A Critical Reflective Essay on My Roles and Contributions in the Task of “Business”

The residential weekend was a really delightful holiday and a meaningful experience in
my postgraduate study. That teamwork training was very unforgettable, even though time
passing so long. During those three days training, there are lots of impressive events
happened. Through looks at those events with a critical eye, those make me changed and
certainly I also develop myself in some areas. This paper is going to examine my
personal behaviors and present a self—awareness, and shows an analysis of my
individual role that relevant with this personal experience. In this reflective essay, the
principle purposes are to find out whether I am suitable for working with others who
come from different cultures and backgrounds or not, and whether I possess of good
leadership and teamwork skills or not. In order to do this, it will be briefly described
these critical events in the first part, and then it will emphasized my individual roles and
contributions as part of our team. During this process, some relevant academic theories
(such as leadership, communication, cooperation and team conflicts) and some models of
team behaviour (such as Belbin Roles, learning style, Adair-Action-Centred leadership,
Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions and Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Grid) will be adopted
to evaluate my performance and potential personal development.
Before reflecting on my individual performance, I would like to briefly describe those
critical events and summarize the overall situation. At the first day, there were lots of
difficulties occurred within our team. I had no idea about what I can do, I don’t know the
rules of the task and act independently, because each of us were lack of communication,
understanding and planning, especially the missile task, this tasks aim was to get a bucket
onto a platform on the top of a pole. We all seemed a bit overwhelmed by the task. It is
very hard to complete. And I was tired and fretful. However, other members try their best
to think several ideas to complete this crazy task. Lots of ideas make us quite confusing,
so we decide to do something first, we build the pole together. When we take the first
step, everything become easily and I began to calm down to think how to get the bucket
attended. Suddenly, one best idea comes to me as spontaneous accidents. I used two
joints as a hook to lock the bucket. I am satisfied with my idea, because one of my
residential objectives is coping with stress better. When in trouble, I don’t know how to
cope with that knotty problem, I always exert pressure upon myself, I cannot do work
well. And this time, I can work under pressure, it improve my confidence. At the same
time, my team members’ encouragements give me a very big power.
During the task, when I have an idea, I don’t know how to explain, therefore, I use body
language let them understand. As an auxiliary means of sound language, the body
language plays an important role in language communication. As Lurnsden (2000)
claimed that, communication is one of the important and challenging skills and refers to
the process used to bring message from one individual to another. It can be verbal and
non-verbal between people trying to create shared meaning. English is my second
language, so sometimes; I am poor at explaining and clarifying complex points that occur
to me. Because of varied cultures, poor communication, I always feel fall behind by half
a beat. As Dwyer (2005:79) said that, good communication is essential for all members of
an organisation to ensure that they work together to achieve organizational goals.
Therefore, understanding how to communicate with others is essential to work with a
team. British people and Anna (Polish) think Chinese people are very shy, and very quite.
Actually, Chinese student do not like to give their ideas on their own initiative, and they
are good at listen to others. And then give some reasonal method to deal with problem.
Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions give insights into other cultures so that we can
interact effectively with people in different countries. Because of high power distance
and high level of long term orientation in china (Hofstede, 1991), chinese members tend
to need more time to thinking, planning and suitting each task and prefer to be wold what
to do.
The third day task is the enterprising business, our group is Crosthwaite Enterprise,
which has been invested £100 by our stock-holders, and they expect a significant return
on their investment at the end of the day with a profit of at least £6000 being achieved.
To achieve this aim, we eight members in the group make every effort to earn more
money. When the whole task was over, we just earn about £4000 and other groups earn
about £10,000. We cannot finish the target and fail in this exercise. We ignore the
collective strength is more powerful than individual, those high value exercises often
need teamwork. Use too much time to plan and think ideas, finally, time is not enough
and cannot complete the task. Here, I use Tuckman – phases of team development
(Chimaera Consulting, 2001) to describe the co-operation within the production team. As
we have already co-operated with each other before in a bigger group, so there was no
“forming” phases at that moment. At the beginning, we were already in the stage of
“storming” – we eight people had conflicts about choosing which task to play. Anna
claimed that we should find some easy tasks to do, and Ivy and I think we should do the
tasks which can earn more money and Graeme mentioned that we could do the task
which other groups had been done before and we can learn from them. According to
Rollinson, D. & Broadfield, A. (2002), ‘Conflict in work teams is not necessarily
destructive, however. Conflict can lead to new ideas and approaches to organizational
processes, and increased interest in dealing with problems.’ Finally, our leader (Gareth)
broke the stalemate and said that “it is more effective to choose different tasks. You can
divide us into a couple of small groups and select whatever you can do.” All of us
accepted this advice, which lead us to the third phase – norming. Varney, G. H. (1989)
cautions that negative conflict can destroy a team quickly and often arises from poor
planning. Now it seems that Gareth’s advice was not as effective as forecasted, because
when we choose the tasks individually, we never consider whether the value of the tasks
were great or not, and furthermore, it was time-consuming that almost everyone chose
easy and small valued tasks. We should choose the most valuable tasks to conduct, and
all of us had better attend the task because it calculated by the number of persons.
In the final phase of Tuckman’s Team Development – Performing, group identity,
loyalty and morale are all high, and everyone is equally task-orientated and people-
orientated. This high degree of comfort means that all the energy of the group can be
directed towards the tasks in hand (Chimaera Consulting, 2001). I feel very happy
cooperate with our group members, because everyone do the task without a word of
complaint. We have same aim, although we failed finally, we work together with whole
heart.
Turning to my personal behaviour, I have experienced two different roles during this
Business, which are production staff, leader and finance controller. I will examine them
respectively in the following paragraphs. At the beginning, my role is production staff. I
was so excited that I can cooperate with others to earn money. However, I am an
impetuous people. I think I am skillful in make kite, I believe that I can make it. And I
never consider everything. When I realize make a kite is a bad ideas and I will waste 5
pound, I felt upset and self-condemned as I thought it was my fault. However, I am not
frustrating. Instead, I try my best to make up the loss. I do anything else I can do and earn
more money. According to the Belbin (2004) roles, I am a completer finisher. Completers
are painstaking, conscientious, patient and anxious. Furthermore, I always gave attention
to the detail in every mission and noticed to public. My aimed to complete and to do so
thoroughly. Even though the kite mission was mot succeed, I still trying to make it fly
and not easy to give up. The tension of well-managed conflict allows people to confront
difficulties through healthy analysis and improve the decisions made (Bryant &Rayeski,
1994). This leads to greater term efficiency and effectiveness.
My second role is leader and finance controller. In fact, I have not been appointed as a
leader, and I act as a leader because I was helping Ivy to manage our group together with
her. Just like Belbin (2004) indicate that completers are good at searching out errors and
omissions. Just during the one hour’s leading time, I found that I was not a good leader. I
paid too much attention to the relationship with subordinates rather than completing of
tasks. According to Sisk (1969: 405-406), my leadership style seemed to be democrat
which is ‘flexible, permissive, and getting the most out of satisfied subordinates’.
Democratic style leadership is often associated with subordinates-centered; in contrast,
autocratic style is often associated with job-centered. Although there is an assumption
that democrat leadership is the ideal, in some circumstances an authoritarian type is more
useful (Cole, G., 2004). In the model of Adair’s (1979) action centred leadership, I am
located in the middle of the task maintenance needs and team needs. I can identify aims
for the group, and identify resources, people, processes and tools. I controlled timescales
very well, just like Belbin (2004) role which describe me as a completer – if gave me a
task, I can always deliver it on time. On the other hand I can not only develop team-
working, cooperation and team-spirit, but also can monitor and maintain discipline,
ethics, integrity and focus on objectives (Dove Nest Group, 2008). However, for
individual needs, it is hard for me to understand all the team members as individuals –
personality, skills, strengths, needs, aims and fears, which seems not good because the
ideal position is where complete integration of the three areas of need is achieved
(Huczynski & Buchanan, 2007). I need to develop my leadership skills in the next year,
according to Yukl (2006: 262)’s view, “the better leader makes the followers feel trust,
admiration, loyalty, and respect toward the leader, and they are motivated to do more
than they originally expected to do”.
All in all, that weekend also was I recently crosses a most substantial week, because I
thought every day was allowed to study the new knowledge, every day had the progress. I
was satisfied with my team working skills as well as my contributions to our group.
Through fully involving in the teamwork, I learnt that it is important to create an effective
team as it will lead to an ultima success. There are plenty of facts should be included as
building an good team, such as good leadership, committed and well-motivated team
members, good communication channels, good planning, hardworking and responsible
team members, and good co-operation. I examined my roles and behaviors respectively
for reflecting on my team working skills and leadership skills. The results are – I have
good team work skills as I can work well with a wide range of people who come from
different country with distinct culture and background. However, I think my leadership
and communication skills are relatively poor. It also needs my further development in
these areas.
Word count: 1743
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