Saturday, January 31, 2009

A Conflict Situation: How do we resolve it?

A, B, C, and D are NUS students who are taking a particular module together. All of them hailed from different faculties, they didn’t know each other beforehand. By coincidence, they were grouped together for a project which weighed 40% of the continual assessment component of the module.

A is the leader of the group.

B is a committed student who is gunning for an “A” grade for this module; sadly, he is found lacking in certain EQ components, most notable of all, he has a “calculative” character.

C is a conscientious worker who views the completion of the tasks set for him as his topmost priority. However, he is taciturn and reserved.

D is taking this module out of necessity, and has told much earlier to the group that he will only do “this much” as he has intended to exercise the S/U option for the module.

The lecturer of the module is a research-mad professor, not very student centric and apparently prefers to leave all the “troublesome” matters, such as tiffs within project groups to the students themselves to resolve.

Over the course of the project, it became increasingly clear that B had a bone to pick with D. B had this pre-set notion that D is in the group for a free ride, so B spent most of his time “ensuring” that D was doing his fair share of work (such that it is similar to everyone else in the group). Due to this additional “task” which B assumed, the quality of the work produced by B went far below his best.

The work D produced was slipshod at best, and most of the time D was late in submitting his part of the project. Worse still, when he realized B’s attitude towards him, he took on a defensive stance. Things became worse as subsequently B spent a significant amount of time “scrutinizing” D’s work, and D on the other hand spent a lot of time defending the quality of the work that he had produced. Quarrels ensued and all these resulted in inefficiency.

Time is running out for the group as the deadline loomed.
Question:

Based on the above situation, what should Team leader A do to resolve the conflict situation and get the group going again?

4 comments:

  1. This really a common conflict that all students faced but find it difficult to resolve. Assuming that the leader is a person that the other members willing to lend their ears, I think he should speak individually to both B and D.
    He should ask B to focus on completion of the project and convinced him to put his 'A'effort on his work and let him speak to D individually from then on.
    To D, he should ask him why he is so defensive and perhaps explain to him how to improve his quality of the work(very Difficult).
    Or perhaps he could partner C with D to do the work together so that D can work better, while he work with B for the completion of the project.
    If not, there is always the survey to assess each and individual's performance. They can give a poor assessment on D and do the project on themselves. This could be use as a hard power if the soft power fails.

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  2. Hey Ken,

    Like what Swee Guan said, this is a common conflict faced by many students while doing projects. Being the leader of the group, A should have an overview of all the individual members and the brewing tension between B and D should have alarmed him. I agree with Swee Guan that A should speak individually with both of them and listened to both sides of the story. He should also stressed to them the importance of group above self. Regardless who is right (In my opinion, both B and D were wrong in their own doings), A should remain neutral and seek to reprimand both of them if talks to resolve their conflict fails.
    In short, in the situation when project is pressed for time and members do not cooperate, the most practical solution is to let A be the "Devil" and direct all instructions. Do you agree?

    Cheers!

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  3. Hey Ah Ken,

    Indeed the situation that you have mentioned is a common problem that most NUS students will experience! I guess for the leader, he will have to reprimand both B and D as their conflict will slow down the progress of the whole team. In addition, he will have to be hard on the group members like directing all instructions to them. And the leader has to review every work of the group members and if he deems unsatisfactory especially for D's, the leader reserves all rights to reprimand D and ask him to redo.Lastly, at the end of the project, the rest of the team except D can unite and comment on the unbecoming attitude of D in the peer assessment form!

    Funny Ji Fang

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  4. Hi Kenny,

    Like all the guys have said, this is a common problem experienced by university students.
    Last semester, in one of my courses, there is actually one group told the lecturer that they decided to exclude one of their group member's name in the final report and presentation slides as he had contributed nothing at all to the project. And the project weighted 40% of the course!
    Back to the question, I think the group leader should talk with B and D individully, hear the story from both sides and get a relatively objective view of what is going on.
    But if he is a good leader, he might be able to get aware of this tension between B and D before this very late stage.
    Also as the deadline is coming, the important thing now is to finish the project on time. Leader should tell B that he should finish his own job with a reasonale quality level first, before he spend so much time checking D's work. As D is taking this module on S/U basis, maybe he don't care about the quality of the project that much, and maybe giving him poor feedback still doesn't affect his get a S for the course. But being a leader, A should make sure that D at least finish his share of the work on time. And to achieve that, A might need to spend more time on monitoring D's work but A should not be too picky on D's work. Otherwise D might think that the whole group is picky on him and he might just stop his work. In that case, the project would be in danger...

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