Final Group Project: Managing of Cultural Conflict

Final Project   Conflicts in OUR TEAM

Our group is different from other groups, we are from EIE, each member in our group has few experience taking this kind of courses. Everyone in our group enjoy this course, it is interesting and vivid, but, inevitably, we will have some conflicts in our assignments just like other groups, but all these conflicts are been solved fortunately.

Three main conflicts in our group are:

1.Time arrangement

2. Team member have to communicatevirtually or rely on virtual technologies to coordinate and collaborate

3.New knowledge for our team to study and understand. 

1. Time arrangement

   Because we three team members have courses respectively, especially someone has internship in Shenzhen, so it is difficult we have time together talk about these course assignments. The conflicts occurred when we discussing what time to do the assignment and communicate face-to-face. Someone has time but another don’t have, this things happened several times. Especially the guy has internship in Shenzhen, he just has time at weekends, because he has work in daytime and has courses at night. But we solve this conflict, we can do our preparation on our own, then we meet just exchange our ideas, rather than study together. This method saves a lot of time, and we can do our assignment harmoniously.  

2. Team members have to communicate virtually or rely on virtual technologies to coordinate and collaborate

   As is shown above, our group members have different courses and some of us do not have time to do course assignment together. So we have to find another method to finish our work--we find we should use virtual technologies. We start to communicate on mobile devices and computer. QQ and we chat is the most common tools we used, and sometimes we use google doc, too. At first we feel great because these technologies solved our problems and let us can complete our work successfully. However, after few weeks, some new problem appears: because we are not do assignment face to face, we find it is very hard to deliver one member’s thoughts and willing to other group members accurately and integrally, there always be some misunderstanding. And modification and integration are also be harder. What’s more, not communication face to face are not good for development of our team relationship, either. Fortunately, we finally solve these problem though it take us long time. We cannot communicate face to face and that also mean our time online is much more. We can negotiate about our own idea which is a good way to understand each other we realized we should show more trust and spend more time on other’s outcome and reflect appropriately. And soon we find it is not a problem anymore.

3. New knowledge for our team to study and understand.

     Cross-field is one of the biggest problem of our ‘science geeks’ group. Born to learn the electrics but clumsy in learning the MGT knowledge. The way to learn the things we never touch before is a difficult way. We try to learn it using the original way that we used to do in our science study, but…there is no lab session, neither the formula for us to study the principle of the theory, just words, paragraph, and…stories. Stories, yes stories, that is where we make breakthrough, and that is the only things we are similar with. We read stories first, and tell stories to each other, and try to figure out some analysis by ourselves, then compare to the analysis with the writer’s, we learn it in a dramatic fast speed. To be honest, we did first begin with some ‘concrete’ aspect each people, then share the idea of each part, and then combine them together and sturdy others parts. We know it is not the best way but it is the fastest way for us to cross the threshold of the different area which we never touched for 20 years. Later, we begin to read all aspect of the reading, and try to grasp some idea and key theory to the point, then, we made it.