions
between the team members can bring a team immeasurable productivity that exert
better team power, so called one plus one greater than two. In the theory of
team foundation process, we call it performing process.
【Old habits cause biased expectations】
People
always tend to expect things based on their historical experiences. Before we form a new team, there have been lots
of teams we were involved in in the past years. These experiences, especially the
good ones, are easily to be transferred into the recognition of new teammates and
guide some of our behaviors. In one hand, this may be helpful at the
forming process of a team. Such previous teamwork experiences may bring us the feelings
of intimacy and make us feel that we can repeat the happy endings just like
before. However, in the other hand, this may also do harm to the collaboration and
development of new team as the old experiences and habits can cause some biased
expectations. There has been a talking during a dinner with our teammates discussing
about our past experiences, after which everyone began to understand why one of
our teammates were always confused and disappointed during the teamwork. Coming
from a province with superior education quality and always study and cooperate with those
high ability students left this team member the habits of relatively higher
standards towards works and partners. For example, s/he thought that after
assigning the work, the teammates should communicate with each other to let the
others know their progress, conditions, and especially the problems they
encountered so that to guarantee the high standard of final results. Every
thing unclear should be cleared before start rather than adjustment at last. However,
the others did not know that at beginning and just deal with each task
following their previous habits. The result of that should be easy to be guessed;
this team member was angry about the result of others’ job and wondered why the
others never talked about their confusion of the tasks during the working
process. This is obviously because s/he just directly copy the old teamwork
experiences to the new one. But what is important is that these guys are
different from the previous ones. S/he cannot expect too much of the
tacit understanding just like the previous teams. As hasty forming study teams, we did
not have much time to understand each other deeply so as to know each other’s characteristics,
habits, and thoughts. At such conditions, the granted standards coming
from previous experiences are no doubt harmful for the entire teamwork. One
side will continuously feel that the others are not doing a good job comparing
with the previous partners while the other side will feel that guy is too
severe to get along with.
【Expectancy
disconfirmation hurts us】
Based on
the two aspects we analyzed above, it is not hard to find out that the
different standards from each people has always been bringing some troubles to
the collaboration and performance of the team. But when we try to dig out the
nature of such unhappy issues, it seems that it is the expectancy disconfirmation
rather than the standard itself that hurts us. Expectancy
disconfirmation means that the result we see is different from what we expect
or what we think it should be like; it can be either positive expectancy
disconfirmation (result is better than expectation) or negative expectancy disconfirmation (result is worse than
expectation). No
matter the first or second condition we talked about before both result such
disconfirmation. The result orientation means that we have already image a
result in our mind, which will be the measurement and benchmark to compare with
the real result; the biased expectation caused by the old habits also set a ‘what
it should be like’ that brings us too much ‘should be’ imagination. Be careful;
here I use the word ‘imagination’. It means that all these standards are generated
and kept within mind that the others do not know it at all. At such conditions,
how can the others meet their expected standard while they totally do not know
it? S/he first set an standard in mind and compare the result (result-orientation) of others with what s/he imagined (biased expectation) and then feel sad about the difference between the two (negative expectancy disconfirmation); conflicts then came after that. However, people may not have time to go through all these analysis process before
they get angry. The only result is that it hurts the team.
Obviously, we cannot just let things just keep like that. Life has to be continued; tasks are still approaching; solution is needed.
Based on
the previous theory, the positive solutions, in addition to these negative
handling ways such as just avoid or ignore the conflicts, to the conflicts
within teams can be highly generalized into four types: problem-solving,
persuasion, bargaining, and politicking.
As our
main problem is around the misunderstanding due to the lack of communication
and each of the teammates are hardworking to chase the good result rather than
negative stand by, we think it should not be very hard to put it solved
directly.
Actually,
the nature of the conflicts was firstly put forward by the teammate who has the
problems mentioned above. S/he reflected the conflicts we encountered and suggest
we launch a better communication mode. S/he should list all the requirements or expectations
clearly or just finish his/her part so that everyone else can understand what
the entire result should be. Also, the others should keep communicating their
progress, problems and extra thoughts during the working process so that necessary
help can be offered in time. In return, the others need to undertake some other
incidents such as the adjustment of the format of whole article and the post of
blog. As this team member is
better at academy than the others proved by his/her previous scores and record,
this solution was well accepted and put into practice directly. By doing so, we
found out that such operation mode also brought benefits to the other aspect
such as higher efficiency due to the guide provided by the first person which
lead to lower frequency of missing the deadline and we became more
understanding about each other and no longer think that s/he is too severe and
fastidious about the team works, which made us more happy collaboration.
If you
ask me what the most valuable thing I get from the course through this semester,
I think it should be that with the help of those theories, we can avoid climb
on the ladder of inference that brings us more patient to understand others
rather than directly define a person or a thing; when we encountered into some
troubles that affect the benefits of different parties, we bundle what we have
and what we can provide to try to bring both side a better result; when
conflicts come, we are fearless to face them directly and cooperate to solve
them because we trust our teammates, etc. With all these theories practiced, we
finally formed a team in high performance collaboration; we finally won
ourselves the true friendship and love that will not be end with the course. Thank
you, Frank and Joy. Thank you, my teammates.