A_Critical_Reflective_Essay_on_My_Roles_and_Contributions_in_the_Task_of_“Business”

A Critical Reflective Essay on My Roles and Contributions in the Task of “Business” The residential weekend was a really delightful holiday and a meaningful experience in my postgraduate study. That teamwork training was very unforgettable, even though time passing so long. During those three days training, there are lots of impressive events happened. Through looks at those events with a critical eye, those make me changed and certainly I also develop myself in some areas. This paper is going to examine my personal behaviors and present a self—awareness, and shows an analysis of my individual role that relevant with this personal experience. In this reflective essay, the principle purposes are to find out whether I am suitable for working with others who come from different cultures and backgrounds or not, and whether I possess of good leadership and teamwork skills or not. In order to do this, it will be briefly described these critical events in the first part, and then it will emphasized my individual roles and contributions as part of our team. During this process, some relevant academic theories (such as leadership, communication, cooperation and team conflicts) and some models of team behaviour (such as Belbin Roles, learning style, Adair-Action-Centred leadership, Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions and Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Grid) will be adopted to evaluate my performance and potential personal development. Before reflecting on my individual performance, I would like to briefly describe those critical events and summarize the overall situation. At the first day, there were lots of difficulties occurred within our team. I had no idea about what I can do, I don’t know the rules of the task and act independently, because each of us were lack of communication, understanding and planning, especially the missile task, this tasks aim was to get a bucket onto a platform on the top of a pole. We all seemed a bit overwhelmed by the task. It is very hard to complete. And I was tired and fretful. However, other members try their best to think several ideas to complete this crazy task. Lots of ideas make us quite confusing, so we decide to do something first, we build the pole together. When we take the first step, everything become easily and I began to calm down to think how to get the bucket attended. Suddenly, one best idea comes to me as spontaneous accidents. I used two joints as a hook to lock the bucket. I am satisfied with my idea, because one of my residential objectives is coping with stress better. When in trouble, I don’t know how to cope with that knotty problem, I always exert pressure upon myself, I cannot do work well. And this time, I can work under pressure, it improve my confidence. At the same time, my team members’ encouragements give me a very big power. During the task, when I have an idea, I don’t know how to explain, therefore, I use body language let them understand. As an auxiliary means of sound language, the body language plays an important role in language communication. As Lurnsden (2000) claimed that, communication is one of the important and challenging skills and refers to the process used to bring message from one individual to another. It can be verbal and non-verbal between people trying to create shared meaning. English is my second language, so sometimes; I am poor at explaining and clarifying complex points that occur to me. Because of varied cultures, poor communication, I always feel fall behind by half a beat. As Dwyer (2005:79) said that, good communication is essential for all members of an organisation to ensure that they work together to achieve organizational goals. Therefore, understanding how to communicate with others is essential to work with a team. British people and Anna (Polish) think Chinese people are very shy, and very quite. Actually, Chinese student do not like to give their ideas on their own initiative, and they are good at listen to others. And then give some reasonal method to deal with problem. Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions give insights into other cultures so that we can interact effectively with people in different countries. Because of high power distance and high level of long term orientation in china (Hofstede, 1991), chinese members tend to need more time to thinking, planning and suitting each task and prefer to be wold what to do. The third day task is the enterprising business, our group is Crosthwaite Enterprise, which has been invested £100 by our stock-holders, and they expect a significant return on their investment at the end of the day with a profit of at least £6000 being achieved. To achieve this aim, we eight members in the group make every effort to earn more money. When the whole task was over, we just earn about £4000 and other groups earn about £10,000. We cannot finish the target and fail in this exercise. We ignore the collective strength is more powerful than individual, those high value exercises often need teamwork. Use too much time to plan and think ideas, finally, time is not enough and cannot complete the task. Here, I use Tuckman – phases of team development (Chimaera Consulting, 2001) to describe the co-operation within the production team. As we have already co-operated with each other before in a bigger group, so there was no “forming” phases at that moment. At the beginning, we were already in the stage of “storming” – we eight people had conflicts about choosing which task to play. Anna claimed that we should find some easy tasks to do, and Ivy and I think we should do the tasks which can earn more money and Graeme mentioned that we could do the task which other groups had been done before and we can learn from them. According to Rollinson, D. & Broadfield, A. (2002), ‘Conflict in work teams is not necessarily destructive, however. Conflict can lead to new ideas and approaches to organizational processes, and increased interest in dealing with problems.’ Finally, our leader (Gareth) broke the stalemate and said that “it is more effective to choose different tasks. You can divide us into a couple of small groups and select whatever you can do.” All of us accepted this advice, which lead us to the third phase – norming. Varney, G. H. (1989) cautions that negative conflict can destroy a team quickly and often arises from poor planning. Now it seems that Gareth’s advice was not as effective as forecasted, because when we choose the tasks individually, we never consider whether the value of the tasks were great or not, and furthermore, it was time-consuming that almost everyone chose easy and small valued tasks. We should choose the most valuable tasks to conduct, and all of us had better attend the task because it calculated by the number of persons. In the final phase of Tuckman’s Team Development – Performing, group identity, loyalty and morale are all high, and everyone is equally task-orientated and people-orientated. This high degree of comfort means that all the energy of the group can be directed towards the tasks in hand (Chimaera Consulting, 2001). I feel very happy cooperate with our group members, because everyone do the task without a word of complaint. We have same aim, although we failed finally, we work together with whole heart. Turning to my personal behaviour, I have experienced two different roles during this Business, which are production staff, leader and finance controller. I will examine them respectively in the following paragraphs. At the beginning, my role is production staff. I was so excited that I can cooperate with others to earn money. However, I am an impetuous people. I think I am skillful in make kite, I believe that I can make it. And I never consider everything. When I realize make a kite is a bad ideas and I will waste 5 pound, I felt upset and self-condemned as I thought it was my fault. However, I am not frustrating. Instead, I try my best to make up the loss. I do anything else I can do and earn more money. According to the Belbin (2004) roles, I am a completer finisher. Completers are painstaking, conscientious, patient and anxious. Furthermore, I always gave attention to the detail in every mission and noticed to public. My aimed to complete and to do so thoroughly. Even though the kite mission was mot succeed, I still trying to make it fly and not easy to give up. The tension of well-managed conflict allows people to confront difficulties through healthy analysis and improve the decisions made (Bryant &Rayeski, 1994). This leads to greater term efficiency and effectiveness. My second role is leader and finance controller. In fact, I have not been appointed as a leader, and I act as a leader because I was helping Ivy to manage our group together with her. Just like Belbin (2004) indicate that completers are good at searching out errors and omissions. Just during the one hour’s leading time, I found that I was not a good leader. I paid too much attention to the relationship with subordinates rather than completing of tasks. According to Sisk (1969: 405-406), my leadership style seemed to be democrat which is ‘flexible, permissive, and getting the most out of satisfied subordinates’. Democratic style leadership is often associated with subordinates-centered; in contrast, autocratic style is often associated with job-centered. Although there is an assumption that democrat leadership is the ideal, in some circumstances an authoritarian type is more useful (Cole, G., 2004). In the model of Adair’s (1979) action centred leadership, I am located in the middle of the task maintenance needs and team needs. I can identify aims for the group, and identify resources, people, processes and tools. I controlled timescales very well, just like Belbin (2004) role which describe me as a completer – if gave me a task, I can always deliver it on time. On the other hand I can not only develop team-working, cooperation and team-spirit, but also can monitor and maintain discipline, ethics, integrity and focus on objectives (Dove Nest Group, 2008). However, for individual needs, it is hard for me to understand all the team members as individuals – personality, skills, strengths, needs, aims and fears, which seems not good because the ideal position is where complete integration of the three areas of need is achieved (Huczynski & Buchanan, 2007). I need to develop my leadership skills in the next year, according to Yukl (2006: 262)’s view, “the better leader makes the followers feel trust, admiration, loyalty, and respect toward the leader, and they are motivated to do more than they originally expected to do”. All in all, that weekend also was I recently crosses a most substantial week, because I thought every day was allowed to study the new knowledge, every day had the progress. I was satisfied with my team working skills as well as my contributions to our group. Through fully involving in the teamwork, I learnt that it is important to create an effective team as it will lead to an ultima success. There are plenty of facts should be included as building an good team, such as good leadership, committed and well-motivated team members, good communication channels, good planning, hardworking and responsible team members, and good co-operation. I examined my roles and behaviors respectively for reflecting on my team working skills and leadership skills. The results are – I have good team work skills as I can work well with a wide range of people who come from different country with distinct culture and background. However, I think my leadership and communication skills are relatively poor. It also needs my further development in these areas. Word count: 1743 Bibliography: Adair, J. (1979), Action Centred Leadership, Farnborough: Gower Belbin, M. (2000), Beyond the Team, Oxford: Butterewoth-Heinneman Belbin, M. (2004), Management Teams: Why they succeed or fail, Amsterdam: Butterewoth-Heinneman Bryant, J. D. & Rayeski, E., (1994). 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