Conflicts Resolution of Task Choosing Preference

______by Liu Shengwen (53711118), Team 10 H2O International

After one semester of building this team and working together on several assignments, our team H2O International has done a great performance of collaboration. Every members has made a great contribution to the teamwork. We used brainstorming, mind mapping and many other different ways to complete tasks and to surmount obstacles. Every assignments is a challenge to our team in different ways, especially in conflicts solving. However, we would like to say “we had some disagreements”, rather than “we had conflicts”. By addressing the question “why we have disagreements”, we work out one thing behind it——difference in backgrounds.

I will talk about one outcome of difference in background and how we prevented it from happening and how we solved it if something did happen. It is task choosing preference.

Team Composition

Out team name is H2O International. It represents the combination of two different kinds of elements, H and O. Two male members in this team study high-tech engineering, while the girl studies organisation management. The two boys have a better sense of logic and the girl is proficient in literature, which can highly improve the group work by building a well organising construct with a professional point of view. During our collaboration, the boys deal with obstacles by solving three questions—“what is the obstacle, what is the reason, which is the best solution”. And the girl make great contribute to the assignments with her outstanding understand of the course.

We hope to generate unique and comprehensive ideas with the help of diversity. Unfortunately, diversity is what caused most of our conflicts within the team.

Conflict Appearances

We have done 2 assignments and several practices which developed our teamwork step by step. And we met different kinds of conflicts. Conflict of task choosing preference is a common one at the beginning phase. After accomplishing the skeleton frame of a project, the team leader is to assign work to individuals whom may have different preference in which kind of work. 

1. I can do it, trust me.

The first kind of conflict appearances is two members are into the same task. For instance, in the assignment of complain letter, Linda is good at english writing, and I am more interested in story telling. So in terms of the case introduction part, if Linda gets that part, she can use more precise words to describe the case while I would like to add more emotional elements into the narrative. It is really hard to define which way is better and there is not much time for us to work together for each one’s part on the details. The most efficient way to finish an assignment is each one taking one part. And Linda and I both want to fight for that part due to our confidence to accomplish the part perfectly. There happens the conflict.

In the real case, no body could tell which one’s work is a perfect job before they even start. That’s why when two members choose the same part, it’s hard for the leader to divide the assignment.

2. I am not good at that, give it to others.

The second kind of conflict appearances is that no one wants to take a certain task. For instance, when we were doing the first assignment, which is about different styles of teamwork. The most complicated part is analysis. It calls for long time of research and writing. We worked out the products and collected datas together, but the analysis must be accomplished from a higher level. The leader tried to find some balance in working load as some of the members may make more efforts in team meeting and discussion while the others need to undertake more responsibility in writing.

How We Solved Conflicts

We can define a assignment as a multitask as it is made of visual part, data part, and analysis part. Multitasking can occur on many different timescales. Our goal is to fulfill multiple goals in parallel. It  is like a construct of total-sub-total. So all the individual work makes contribute to the whole project. 

The first thing to motivate people to overcome one’s rejection to a certain task is to make one understand that task is a significant component to the assignment, which is a part of building the team.

Most people perform better when they have a clearly defined ‘future state’ to work towards –
a vision of the future as the focus for their efforts. Similarly, a team will perform better if it takes time to develop a shared vision. The vision should motivate and inspire team members, commit them to the task and convince them that it will be achieved more successfully if they work together rather than as individuals. 

Teams are more motivated to deliver a vision they themselves have developed because the vision has its roots in their own values, skills and beliefs, rather than coming from outside. When team members feel they have made a real contribution to a significant, challenging and attainable vision, they feel a sense of ownership and are likely to work hard to co-operate and achieve it. The extent to which it is shared depends on how it has been negotiated.  

In different assignments, our team leader changed. Fortunately, they did a good job at persuading people and creating a win-win situation. They always focus on how to proceed the project in a team. In assignment 2, we shared a lot about interesting conflicts happened during our working experiences. Choosing one proper case for writing a complain letter is initial. The leader of that assignment, Jojo decided to use the Muslim case, which has enough conflict impact and easy to evoke sympathy. The problem is I am not an aggressive type, and writing the complain letter could use a strong attitude as well as calm, which suits Linda better. Jojo claimed that we need a Linda way of speaking not a soft way from me, listing several disadvantages. This kind of persuasion moved me because I always put team at the first place. Little compromising is ok for me as well as it is needed for better performance of the final result.

Collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood – when individuals feel that they can do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste too much energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focus on the task. In addition, team members are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team’s goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as one that requires creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest time and energy in collaboration. 

The second thing is to make it really clear who should be responsible for what kind of job. We talked a lot about our capabilities, to make sure who is better for a certain position, which can be also defined as trust building. 

Assigning leaders who are both task- and relationship- oriented. There has been much debate among both academics and senior managers about the most appropriate style for leading teams. Some people have suggested that relationship-oriented leadership is most appropriate in complex teams, since people are more likely to share knowledge in an environment of trust and goodwill. Others have argued that a task orientation – the ability to make objectives clear, to create a shared awareness of the dimensions of the task, and to provide monitoring and feedback – is most important. 

The most productive, innovative teams were typically led by people who were both task and relationship oriented. This kind of leaders changed their style during the project. Specifically, at the early stages they exhibited task oriented leadership: They made the goal clear, engaged in debates about commitments, and clarified the responsibilities of individual team members. However, at a certain point in the development of the project they switched to a relationship orientation. This shift often took place once team members had nailed down the goals and their accountabilities and when the initial tensions around sharing knowledge had begun to emerge. An emphasis throughout a project on one style at the expense of the other inevitably hindered the long-term performance of the team. 

That is to say, trust is not only useful for collaboration, but also for leadership.How could a leader build trust and let members trust him in such short semester under the pressure of time and other courses. Many studies highlight the central importance of personal connections in the trust-building process – and appropriately so. This finding does not necessarily mean, however, that your trust in leaders or persons of power must be based on a history of sustained personal contact. An important element of swift trust is the presence of clear and compelling roles. Deep trust in a role, we found, can be a substitute for personal experience with an individual. Role- based trust is trust in the system that selects and trains the individual. Robyn Dawes, a psychologist who specialises in human judgment, once observed,“We trust engineers because we trust engineering and that engineers [as individuals] have been taught to apply valid principles of engineering.” Thus, the role is a proxy for personal experience and guarantees expertise and motivation – in short, trustworthiness. 

During our teamwork, chatting is a helpful process for us, through which we can generate an image of one’s personality. Leaders then use these images to match personal abilities and roles in the team.

Summary

Often the challenging tasks facing nowadays real cases require the rapid assembly of people from multiple backgrounds and perspectives, many of whom have rarely, if ever, met. Their diverse knowledge and views can spark insight and innovation. However, the higher the proportion of people who don’t know anyone else on the team and the greater the diversity, the less likely the team members are to share knowledge, which may lead to task choosing preference problems. In order to solve this, the priority is to focus on team building, trust building and roles determining at the same time. A team should have agreements in future state and clear understand of what kinds of roles that members are playing. Team leader and team members are to create an inspiring atmosphere by persuading, negotiating and approaching win-win situation within the team.

References

1.Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions, May 2009. The Decision to Trust, Robert F. Hurley.

2.Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions, June 2009. Rethinking Trust, Roderick M. Kramer.

3.Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions, November 2007.  Ways to Build Collaborative Teams, Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson 

4.www.constructingexcellence.org.uk. Effective Teamwork.

5.Choices, Choices: Task Selection Preference During Concurrent Multitasking, Menno Nijboer, Niels Taatgen, Hedderik van Rijn

6. Salvucci, D. D., & Taatgen, N. A. (2007). Threaded Cognition: An Integrated Theory of Concurrent Multitasking. Psych. Rev. , 115 , 101-130.