Prompt:
- Have you ever been on a team—in school or another setting—whose members either avoided conflict to the group’s detriment or engaged in destructive conflict?
- Have you ever been on a team in which you noted a problem with a teammate’s work but didn’t point it out? What stopped you from providing feedback?
Whichever scenario you picked, write about some strategies you might (or did) employ to work through the issue. Explain how you might go about negotiating conflict with group members in this class.
Response:
While being in school, both situations have affected the productivity of groups I’ve been in. College work specifically has brought my attention to this issue more often. In general, I’m the type of person to seek to avoid all types of conflict overall. If I disagree with someone I’m not particularly close with, I’ll be hesitant to let that surface. This pattern is also really noticeable in college groups because most people at this school like to be polite to one another for the most part. So if one of the group members suggest something, many of the other members of that group will just go along with that even if they’d prefer to do something else. To avoid this unknown unhappiness of members, it may be helpful for everyone in the group to highlight what they want honestly. Maybe then there can be a majority rules method of deciding or the ideas can be combined into something new and better. My group did this when deciding which part of human rights to focus on in order to find an organization to be a part of. A couple of members voiced their interest in LGBT+ topics and another mentioned she would like our work to involve immigrants. So we did some research and ended up finding an organization that included both of those interests.
