Open Topic: Communication to achieve Organizational goals

Communication is used in our everyday lives to achieve various goals such as fostering interpersonal and intercultural relationship, achieving organizational goals and resolving conflicts. I will be exploring the topic of using communication to achieve organizational goals as most of us taking this course will be entering the workforce soon.

In today’s workplace, employees are expected to work in teams to achieve organizational goals such as completing projects of high quality on time. Group projects are given in schools to mimic the working life and one common problem faced while doing group projects is uncooperative members.

I would like to share my experience of working in a design module which required intensive group effort as the assessment was based solely on the project. Out of the 6 team members, 2 did not complete their individual parts on time and we could not proceed onto the common parts of the project. In the end, the required values were taken from other groups and the common parts were completed by only 4 members.

Assertive emails were sent to the 2 members, requesting them to finish their work. We phoned the 2 members to try to understand their difficulty but only 1 of them was contactable. He was suffering from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and could not handle stress. Empathizing his condition, help was provided to complete part of his individual work.

It was a very frustrating and tiring experience. What would you do differently in terms of communicating with uncooperative team members?