Teamwork and Sharing

In my experiences, working as a team has always produced greater results versus when people are working alone.  Having the ability to bounce ideas off of one another really allows peoples ideas to evolve and turn into something greater.  When working alone, everybody is relatively close minded because they have no one else to talk to about their ideas. 

Last summer, the group of interns I worked with and I were given a project with about 3 weeks left in the summer.  For the most part, all of us had been doing work individually and we had not really collaborated a lot on anything.  Our project was to plan an event for our company. 

The event was a type of career fair sponsored by the National Association of Professional Women.  There were about 50 companies at the event and we needed to organize it all.  We had to coordinate where we were going to have different parts of the event and we had to develop a well thought out time all of it.  All of us interns had different specialties.  We all had different ideas and we were all nervous about planning our first event. 

Two weeks in we were done with all of our planning and our boss came in and gave us an interesting option.  He told us that we were going to decide how much we all were going to get paid.  He gave us one lump sum of money and told us that however we thought the money should be allocated is what he would do. 

I think that our boss doing this was an incredible decision by him.  Realistically, the money was not that great of an amount as we were only interns and did not get paid that much.  After our boss left the room, we all started throwing out some ideas.  We ended up all agreeing that the easiest solution to this problem was splitting the money evenly.  Even though some people did more work than others, it would be impossible to negotiate a difference in pay because nobody would be willing to accept less money than the less person. 

I do not believe that the pay rates were fair because two other interns and I did a majority of the work.  We really took a leadership role in the group and organized all of the work we had and made it manageable for the entire group to accomplish.  Although I do not necessarily agree with how we all got the same amount of money, I obviously understand why that was the only way that we were all going to agree.

My situation at my internship was related to the first situation in the “How to get riches out of marbles” article.  It is obviously a much different scenario, but I believe that the principles of sharing are the same in the two situations.  For the kids, when they worked together and got a different amount of marbles, the kid who obtained more marbles feels a sense of obligation to give his extra marble to the other kid because of the fact that he could not have received any of the marbles without the help of his partner. 

In my situation, even though we did not all do the same work, when delegating the money, we all felt a sense of teamwork and the fact that we really did need everybody made us all split the money equally.  In theory, if we were to have delegated the money solely on how much work every person did, our situation would have been more like the third condition in the article. 

You earn your money by doing work.  The kids pulled the ropes separately and got their own marbles because they pulled their rope.  There was no teamwork involved which is why the kids felt no obligation to share the extra marble with the other kid.  This would not work for our group because there was a great amount of teamwork involved in us producing our outcome.  Teamwork is a huge component of feeling a need to share.  You feel a sense of obligation to share because you needed to rely on the other people in order to do your own job.  This reliance leads to a willingness to share.