Module course : Integrated Business Management Simulation

Module code : UMSDMK-15-3

Student ID : 20055928

Word count : 1106

Component B

Part I :

1. How has the simulation helped you in understanding the challenges of

working in a team. How do you think this might translate to the workplace ?

2. What do you understand by the concept of personal resilience ? Give an

example to evidence your own capacity for resilience using your work or
personal experience.

Part II : Critically reflect on your strength and weakness around your self-
awareness and personal resilience. Consider how these may impact your
personal and professional development and your personal challenges.
After more than two months working together as a team in a Simulation course, I have gained
many helpful experiences for my personal and professional development. This first essay
aims to reflect the difficulties that I faced during the team-working period and my own
evidence about my personal resilience.

Part 1

In order to have an effective and working well together, our team has solved three main
problems: : contribution shortage, low motivation and negative leadership.

Firstly, the contributions from all team members play a key role in a team. It helps to achieve
team’s goals by ensuring the decision-making process works smoothly and effectively.
However, my team used to be stuck in a lack of contribution caused by a psychological
phenomenon called groupthink. As Janis (1972) supposed, groupthink occurs when the team's
final decision is given by an individual without considering the decision possibility or any
alternative actions. It may improve the decision making speed but it has a negative effect on
the decision quality directly. In fact, groupthink often happens in a team having close
relationships (Kreitner et al., 2002) and it was totally true with our team. To keep the
peaceful atmosphere, we tried to follow the leader’s opinions at all. When a problem comes
up, we tend to agree to a specific idea instead of raising our own thinking. As a result, we
finally recognized our problem as the company’s profit was gradually decreasing. To reduce
this issue, my team had a discussion and ended up with a commitment that actively voicing
our ideas and together analyzing carefully each option.

About low motivation, it is seen as one of the main reasons of social loafing (Kreitner et al.,
2002). Thompson (2003) defined this psychological event as an individual's performance
when working in a team is not as well as when they are alone. When people work in a team,
they tend to put less effort and responsibility as they suppose their impact does not cause a
huge impact on the team result and there will be someone willing to take accountability for
their tasks. Therefore, the low motivation appears and leads to the slack off from work. This
challenge arises when some members did not join in a weekly team meeting, not invest any
contribution in team discussion, not prepare a plan or even not update the result in the last
quarter and not complete assigned tasks on time. Those actions eventually affect negatively
on the team effectiveness and goal. To avoid this problem, my team had to establish
individual accountability clearly and apply some strict punishments to ensure the highest
commitment from each member.
In terms of leadership, there are many principles that a leader must follow to enhance his
competence. There are three elements that used to evaluate the sufficient level of a leader :
the relationship between leader and members, the task arrangement and the power position
(Fiedler, 1967). My leader is a conservative person, she rarely listens or absorbs the
member’s opinions and often insists that her plan was the best for our company. As we
already had a close relationship with each other, we try to follow her lead at all to keep the
peaceful atmosphere. Those challenges above such as low motivation and lack of
contribution are the consequences of her negative leadership. It can not be denied that she had
a high power position in the team but it did not work. To improve that situation, we decided
to communicate clearly to help her found the limitations and adjust her leadership lifestyle.

There are various definitions about the concept of personal resilience. In general, personal
resilience is demonstrated through four dimensions : high capacity of adaptation (Bonanno,
2004), ability to endure hardships (Rutter, 1987), determination to overcome difficulties
(Bandura, 1989), and recovery (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004). Personal resilience has a
function in providing power for people to enhance their readiness to change, helps them to
become more flexible, adjust their behavior to deal with advantages and increase the recovery
ability from difficulties.

Personally, my resilience was constructed through the internship period. At that time, I
worked in a sales position without any sales experience before. Although I had tried my best
to learn and gain knowledge among books and documents, I still failed in the first month and
was complained by my customers. After that, I spent a large amount of time reviewing my
limitations and solutions to improve my skills. As a result, I restarted my working process
through observing carefully my co-workers about their attitudes, consultative and persuasive
ways effectively when they were working with customers. At the end of the day, I noted all
of the valuable experience to practice on the next day. Finally, my result was improved when
I became one of the reward salespeople for beyond the KPIs and enhanced the company’s
reputation since building good relationships with customers.
Part 2

In this part, I am going to reflect my greatest strengths and weaknesses based on my self-
awareness and personal resilience. Besides, the impact of these personalities in the workplace
would be considered as well.

In my view, I consider myself as a person who is responsible. When I am assigned any task, I
always try my best to complete them on time and in the way I feel satisfied with the result. At
the end of the day, I usually make a to-do list for the next following day to ensure everything
stays in my control and avoid the situation of leaving anything to the last minute. Whenever a
decision is made, I would put all my concentration on this as I do not want to cause any little
mistake. In case of making a mistake, I am willing to be responsible for it and try to find out a
way to correct it. Many authors proposed that the responsibility is an effective tool to predict
the higher work performance (Barrick and Mount, 1991; Hurz and Donovan, 2000).

About the weakness, I have to admit that I am a perfectionist. In theory, there are two types
of perfectionism : neurotic (negative) and normal perfectionism (non-negative) (Fang, X., et
al., 2007). I occasionally feel impatient with inefficiencies and colleagues who do not work
as quickly as I do. Also, I always focus too much on details and results but ignore the
process, which annoys my co-workers sometimes. Recently, I am improving this problem by
practicing open-minded thinking and keeping calm in unexpected situations.

There are many challenges and difficulties when moving to a professional environment. It
requires both personal skills and academic knowledge. Thus, preparing necessary experience
and personal resilience for future career is an essential step for individuals.
References :

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Fang, X., Qian, MY., & Zi, F. (2007) Psychological Research of Perfectionism. Chinese
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Fiedler, F.E., (1967). A theory of leadership effectiveness. McGraw-Hill.
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