A631.2.5.RB - Cooperation and Competition

I recognize a lot of names and believe I worked with some students prior to this class so I know what to expect from them. I hope my team is secure in using email more than the discussion board. This means checking in every couple of days, asking questions, providing help where it is needed. This gives accountability to each member and if we have to nudge the other members we can do it in a constructive way. We all seem to have the same thoughts on expectations and what we expect from our learning experiences here.

I do not believe this will be the case.

Over the course of this program I have learned a lot about working on teams. At first, I groaned about this as I had my own assumptions as to how it work or not work. Instead of looking at the positive I focused on the negative aspects of team work. For instance, in another course it seemed that right out of the gate, one team member thought he was God's Six Sigma gift to the team and wanted to run everything but talked like a politician. I suggested our team use Google documents to collect information for this assignment, everyone agreed, and then no one used it. Sometime groups are very frustrating! I always seem to have issues with members; either we must deal with a very aggressive member or lack of participation. However, these experiences have actually taught me about group dynamics and how to better work with teams. I believe too many members hinders teams and creates more of a likelihood of role ambiguity and conflict (Brown, 2011, p. 298). One of my courses had 3 students. Period. It was great! However, I am open-minded and try to see the good in teams.


With any group, there will be times where we disagree with each other and even with communication on the discussion board, the message can get lost as tone cannot be conveyed through here. Everyone approaches decision-making or problem-solving differently so it is important that we try to avoid conflict if possible. However if that is not possible we must be able to manage conflict constructively by using compromising and integrating styles. The charter is straight forward and there are not really any factors that inhibit the process or time needed to get it done. Everyone submitted their parts pretty quickly. I was last, but with plenty of time to spare. Being on the West Coast is a challenge, as I see time differently and work "later" than others.

Overall I would say communication and coordination of responsibilities are essential behaviors that will contribute in helping us to successfully and efficiently complete tasks. As a team I believe we are all on the same page with how we share information: through the discussion board with email follow up as needed. No time was spent on decision-making and problem-solving this week; it was not required. At this point there are no real issues with authority or power that would affect our team. It is possible that it may happen in some of the later projects however I feel confident that we will be able to work through those issues and remain cohesive. As I read over the charter I can see that we will be able to collaborate well in order to influence a great outcome to our projects. I do think that it would be interesting to ask these types of questions in some of the other projects that are more time consuming and more detail oriented where the chances of conflict and competition will most likely occur. This way we could get a better idea of different challenges there are and how we dealt with differences and still managed to get the project done in a timely manner.


Brown, D. (2011). An experiential approach to organizational development. (8th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.