Team production with gift exchange
In the following blog post I would like to talk
about gift exchange in group work in university. At my business university in
Vienna teachers have a main focus on this type of work because they think that
it is very important for our future working life to work with different people
together and learn how to coordinate. I had last semester 8 different groups at
the same time, which was very hard to coordinate, but now I have a lot of
experience in working together in groups.
It is very interesting to see that in a short
time period everybody finds their position in the group. Quickly there is a
leader who makes a facebook or whats app group and someone decides which work
every student will do. For me gift exchange is defined as giving something to a
person or a group for example effort or time and not expecting to get back the
same.
My favorite group was last semester in my human resource
management class. Here I want also to bring up the example with gift exchange.
We were 6 different people in this group and all very satisfied with our major.
We all also wanted to have an A+ so it was clear at the beginning that everybody
wants to do more than he or she has to do to get the best grade. A girl for
example volunteered for doing a poster. She borrowed a lot of equipment from
her mother because she was a teacher and put a lot of effort in it. She was
sitting the whole weekend on the poster and tried the best to be creative. She
didn’t expect that the other are also sitting the whole weekend on the project
but she did it for the group.
Moreover, we had a google document were
everybody could work at the same time. We couldn’t identify who did which parts
of the project and how much effort every person put in the project but it
worked perfectly because we had all the same goal and were very motivated at
work.
The result of this group project was that we got
an A+ and the teacher was very satisfied about the creative way we did our
project. I think we can achieve much better results when we don’t care how much
effort we put in the project especially when we don’t compare us with the
others in the group. Therefore, every person gives their best and there will be
the best result achieved.
I had also another group where it was very
important for the members that we split the work in clear parts and that
everybody works the same time and amount on the project. We worked separately
during the whole project and at the end we tried to combine the parts. But the
problem was that we didn’t know what the other person wrote and we had a very
different style of writing. Furthermore, it was a lot of work afterwards to
make a fluent text of the separate parts. So, it is to mention that this method
is fair for everybody but definitely not the method where you can achieve the
best goals. When every person only cares about putting an equal amount of effort
in the project in cannot be the perfect result. This is a negative example of
gift exchange because it is about the willingness to give more than the other
person, which is not found in this example.
It is definitely not possible in all groups to
do it like in the first example because when there is one person who wants to
have an A+ and the other person wants only to pass then it is probably better
to do it like in the second example. Because in that case, the motivated person
can go through the text and try to combine it perfectly and it can be a good
result. But when you work with this person like in the first example it can
happen that the unmotivated member is doing nothing and you have to do the
project by yourself.
To sum up, gift exchange in groups is important
to get perfect results. But it is also to say that you need the right group
members to make a good project possible.
So, pardon if this sounds like a silly question, but are there only group grades on the projects you describe or are there also individual grades? I wonder, also, if you've been part of a group that has to deliver a report but this isn't for a class so there isn't any grade at all. I have had such experiences professionally. The work done in figuring out what should be in the report mattered more to me than how the final report itself turned out. Also, my own career was pretty far along at this point, so having my name on the report was itself not a big deal. Have you had any experience of that sort, in any group work whatsoever?
ReplyDeleteYou talked in a previous post about playing badminton, which I gather you do just for recreation. Do you play as a team in that or only individually? If as a team, what does it take to get get good teamwork in that setting.
Still a different setting is the live classroom. In my class, we don't have grades for class participation. But a few students are more likely to talk up than the rest of the class. Can you think of what motivates them to do that? Their talking up is definitely a gift. If you view my role as that of a manager, and I want to encourage more gift giving among those people who report to me (students who are in our class) what actions might encourage that. More generally, meaning not in a class setting, what might a manager do to encourage gift giving among those who report to the manager?
Yes, normally everybody in the group gets the same grade but we have the possibility to receive a different grade based on our teammates input. No unfortunately I don’t have experience like class.
ReplyDeleteYes, I also play badminton in group. To get a good team work it is important to take care of the other person in the game so you can react better.
I think some people feel more comfortable to speak in class and it depends also on their personality. Moreover, positive feedback could encourage employees to gift giving.