To Team or Not to Team

 This week we have been working to finalize our decisions on if we want to work with partners for our final project or not. We did this by doing a pair of exercises, which were social media and a lost at sea activities. 

For the social media activity, I looked at a classmates Instagram account that I was considering working with. I looked at her account and took note of the types of content they posted and how often they do it. This ended up helping me get a better look at the person I was considering working with and the type of person they are. For the lost at sea activity, I got into a group and we received a list of items and we had to rank them most to least important. This surprisingly worked well to show how easy it is to disagree in a group. This helped my decision because it showed me that I would have to take into consideration that if I worked in a group, disagreements might happen regularly, which could affect the quality of the portfolio. These two things alone were pushing me more towards the side of working alone because of the fear that there would be too many issues working with others. This idea is also mentioned in the article Team Building and Group Dynamics.... by Eli Becker, “you can have great products, you can have phenomenal software, you can have the smartest people, but if they're not playing together, it's never going to get you ahead.” This showed me that even if the people in my group themselves are hard workers that if we couldn’t get along or clashed on ideas, we wouldn't get anything done. 

I have been able to draw the conclusion that to make a not only functioning but a well-working group, many things would have to be taken into consideration. As shown in the article Team Building and Group Dynamics... in order to have a productive group you need to be “stabilizing a culture of trust, collaboration, and accountability” (Eli Baker). Setting up a group with this solid of a foundation could be very time consuming and difficult, especially if it were to be made of people you don’t particularly like to begin with. The article The Effect on Personality Type on Team Performance details a study that was done with research groups full of different personality types. It states, “there were a number of noticeable differences between the two teams”. This helped me come to a decision because it made me consider that something so small as different personality types could make a difference in the team’s work. 

With all of this considered, 

I have chosen to work on my portfolio alone. I have come to this conclusion because working in a group seems too risky, and that too much could go wrong with only a small inconvenience. Not only did the activities and articles influence my decision, my own personality played a part as well. I personally work better alone and like to make my own decisions, which would surely cause problems in a group environment.