Teamwork-related issues in manipal international university

In Manipal International University (MIU), there are some teamwork-related issues that are restricting the personal development of individuals. Some students refuse to work with teammates, despite the fact that teamwork is a significant element in the survival any businesses. School environment and effectiveness can be observed through teamwork among students, according to Phalane (2012). Robescu L. D., Manea E. E. (2015) agrees that students, especially in engineering course need to learn to work well in a team. One of the important learning outcomes for higher education courses is effective participation of students in group work. It is true after all because MIU is the School of Science and Engineering (SOSE). By reviewing history of teamwork, Grayson (2012) states that after 1945 when World War II has just ended, the earliest teamwork has been founded to discover the factors of failure of military teams. However, some find that working with others is not as comfortable as predicted. Some of them prefer working alone, ignoring the traditional perspective that teamwork will increase the effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. Various reasons were given by them for holding such perspective.

It is true that talented leaders are often good at selecting the right person for the right job. Medwell states that teamwork is when individual experts gathered by a leader as a workgroup and set goals, interact, communicate, make decision, analyze problems together, combining abilities and knowledges from every members in order to accomplish common goals. Team members should be brought into a team because they are experts in a particular field, through experience or training. However, talented leaders are hard to find. Some leaders of a team are dividing tasks according to their benefits and peer pressure. Indirectly, group work has been demonstrated to be far less effective than it should be. Without hesitation, grouphate will be formed among teammates where many people feel uncomfortable and even tired of working in groups or teams. That is what keeping some students in MIU from working with teammates.

Besides, sometimes teamwork is exhausting. Cardona and Wilkinson argue that each team member may be in the same team but has distinct and different personality and this brings to the task particular skills, knowledge and experience. Nour and Yen’s (1992) finding also agrees that group decision making demands increased levels of communication, coordination and collaboration and that this form of decision making generally takes longer time. Some team members are often late for group discussion, unprepared during meetings and postpone their jobs until the due dates are just around the corner. In the end, they are unsatisfied with the results given because Mason Cooley said that procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things even harder. Once they experienced the pain, they will feel unsecured working with teams anymore. They always think that they could do better and produce more themselves. That is why research has demonstrated that group interaction leads to much lower of productivity than does individual brainstorming in terms of both quantity and rated quality of ideas. Group is not a good idea if one wants to obtain many ideas. 40% of students in Flinders University who worked in team before think that they could achieve better results when working alone. According to the research conducted by O’Malley and Scanlon (1990), 75 per cent of 80 students do not prefer working collaboratively with team members.