To Team or Not to Team

 

 To Team or Not to Team 

In My Portfolio project I had indecision as to whether I should work in a group or not. Sometimes in collaborative work that I participate in, I sometimes have the notion that I am not contributing enough to the group project. There is an explanation for this notion. Terry Pettijohn and Shujaat Ahmed (2010) of Coastal Carolina University states that this habit is called social loafing. They describe social loafing as “the likelihood of individuals contributing less when working on a task as part of a group than when working on a task alone... [it] generally increases with group size and decreases with task importance, potential for evaluation, uniqueness of individual contributions, and complexity of task.” The possibility of loafing in a group is why I had a preference to work independently.  

 After some reconsideration, I decided to work in a team rather than independently as I know some classmates and have a good friendship with them. I figured that this could provide for healthy cooperation and improve our knowledge of one another. to prove my reasoning for this statement, Eli Becker of the Wiley brand team explains that in a collective commitment, “the team needed to trust that what they were saying would be respected and heard. They shared personal backgrounds to learn about one another's perspectives and how they might relate to their colleagues in ways beyond work period they spoke candidly on what makes them comfortable and uncomfortable in a work environment. They discussed their teams core values and their vision for themselves and the company. (2015)” I applied this approach to working with my partner as we were honest with each other and since we knew enough about each other, we discussed the proposal for our magazine and how that vision could form into a magazine.  Another reasoning for my decision to worked in a team was that Pettijohn and Ahmed (2010) provided a statistic convincing me to work in a pair. The statistic reads that “Collectively, 78% of the top billboard songs were written by individuals or pairs.” This statistic gave me the notion that if I worked in a pair or independently, my product would have a good chance of becoming successful. Because of the article that I cited with Eli Becker, I had decided to work in a pair.  

The Coast Guard lost at sea activity also helped me make the decision to work in a group as I had noticed on some of the rankings I had picked them in different places from the Coast Guard and that made me think that before deciding on certain subjects of the magazine, it would be good to have a second opinion to help assist me in determining what would be ideal.