An
intelligent lone wolf’s endorsement on teamwork via dialectical thinking
For a part-time lecturer with a self-image of
a lone wolf, it is quite a tranquil and isolated life to me recently. The only minor issue: I have been thinking
hard of how to reduce usage of toilet paper in a convenient way. Thus, when the university asks me to write an
article on teamwork, I come up with this article title: “An intelligent lone
wolf’s endorsement on teamwork”. Conducting this intellectual exercise inevitably
invokes my dialectical thinking. This thinking follows three stages: thesis,
antithesis and synthesis.
To begin with, teamwork is generally
considered as the commitment of a group of people (i.e., a team) to work
together in order to achieve a common challenging team purpose. Teamwork is not
required to a group, which is simply a collection of people who interact with
each other such that one person’s actions have an impact on the others. With
regard to the management field, I understand why managers are interested in
teamwork as a management technology: organizations comprise groups and teams
(including teams of teams), which managers need to manage well. Besides, there
are business trends that foster managerial interest in teamwork, e.g., (i) need
for organizational restructuring to cope with increased competition, (ii) need
for better talent utilization, and (iii) need for more flexibility and
responsiveness to come with changes of all kinds, etc.. This kind of favourable
view constitutes the thesis position of dialectical thinking on teamwork. For a
self-proclaimed intelligent lone wolf, I also hold a negative view on teamwork.
Such antithesis view is based on the following ideas:
Idea 1: I am not a sociable person, and have
a low level of affiliation need.
Idea 2: As an intellectual with critical
thinking, I suspect that teamwork is being used as a coercive tool to force
people to comply with illegitimate aims.
Idea 3: I am highly concerned that, more
often than not, some team members are pig-like (a Cantonese English for stupid
people).
Idea 4: Teamwork hampers my personal life
experience of liberation as a lone wolf.
Idea 5: Teamwork is not much required for
certain professions, e.g. golf players. Again, as an academic, I do not write
academic papers with other people as co-authors.
Idea 6: Teamwork, by stressing common
purpose, very often promotes a functionalist (thus conservative) sociological
view, while, an intelligent lone wolf is fully aware of a more pluralist and
coercive view on society.
In the setting of education, the conflict
between the thesis and antithesis positions is often at work: universities set
group assignments so that students are able to gain useful teamwork experience
(which many students do). At the same time, some students do not enjoy group
assignments and have bad experience to work with uncommitted teammates.
Using dialectical thinking, I now try to
offer a way to synthesize the thesis and antithesis views on teamwork. The
synthesis view is based on two ideas:
Idea 1 - the contingency idea: whether
teamwork is effective or not depends on the application situation. The three
main application situational factors are: (i) context (adequate resources,
leadership and structure, climate of trust, performance evaluation), (ii)
composition (abilities of members, personality, allocating roles, diversity,
team size, member flexibility and preferences) and (iii) process (common
purpose, specific goals, team efficacy, conflict levels, and social loafing. If
these factors are unfavourable to teamwork effectiveness, then teamwork is an
unattractive organizational practice.
Idea 2 - the critical idea: the perceived
application situation (re: idea 1) is itself a social construct; thus it is
important to maintain high critical awareness in the social construction of
such teamwork application situation.
The synthesis view, in this respect,
represents this intelligent lone wolf’s endorsement of teamwork. More
importantly, it makes clear that, an intelligent lone wolf can be a valuable
teammate, especially in his/her analytical contribution, on team performance
when the team environment is right.
