2015年5月4日星期一

Final assignment: why different standards of teammates cause conflicts


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.