Resolving Interpersonal Conflict
Conflicts are an unavoidable part of our life. Therefore, we must learn to resolve conflicts maturely to maintain our relationships. Conflicts could break out due to simple misunderstandings, or they could be intentional. Regardless, I always assume the conflicts I faced arose from honest mistakes. My usual conflict-handling style is accommodation since I would choose a solution that favors the other party over myself. However, I recently faced a conflict with a previous group member that tested my conflict management skills. Even though we were assigned groups randomly, my group members cooperated very well, except for one person. At the start of the project, we would distribute the tasks evenly, but this member could not complete most of his assigned work decently. We were unsure if he was doing it intentionally or if they were too complicated for him. Nevertheless, we would guide and assist him. However, his behavior did not improve, so we gradually assigned him lesser work, which ultimately led to a heated conflict. It started when a deadline for a project milestone was close, and he had nothing to show for his section. Since it was the weekend, we could only guide him over text messages. Unfortunately, the conversation slowly became heated as he believed we were instructing him wrongly. It could be due to miscommunication since text conversations can be ambiguous. He insistently refused to start work despite our numerous attempts to convince him, so I decided to finish his section without informing him. It was a mistake as he thought the group was removing him, so he panicky added his disorganized work to the submission. We asked him to remove it as it affects the overall document negatively. He adamantly refused as he would have no contribution without it. The deadline was closing in quickly, so we escalated it to the professor, who suggested a comprise. He would accept the current submission and grade the conflicting sections based on the better version. We agreed to this, and he added that team camaraderie is crucial. Hence, we should learn to cooperate, as peer review is a large percentage of the final grades. However, this person's behavior has not improved even after the professor's advice. And since we did not want to bring down our final grading, we hesitantly gave him a good peer review.
Looking back now, I wish we had brought the issue up again and justified a poor peer review. He is still a detriment to his current groups, and his behavior should not be tolerated. Reader, would you have done anything differently if you were in this situation?
Looking back now, I wish we had brought the issue up again and justified a poor peer review. He is still a detriment to his current groups, and his behavior should not be tolerated. Reader, would you have done anything differently if you were in this situation?
6/3/2022 Edit: Rewrote entire post to fit guidelines better, overall story is unchanged.
Hi Jordan, thank you for sharing and I am sorry to hear that you have suffered such a one-sided encounter. I can see that you and your group members have constantly tried to get along with him and despite the many heartfelt attempts, it was to no avail. After reading your post, I can imagine the piled up frustration you have garnered because of how wronged you were. I can see that you have tried giving him chances and looking from his perspectives to understand what he is going through. Indeed, I agree that if I were in your shoes, I would have brought up the issue to the professor again as it is not fair to you and your group members.
ReplyDeleteThanks Xuan Zheng. I appreciate your kind comments. I have also updated the main post after hearing your feedback on the overall structure.
DeleteNOTE: PREVIOUS POST AS OF 6 MARCH 2022
ReplyDeleteA recent interpersonal conflict I faced was related to a group project. The members for this group were assigned randomly, and this was the first time we met. Despite this, we were able to cooperate fairly well on various tasks, all except for one person. This team member was particularly uncooperative. We even attempted assigning the simplest of tasks to him, but he still could not make any relevant contribution. The worst incident was when he actively refused to work with the team and sabotaged one of our milestone submissions. We had split the tasks two weeks before the deadline. However, when we asked about his progress a week before the deadline, he dismissed us, saying he could only start work once we finished our sections. We were in disbelief as we had established before that he could get started on the frame first and fill in the information after. We gave him the benefit of the doubt as we just started our first semester and he might still be adjusting. So we burnt the midnight oil to complete our sections and informed him in the group chat once we were done. That following afternoon we received a message from him saying that he refused to accept our work. He was adamant that the work was similar to the examples, although there were differences. Since the deadline was closing in and we could not convince him to start working, we decided to carry on without him. I pulled another all-nighter and uploaded the finished project to the group shared folder. However, the day after I uploaded the completed submission, he added his "contribution" to it. I described it as sabotage as it was poorly copied from the examples and did not contain any relevance to our sections. Additionally, he confronted us for overwriting his part and blamed us for poor communication. He was furious and emphasised heavily that it was unfair that we removed his contribution as he has been working on it for the past week, even though he mentioned previously that he has not started at all. To settle this issue, we approached the professor and came to a compromise. The professor agreed to accept both submissions but will award grades based on the better submission. Additionally, the professor reminded us that team camaraderie is a crucial factor in his final grading, so we should learn to get along as he will be using the peer review to determine teamwork.
However, this person did not improved his behavior at all. But we did not want to bring down our grades, so we bit the bullet and still gave him a good peer review despite his lack of contribution. Looking back now, I wished I brought up the issue to the professor again and justify a bad peer review without affecting our grades. Reader, what would you have done if you were in this situation?