week 5 dq 1

Individualism and Collectivism (Hwang, Francesco, & Kessler, 2003).

Individualism; a string of behavior patterns that places all the decisions and actions a person does upon themselves. They process the information, decide what the best actions are, and perform those actions close to entirely themselves (Smith, 2015).

Collectivism; a group of people perform actions in a group. A group of people will review data, both individually and in the group discuss the data, and come up with a group decision as to how to respond to the data collected. Decision by majority rule, actions are done based on the collectiveness of the groups decision making. Although the more charismatic some of the stronger personalities are, the more what they want to do the more the group itself will respond and allow the stronger members to make decisions. No matter if those decisions benefit or are hard the group itself. Or hard on individual members of the group (Hwang, Francesco, & Kessler, 2003).

I am a graduate of University of Phoenix with my bachelors. My Bachelors degree states I went through dozens of team projects. I was in really bad teams and really good teams.

Three possible solutions for how to work together.

The first one is divide the work up into sections. Have each member choose what they want to work on. This usually works the best. Each person is individually motivated to perform, each person leans on their strengths. The work is done, and everyone contributed.

Second most groups require a team lead, for those who either do not want to work, or have no idea how to do what is needed, the team lead usually does their work,

Third solution is to try working from a collectiveness but in the teams, I have been associated with both at UOP and in life, humans almost need a leader to tell them what to do. However for some groups the strongest voices rebel against any collectiveness, they want to be an impediment. Their individualize is so strong they do not care what harm they cause as long as they can be a stone in the river. The more disruption they cause the better. When these things occur, the group usually has to break into subgroups. Those who just want to sit back and complain bitterly about everything, but actually do absolutely nothing. Those that want to do the tasks at hand form into a smaller group, do the work, bypassing those who refuse. Now there is a problem. Those who refuse to work, usually demand they were in charge of the project and get top billing and the most credit despite the only thing they did was to get in the way of progress. In their head they are the center of the team, their contributions were the center of the project. A very strong “cognitive dissonance” is part of this person and or this groups operational structure. They are convinced they did things which the evidence clearly shows they did absolutely nothing. Sometimes the bosses want to know who works and who refuses to, other times the bosses could not care less and just want the work done. For some reason in the non-academic world some bosses do not mind paying the salary of people who flat out refuse to work.

Hwang, A., Francesco, A. M., & Kessler, E. (2003). The relationship between individualism-collectivism, face and feedback and learning processes in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 34, 72–91.

Smith, P. B. (2015). To lend helping hands: In-group favoritism, uncertainty avoidance and the national frequency of pro-social behaviors. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46(6), 759–771. doi: 10.1177/0022022115585141