Collaborative Group Assignment

This is my final blog post for this group assignment.

This will be a reflection on the group assignment required in the SMS modoule.

We had to prepare a presentation using slideshow and Google Hangouts for voice narration on social media usage in a company. We selected New Balance, a niche shoe company based out of US.

The interesting part of the assignment was the delegation of tasks. Since no one person was selected to be a group leader, this was a case of everybody taking up their own responsibility to get the job done. 

This non-traditional non-hierarchical approach in the workforce has many proponents and opponents.

Among the proponents, the case made is that former rigid hierarchies lead to demotivate staff and slow down of the process of execution and things have to pass through red-tape through the channels of approval. Companies like Zappos embody this approach as they have literally and figuratively speaking removed as many barriers between the CEO and the most junior staff. This allows for prompt execution and increased loyalty among employees as they feel their work is being recognised by all channels. 

Within our group, this is exactly how it played out. Each one took up the task of self-assigning certain roles through the project in order to make it easy to complete the over all task. By consulting among each other and picking up a task no one was held accountable yet everyone knew that lack of participation would lead to indirect shaming and loss of respect among the cohorts.

Among the opponents of this method, the case made is that the loosey-goosey structure results in loss of accountability and delegation as no one person is aware of who is in charge of what. It may also result in poor performance as some may intentionally choose to slack off knowing that it will be hard to trace it back to them. Additionally, it may affect morale since at the time of annual or periodic performance review, no one person is well aware of the specific tasks completed by the individual.

Within our group assignment, there were times were certain individuals would tend to not participate actively at certain periods of time, including myself! There were various reasons cited such as work, person, holidays etc. This led to lack of accountability and resulted in the remaining members wondering how to spread the tasks among the rest. However, everyone eventually got back on board and participated, especially nearing the deadline date, and the project was indeed a collaborative effort with everybody contributing to various parts.

The above is based on anecdotal evidence and personal readings of various business magazines and there is no specific literature review conducted to support this. Having said that, it would probably be realistic to expect that a literature review search will result in finding some literature or research paper conducted on this subject matter. Overall, it is very intuitive to deduce