Working in Groups

(Alvin Lo, Danely Gonzalez, Sriram Hariharan, Xeon Gutierrez)

Not all groups are created equal, and it can be very difficult to make one in which everyone is content with the other group members. The point of groups is to allow people to bring together different strengths to create a better end product. A lot of the time, we see people who don’t how to collaborate which creates a bad group environment, but rarely is anything addressed verbally in order to mend these problems. For this blog post, we looked at three different situations where there were issues with collaboration within a group, and analyzed the situation from both sides and how ethical dilemmas were faced in these bad group set ups. 

The first group member’s perspective seems great from the person giving it. He/she said their partner helped them learn and grow as a programmer, but the situation was probably not ideal to their partner. He/she said, “He is a much better programmer than me… and helped me look for better solutions than the laziest one”. The point of pair programming is to feed off of each other, so when you’re receiving much more than you’re giving, it can become very frustrating to your partner. At no point does she mention how she contributed as a partner, only how she gained. If the partner giving the perspective had said this to me and I was her partner, it probably would have ticked me off a bit. I’d advise him/her to study up as best she could to understand the concepts they were going to implement together, that way his/her partner is also benefiting from being a part of their team. I would’ve felt guilty about contributing so little, and probably would’ve worked harder to meet him halfway. If possible, I would’ve worked alone on further assignments with help from the professors because it seems like the help he, the partner, is giving is the same kind of help a TA would give, not the typical help of a partner. Although not intended, he/she is indirectly hurting him because he’s carrying her through the assignment. It seems as if he’d be able to get work done faster on his own, so he’s losing time he could be using to work on other assignments. He is also hurting her by not addressing this issue because she is becoming dependent, which can come back to bite her.

After analyzing the second perspective, it becomes obvious that the lack of communication have significantly lowered the effectiveness of the team. The narrator, after missing several group meetings, have given the impression that they cannot provide as much “value” as the other members of the group. However, due to his lack of assertiveness, he was unable to voice out concerns over his role (or lack thereof) in the group, which exacerbated the situation. In his place, perhaps the best action to take is to apologize in hopes to diffuse the tension within the group. On the other hand, the group should discuss this with the professor and decide the best direction going forward. In this scenario, the narrator is under the effect of conformity bias, in which the group implicitly believes that the lone member is less valuable and has contributed less than others and the lone member believes that he has to maintain a certain level of responsibility to feel included. This results in a lose-lose situation, as the non-contributing member has no choice but to “make up” for lost work, while tensions arise amongst the others in the group over the additional work that each member is now responsible for. 

The third perspective shows how a non-cooperative teammate can make other people feel unwelcome and unproductive in a group. The narrator says how one of their teammates shut them down and deleted their code without giving them any reason why. They also refused to use the code of the narrator. This made the narrator not be as willing to contribute to the team both in ideas and code, and in doing so reduced the overall cohesiveness of the group. On the other hand, the teammate who acted in this way probably didn’t feel like what they were doing was wrong, and that they were working for the betterment of the whole team by excluding someone, who in their mind, was not a good coder. This is an example where the narrator feels conformity bias, because the narrator feels like to truly belong in the group they have to be silent and not bring their “inferior ideas” to light, and the teammate feels that they are justified in causing harm, because they are protecting the grade of everyone involved.  Both of the teammates are hurting the group in different ways, with the narrator not sharing their ideas and bringing a diversity of thought to the group, and the non-cooperative teammate stifling other people’s ideas and not making them feel welcome. 

In conclusion, throughout all of the perspectives there were ways for both the narrator and the other group members to change the way they acted and improve the overall cohesiveness and effectiveness of the group. The first perspective showed how one person can do all the work while another person doesn’t contribute, the second perspective showed how hurtful it can be to be “carried” forcefully, and the final perspective shows how a non-cooperative and non-supportive teammate can make someone feel. In all these cases, greater insight by the group members into the ethical dilemmas created by their actions could have prevented their issues.