Team Production and Gift Exchange

       In an article by Jonathan Haidt, from nytimes.com, he discussed gift exchange with regards to different make ups of team production and related it to the United States economy and Obama’s efforts to raise taxes on the one percent. Essentially, if people are not working together then they are much less likely to share rewards with one another. This reminds me of some of my experiences with group work in college.

               There has been only one group that I participated in that I felt every member carried their own weight. We were forced to elect a team “captain” that was intended to delegate tasks in a fair manner to the rest of the group. After electing this captain we decided to collaborate on each other’s tasks through google docs instead of working solo. For those not familiar with google docs, if you are invited by the creator of a document to edit, then you can freely edit the article without the owner’s permission. The quality of work that we produced was way more polished than the original creators work. On top of that when one person edited your work, it encouraged you to at least take a look at theirs. The more we collaborated the more we cared about the final product of the project. We received an A, and each of our members received the highest peer rating grade you could get.

               Clearly, I think the findings in the article relate to my experience. One example the article gives discusses a situation where two people pull ropes in tandem and receive marbles for their efforts. When both players do the same amount of work the player that receives more marbles is very inclined to share the deficit in pay. In my case, sharing the workload led to better grades and peer reviews. If we had handled our project without collaboration we would have been more selfish. We wouldn’t have contributed ideas to each other and most likely would have turned in lower quality work.

I have been in many groups where members are assigned tasks and then turn them in on the due date without other members reviewing their work. It has always led to lower quality work. Without collaboration, good ideas are not shared and single members are allowed to slack off on tasks. In the group that collaborated we kept everyone in check and were rewarded accordingly.  

 Evidently, working together has many benefits and this article by Haidt highlights that. When we work together, we not only begin to care for one another but we begin to care more about what we're working towards. It is only when every member of a team goes all-in do they create the optimal and most efficient outcome.