To Team or Not To Team

     I have decided to work on my portfolio for AICE Media Studies with a partner this year. When I was working with a friend on the “Social Media Peer Account” activity, I found that I liked having the company of someone and viewing their social media account led me to find much more about them and building a a trust bond. In the article, “ Team building and group dynamics: creating and fostering a culture of teamwork requires trust, collaboration, and accountability”, it was proven that using “The Five Behaviors... helped lay the foundation to further development...”. “The Five Behaviors”, is a team building method that helps a team build trust in each other by allowing them to get to know each other before working on any of the projects. Therefore, breaking down my partner’s social media account allowed me to get to know her a little bit more such as beliefs, interests, and personality. 

    Another group activity that I participated in was the “Lost at Sea” assignment where I was put in a team and we had to figure out the most essential items you would need in this specific situation where someone was lost in the middle of the ocean. We first had to list the, most to least essential of our own opinion, then we all compared our opinions and came to an agreement to what was essential. We then compared our group answers to how a Coast guard would rank his items. Our results were a little off but we got at least half of it close to right. This activity was different compared to the social media activity because I knew my partner in the social media activity, so the communication was comfortable. Although, in the “Lost at Sea” activity, I was put in a group with complete strangers where I didn’t know anything about anyone. The communication was a bit awkward until five minutes after we were put in the groups when someone spoke. In the article “Team building and group dynamics: creating and fostering a culture of teamwork requires trust, collaboration, and accountability”, that before working on any project with a new team, “the team needed to trust that what they were saying would be respected and heard...”, and since the people in this group were complete strangers to me, it was difficult to achieve the trust. 

    Therefore, I decided to work on my portfolio with a partner rather than a group with more people. I will be working with Sonja who’s a friend and previous partner. We have skills that would be good for working as a team. My weaknesses are her strengths and my strengths are her weaknesses. For example, one of my strengths is formatting and organizing things where it would chronologically make sense while that is a weakness for my partner. My partner’s strengths are her skills in photoshop or editing apps while I have no skill in that. In the article “The effect of personality type on team performance”, it mentions “diversity in skills and knowledge combined with a balance of personality types is desirable for effective teams.”. My partner and I have diversity in skills but we also have a pretty similar personality type. If I had a completely different personality type than my partner, there could be a high change that I would have trouble cooperating with them. Having the same personality type with a partner makes it less complicated because we would agree on most things and have similar perspectives and easier to understand each other.