Conflict with Group Dynamics
Overall, I think that when people have to work together, there is always some area in which conflict arise. Most people do not approach problems the exact same way, which is what makes collaborating so important. However, most of us think our solutions are optimal, and this creates forms of conflict. I will provide an example of this from my internship last summer.
Last summer, I was a data analyst at a company, and interns had to work together on a final project to present and show what we learned throughout the summer. Although all of us had the same title in the company, a college student interning for the summer, some people definitely felt more highly of their contributions. When the five of us worked together, immediately, some students assumed a leadership role and others were followers. This does not necessarily create conflict, but I know that when one of the interns constantly referred to their contributions to the company in a more arrogant way, I was slightly annoyed. I knew the work they did, and I knew that we had similar qualifications and completed the same type of work. After working on the project for a bit, one of the students confronted that intern and told her to be more open to our ideas, for we also found insights throughout our time. I know the other group members were also annoyed by her general attitude.
At the same time, this does not mean that assuming a leadership role is bad. I think that if someone truly does have more qualifications or has spent more time in a company, then they certainly should step up and try to help the new employees. Even with people who have completed similar tasks, it is nice to have someone step up so that the project actually gets completed. However, I think that attitude plays a huge role in one's ability to lead a group. Arrogance and disrespect will almost always lead to conflict: no one likes to be treated like an idiot.
This week's PowerPoint mentioned that emotions tend to lead to conflict because we are unable to understand when we do not know what is going on. At one point in our group project, this girl tried to promote an idea that was completely false based on the work we were doing. This demonstrates how this arrogant personality trait can really lead to conflict and evoke negative emotions in other group members.
Additionally, the PowerPoint connects Newton's Law of Human Interaction to organizations in the work place: when someone becomes offensive, others tend to be defensive. I agree with this idea, but only to a certain extent. When the girl was initially very offensive and perpetuated her ideas, I think everyone remained defensive and let her take control. For me personally, I know I did not speak up until it got bad. I thought that she would eventually tone down, and maybe she was just excited about the project and her potential contributions.
However, when she continued to be aggressive, I know that I got annoyed and spoke up with my ideas and where I thought she was wrong with her analysis. In this way, I think that I began to act more offensively: I did not remain on defense. One may argue that this means she became defensive, but unfortunately for the rest of us, she remained on offense and was not open to our ideas. In a more ideal situation, I would hope this person would become defensive and realize what they are doing is wrong.
I am not sure if conflict was unavoidable with someone like this. I did not know she would be in this internship program beforehand, and I never had a "real" job or internship before this. When accepting the offer, I really did not think about conflict with other people because my only goal was to find an internship and gain experience in something I am interested in. Hopefully, with more time and experience I will be able to realize when a company is not a good fit for me and when I would work well with their employees.
Last summer, I was a data analyst at a company, and interns had to work together on a final project to present and show what we learned throughout the summer. Although all of us had the same title in the company, a college student interning for the summer, some people definitely felt more highly of their contributions. When the five of us worked together, immediately, some students assumed a leadership role and others were followers. This does not necessarily create conflict, but I know that when one of the interns constantly referred to their contributions to the company in a more arrogant way, I was slightly annoyed. I knew the work they did, and I knew that we had similar qualifications and completed the same type of work. After working on the project for a bit, one of the students confronted that intern and told her to be more open to our ideas, for we also found insights throughout our time. I know the other group members were also annoyed by her general attitude.
At the same time, this does not mean that assuming a leadership role is bad. I think that if someone truly does have more qualifications or has spent more time in a company, then they certainly should step up and try to help the new employees. Even with people who have completed similar tasks, it is nice to have someone step up so that the project actually gets completed. However, I think that attitude plays a huge role in one's ability to lead a group. Arrogance and disrespect will almost always lead to conflict: no one likes to be treated like an idiot.
This week's PowerPoint mentioned that emotions tend to lead to conflict because we are unable to understand when we do not know what is going on. At one point in our group project, this girl tried to promote an idea that was completely false based on the work we were doing. This demonstrates how this arrogant personality trait can really lead to conflict and evoke negative emotions in other group members.
Additionally, the PowerPoint connects Newton's Law of Human Interaction to organizations in the work place: when someone becomes offensive, others tend to be defensive. I agree with this idea, but only to a certain extent. When the girl was initially very offensive and perpetuated her ideas, I think everyone remained defensive and let her take control. For me personally, I know I did not speak up until it got bad. I thought that she would eventually tone down, and maybe she was just excited about the project and her potential contributions.
However, when she continued to be aggressive, I know that I got annoyed and spoke up with my ideas and where I thought she was wrong with her analysis. In this way, I think that I began to act more offensively: I did not remain on defense. One may argue that this means she became defensive, but unfortunately for the rest of us, she remained on offense and was not open to our ideas. In a more ideal situation, I would hope this person would become defensive and realize what they are doing is wrong.
I am not sure if conflict was unavoidable with someone like this. I did not know she would be in this internship program beforehand, and I never had a "real" job or internship before this. When accepting the offer, I really did not think about conflict with other people because my only goal was to find an internship and gain experience in something I am interested in. Hopefully, with more time and experience I will be able to realize when a company is not a good fit for me and when I would work well with their employees.
Here's a little disclaimer before otherwise commenting on your post. There is no such thing as Newton's Law of Human Interaction. I made that up - trying to put a catchy name on something that did seem real enough. It's fine to use it in this post, but probably shouldn't be used outside of our class.
ReplyDeleteMoving onto your post, I would distinguish a manager, on the one hand, from a leader, on the other. Sometimes those overlap, but definitely not always. The way you told this story, the girl who self-appointed as a manager was not a leader. Regarding that your group had a need for a manager, I was a little unclear as to why that was. Two possibilities are: (1) some of the interns needed to be coaxed into doing their share of the work or (2) the various components of the work interns did needed to be coordinated. Given this, I wonder for how long the group went with nobody providing management, and if there was some dysfunction in this state before this girl asserted herself. You might consider an earlier prompt on effective teams, particularly the discussion by Katzenbach and Smith.
Egotism, when it comes at the cost of low emotional intelligence, is certainly hard to deal with. You wonder if the person needs to be cut down to size before a more production relationship can happen. There is a different between offering an opposing view and demonstrating the fallacy of the maintained view of somebody else. With the latter, if the other person recognizes the error she was making, then that might be disconcerting for her. In this case it is possible to imagine that she'd feel vulnerable and would stop acting aggressively, at least for a while. But it's possible that the person will not be convinced by the argument or simply bluff that she's not convinced, in order to maintain her authority. What happens then? I wish I knew the answer to that question.
Of course you can't take a job and know that one of your co-workers is a jerk. That's the kind of inside knowledge you can only learn after working at the place for a while. This is one good reason to develop a mentor from outside your place of work. So you can air your issues with somebody who has empathy to your situation. Having a mentor helps to deal with the invariable frustrations that will come along. How you find a mentor, of course, is quite a different story. I've got no manage method, but it does suggest that you should stay in touch with your former bosses, especially if you liked working for them.
Getting back to your story, it is conceivable that you and the other interns might have held a meeting or had an online discussion about the self-appointed manager. If you came up with a plan you all could agree on and presented it as an ultimatum perhaps that would have helped things along. It's hard for me to say from my perch. But trying something can be empowering in itself. And learning from the experience, might be useful if something similar comes up in the future. So there might be some good coming out, even if the overall experience was quite unpleasant.
I took that slide a bit too seriously! I thought it was a real idea that economists saw with regard to the dynamic between aggressive and defensive behavior. I think that general idea can be seen in some parts of group dynamics.
DeleteI think that is a good point: managers and leaders may overlap, but certainly not always. Just to clarify, this was simply a final project us interns worked on together. It was about 10-15 slides and not the main point of our internship. We worked on this maybe 30 minutes a day in the last 1.5 weeks of the program. Although a manager or instructions from a full-time employee would have been helpful, I think the main reason we worked on this project was that so us interns could network and really understand our impact without the insight of an employee; they wanted to see what we thought we learned, not what they wanted us to learn. I do not think our team was dysfunctional, but the way the girl inserted her role certainly made us a dysfunctional group.
I agree with your point on egotism. It is hard to deal with people who are not open to constructive criticism or willing to change their behavior when asked. She clearly continued to maintain her authority, even though she knew none of the group members really appreciated what she was doing. Hopefully, with more experience, she will change her attitude and how she goes about working in groups.
I think that having someone who can guide you in frustrating work situations is important. The idea of a mentor is something I never really thought about.
I also think that I learned something important from this experience. Although I did not enjoy working on this final project, I learned how to deal with people with a large ego and how to work around these problems. It was not ideal, but unfortunately, I think that throughout my career I will have to deal with people like this, and the earlier I learn how to manage it along with my personal opinions and state of mind is important.