Critical Thinking

Name of the Student

Name of the Institution

Critical Thinking

An individual can develop a competitive, cooperative or individualistic orientation towards team members. During a survey that gauged my orientation approaches towards team member, I scored 15 out of 20 marks on the individualistic orientation scale. This was my highest score. My lowest score 13 out of 20 marks on the cooperative orientation scale. On the competitive orientation scale, I scored 14 out of 20 marks.

Despite the fact that my lowest score was on the cooperative orientation scale, I have learned through experience the importance of having highly cooperative team members. I was once a member of a small learning group, in which the members met and discussed specific educational topics. Different group members contributed different valuable ideas, and we cooperated to come up with solutions for specific problems or come up with answers. As such, we always came up with constructive solutions that any single individual would not have developed without the assistance of others. Although I got the experience from a learning group, having cooperative team members has a similar benefit to organizational teams, as Levi (2010) explains. Cooperative team members in an organization enable a team to improve its quality and quantity of output as the team members join creative ideas.

When I was a member of the learning group, I learned some ways of dealing with competitive team members. In order to deal with such colleagues, the team should stay focused towards meeting its goals, avoid competing with them and develop internal relationships with them. As Levi (2010) explains, it is possible to suppress the need for competition in such colleagues after developing internal relationships with them. The results of my survey indicate that I need to do some improvement on my orientation towards team members. I can suppress competitive orientation through training myself to listen and accept what team members say and avoiding pressing them to accept what I want or say. Further, I can enhance my cooperative orientation through always letting the team members know my ideas and discuss the ideas with them, and be always actively involved in discussing their ideas. I should always consult them before making decisions and use their opinions to inform my decisions. Also, I should focus on carrying out tasks together with other team members, rather than work alone as an individual. I should offer help and seek it any time from the team members. In addition to improving my cooperative orientation, the aforementioned steps would help to suppress individualistic orientation (Levi, 2010).

References

Levi, D. (2010). Group Dynamics for Teams. London: SAGE