Traditionally I have always viewed teamwork as a superior alternative to individual work. This is because I think minds that work collaboratively will always be more creative, effective, and efficient, compared to its individual counterpart. In week 5, we engaged in a survival activity to demonstrate the power of teamwork. This activity changed my view of teamwork.

The Activity

In class, we were given a list of items and placed a survival scenario. Our job was to rank the importance of each item. We were to do this twice: once as an individual and once collaboratively as a team. At the end of the activity, we would compare our answers to a survival experts, and see if our choices together were better as individuals or as a team.

The Results

My individual score from this exercise was significantly better than my team score. In fact, in this scenario, if I were to work in a team, I would for sure die. Don’t get me wrong, I love my team to death (intended pun) but sometimes, when you work in a team, you no longer stick with your original ideas and you can get easily mislead. In my case, I changed the items I prioritized originally in order to adapt and fit the views of the overall team.

This exercise showed me that although I love working in a team, sometimes teams can hinder your individual ability. Some members of my team had a higher survival chance in working as a team but for myself, I was better off making decisions alone. Another soft skill this lesson taught me was to voice my opinions louder. My team may have been better off had I been more firm on what I believed in but I hesitated as I was going against the majority vote. Teamwork is great in many ways, however, it is not always the best way to complete tasks.

We’ve all had our fair share of horrendous job experiences. After Week 4’s discussion on our worst job experience, I can now quantify and identify why my job was so horrible. My worst job has to be when I worked in a kitchen. (Out of respect for the establishment, the restaurant name or location will not be named.) If you don’t know, a kitchen job is a hot, high stress, and fast paced working environment. In many ways, you are a glorified robot, only completing 5-6 tasks a day.

My job on entrée varied shift by shift. If I was on broil, I would be in charge of cooking. This meant my entire shift would consist of cooking various proteins such as steaks, chicken, and fish. If I was on call, my shift consisted of my calling out orders to my broil cook and setting up plates for my finisher. If I was on finish, I would collect plates from my caller and plate the various foods. Although my workplace tried to improve my skill variety, I was doing very on a shift by shift basis. This system also hindered the task identify as well as task significance. Although I was in charge of making the product for the customer, there were chefs that will kick you off the station and take over if you couldn’t keep up. This made you feel insignificant overall. There was very high autonomy as you can expect to work 10-12 hours a shift because of poor scheduling. These reasons culminated in a terrible working experience at such restaurant.

The only reason why I stayed with my job was the fact that you were provided abundant amounts of feedback. This feedback was given live and after every shift. Supervisors are very unfiltered and will explicitly explain your performance that shift. As a result of this feedback, I was intrinsically motivated to always improve regardless of the poor working conditions.

Understanding what makes a job bad is important for me as a future employer because it allows me to set policies that both motivate and empower my employees, in order to have the best working conditions and most productivity imaginable.

Today in class we discussed what motivates different people and personalities. This discussion had a key takeaway: people are motivated by different factors, whether it be intrinsic or extrinsic.  After discussing these definitions, I got to thinking. Is everyone extrinsically motivated to some extent?  

During our discussions, we identified the difference between being motivated by fear versus being motivated by appraisal. While these examples clearly demonstrated two polar means of motivation, can we further generalize extrinsic and intrinsic motivators? In my head, extrinsic motivators are materialistic motivators as it requires someone else to praise you in order to feel the effects. Intrinsic motivators on the other hand are internal, and is fuelled on self determination to produce the best output. Referring back to my original question, are all people extrinsically motivated to some extent? I’ve come to the conclusion that unless someone has enough financial capital and assets to live the rest of their life without worry, we are all extrinsically motivated to some extent in order to make ends meet.

Upon my reflection, I used myself as an example as to why I have arrived to my conclusion. I think I am an intrinsically motivated worker. I work hard because I take pride in the outputs I produce. I generally will not take on tasks unless it is worthwhile for me to complete. My logic here is my marginal benefit of doing something must outweigh the marginal cost. The marginal cost of performing a task I don’t want is frustration and anger. An extrinsic motivator will offset the marginal cost and add some more benefit to make the task worthwhile to complete.

The only time I see extrinsic motivation failing is when there isn’t enough benefit being added on to make a task worthwhile to do. My argument illustrates how everyone can be extrinsically motivated to some extent.