Parallel experiences of team work

Teamwork is an important skill of interpersonal communication. It is challenging because it is not absolutely on individual level. Instead, lots of external factors, such as personality of teammates, rules and norms within a team, and roles of team members, can strongly influence teamwork performance. Also, there is no doubt that some external incentives can enhance quality of team work.

I am currently doing a group project for another class and I really enjoy it. The professor set up really clear grading policies with rewards and punishment. All group members were asked to set up a common goal together and reach a mutual agreement about how to conduct the project, such as never miss meeting unless emergency. It set up an informal rules and norms for small group and really made things done more effectively. The grading policy also provides some incentives and punishments for members' performance. For example, he suggested that all team members should vote for the most contributing and cooperative person in the final assessment. Even though every one in the team basically share the same grade, the member with highest vote will be rewarded some extra credit in his/her individual grade. On the other hand, if most of group members compliant on a certain group member's behavior or attitude, he would investigate and might lower that person's letter grade. The informal role setting in this group project also works really well. To prevent waste and noise in communication, all teams should appoint only one person to be the representative to communicate with professor and consolidate information. Even though it might cause inefficiency in some circumstance, it save our time and make the feedback process easier.

Honestly, I don't think I really have terrible teamwork experience. Even though sometimes people worked inefficiently, we could still finish the task on time. I had painful experience to figure out the communication process. In some project that requires external communication, it might be confused to figure out different people's responsibility. Usually, people have formal roles and responsibilities in a structural organization. But for external personnel who are not familiar with the process, they might choose people to contact based on proximity and intuition. My supervisor used to get really frustrated when she knew one of our external partners directly reach me via email. Then she emphasized the hierarchy of the organization that people should assign task by contacting the director first, because I am not responsible for reporting to people outside the organization. And some of the requests actually confuse me. However, after my supervisor talked to both part, this person started directly reaching to another student intern. Some of his requests haven't been negotiated and reported to people who are in charge, so we sometimes we receive requests that are contradict to each other and waste time in communication. I think this is the drawback of unclear communication flow in a team and in the organization. It might also due to different people have different viewpoints about their jobs. For this external person, his goal is obtaining his need as soon as possible so he will reach student intern because we usually reply email more timely. However, as far as we are concerned, we need to make sure the accuracy of our job. And for management level, they want to keep a structure of the organization.