To Team or Not to Team

 

For this year’s portfolio project, I had already decided to work on my magazine cover and article alone, and when I read all the articles presented to me and worked on all the activities assigned to me, my decision was reaffirmed.

The Social Media Peer Account activity supports my decision, as it showed me what a peer of mine values, that being attention and emotion. I too value these, but I believe that a desire for attention is a destructive trait, and when I come across those who value it, there tends to be some competition between us regarding who gets control of a project. In Eli Becker’s article, “Team building and group dynamics: creating and fostering a culture of teamwork requires trust, collaboration, and accountability,” Becker goes over the importance of team members being able to cooperate with each other, but my peer expresses emotion much more than I am willing to, which I find causes conflict when I act harshly, or requires me to behave in a manner contradictory to how I would like to. My peer also has the potential to want to make decisions I dislike, which causes conflict when I or someone else ends up stubborn about a particular decision. Although I believe I am stronger when it comes to asserting my desires, I do not like forcing those I have deemed as friends to deal with my decisions when they have ideas of their own. Given this, I believe that it would be foolish to have him as a partner in this project, and I am better off working alone.

The Lost at Sea activity we worked on in class also supports my decision, as it was a clear demonstration of my personality and how it can cause conflict. In the article by John Bradley and Frederic Hebert, “The effect of personality type on team performance,” the authors describe the importance of personality when working in a team. My personality often causes conflict within a group, as I tend to be more assertive with what I want to see, and I do not know most of the people in my class, so I cannot say for certain what their personalities are. This being the case, there is a good chance that I could have worked with someone who is stubborn with their ideas, and this would most certainly cause conflict within a team. In the Lost at Sea activity, I saw how I continually tried to assert my opinion and force the others to accept my decision, and should I end up working with someone like this, there would certainly be conflict, and even if I did agree to back down and allow their ideas to flourish, I would be irritated throughout the entire project, and would create mediocre work.

As I have already started to go over, my personality does not always work well with other people in a team. In Eli Becker’s article, there is a quote from Leamon in 2015, one of the creators of the Organizational Capital Program, a program designed for effective team management, that states “...you can have the smartest people, but if they’re not playing together, it’s never going to get you ahead.” Like I have mentioned, my personality often comes in to conflict with others. I am assertive towards my beliefs and desires, and while this often works out when the people around me are more submissive or apathetic, there is a decent chance, given that I do not know the people in my class, that I would end up working with someone who is also more assertive. I find that I generally get agitated in situations such as these, at least when I care about the project I am working on, and as a result, I feel that it would be foolish to risk clashing within a team, reducing the quality of what we work on.

It is because of this, that I feel it would be best for me to work alone on this project and complete the magazine independently, just as I thought I would from the beginning.