Thursday, April 28, 2011
Competitive & Collaborative conflict resolution
Last year I had a COMM class and had to do a group project. When we were given the assignment, I quickly jumped on an idea that came to me that I felt was brilliant. When we were given our groups, I quickly shared my idea and the group loved it. I had planned out the entire presentation based on my idea. However, that is not very ideal for group projects, and it did not really facilitate group interaction, so when we began discussing ideas on how to add to and improve my presentation idea, I had to compromise a lot. I gave up a lot of ideas I had, including specific segments of the presentation that I really liked, but in order for everyone to participate, we had to compromise and collaboratively settle what would be included and what would be dropped. To contrast with competitive conflict resolution, I could have held firm and told the group that my project absolutely needed to be the way I thought up or else we had to choose another way to present our topic.
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I can definitely agree with the situation you were in! I can recall a handful of times where I was put in a group to work on a project, but had to compromise a lot of my own ideas in order to cater to the rest of my group members. Obviously working in a group is a collaborative effort, but I also think that one of the downfalls of working in a group is the very fact that it is a collective effort instead of one complete idea... in other words, it's little pieces of each individual's great idea, instead of one completely great idea. Not to say that working in groups never produce great work, though... I just think that one of the best qualities of working in a group can also be it's worst.
ReplyDeleteYou had a great post this week! Don’t worry I think we have all done what you talked about at some point of our school careers! Sometimes we get ahead of ourselves and forget we aren’t the only people in the group, but when an idea is just too good how do you hold back? You don’t. You want to do it all your way but I cant blame you for that! At least you had some knowledge of what you did and you did end up compromising. I loved how you really related to an example of your own and what could have been done as well as what you did.
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