To Team or Not to Team

      In my personal experience, working individually seems to be the best option for me. It has been the plan from the start of the semester to work alone because if I work with other people, either friends or classmates, they will bring different ideas to the table that I would find different to what I had in mind. Even though it is fun to work in a group with people you know, I do not want to end up relying on them in order to get things done.

     Working with a group has its positives; individual members can express their ideas and work on a compromise in order to get the task done. In the article, The effects of personality type on team performance, they state that “Expected benefits of successful teams include increased motivation, greater task commitment, higher levels of performance, ability to withstand stress, more innovative solutions, and decreased development time.” Group projects tend to be more innovative and can help others think in a new perspective. In the “Lost at Sea” activity, I was with people that I did not know, and we were able to come up with intuitive guesses for the order of importance of each item. Most of them were not perfect guesses, but I got more guesses right with a team than I did individually. Additionally, working with others can highlight an individual’s strengths. In the “Social Media Peer Account” activity, I had the chance to look at Grace’s Instagram account and through this I could tell that she is consistent in educating people in current events through her posts. 

     Even with the various positives of working in a team, I still prefer to work alone because of the risk of social loafing. “Social loafing is the likelihood of individuals contributing less when working on a task as part of a group than when working on a task alone. In reviews of nearly 80 research studies, report the consistency of social loafing effects across different types of tasks (physical, cognitive, creative, evaluative, and work-related) and participant samples” (Pettijohn, Ahmed, 2010). If I am in a group, the risk of social loafing could happen to any member of my group and we would be behind. I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to group projects and I tend to try and communicate with my team members, but since intra-team communication is another factor that influences team success (Bradley, Hebert, 1997), the lack of it could impact the quality of the project.

     To conclude, I find it beneficial for me and the quality of my work to work individually on my final project.