During the course of my college studies, I have taken part in different group assignments and projects, where I had to function in the role of a group leader and manager. One of such group projects turned out to be extremely difficult and challenging for me as team members were negligent, disorganized, and disinterested in the final results of our project. It was especially difficult for me to work together with one troubled student who was always late to the group meetings, ignored the majority of the assigned tasks, and put no effort into the project at all.
In order to punish the student for his permanent idling and bring him to cooperate with the group, I decided to employ the disciplining approach. In theory of management, the disciplining approach "involves responding negatively to an individual's behavior with the intention of discouraging future occurrences of that behavior" (Whetten and Cameron 339). Therefore, I started giving that student only bad marks within the confines of our project as well as assigning him the most difficult and problematic tasks and problems. Unfortunately, this punishing behavior proved to be ineffective, as it did not change the student's behavior and his attitude to the project.
As of today, I believe that the rewarding approach would definitely work better in that particular situation. According to Whetten and Cameron (2011), this alternative approach "consists of linking desired behaviors with individual-valued outcomes". In other words, if I had encouraged and compliment the student even for every minor completed task, he would have been more motivated to work harder and be more interested in the achievement of our common goal.
Works Cited
Whetten, David A., and Kim S. Cameron. Developing Management Skills. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2011. Print.
