Group Dynamics

I've been fortunate in that throughout my three internship experiences, I've never experienced anything that amounted to a conflict. Minor disagreements were present as expected, but these were few and far in between and were all swiftly dealt with through communication and understanding. Therefore, for this example I will be using an anecdote concerning office politics that my mom -Cindy had told me about this past summer. For background information, Cindy works in corporate business and is a senior member in the finance division. The company she works for supplies fast moving consumer cosmetic goods.
The conflict arose due to misconduct from the sales department. It must be noted here that sales representatives are highly motivated to post strong sales numbers as their year end bonus heavily depends on performance. The sales division, under instruction from the vice president of sales engaged in a practice in which they were essentially stockpiling company products in the warehouses of the buyers who would then resell it to large super markets. The way this works is that the sales representative convinces the buyer to place a order larger than the number which they forecast will sell. They promise that doing so only ensures that the warehouses won't run into a shortage of supply problem from unexpected large orders during the year end shopping season and promises that returned goods will be refunded for the full price. This practice allows the entire sales division to post temporary high performance and fetch a large year end bonus. However, when the products are returned from the warehouses, there is a possibility that they are expired or in poor condition resulting in losses to the company.
When this practice was found out, Cindy led a company wide audit. The VP of sales when confronted took on a rather nasty attitude as he had been with the company for longer than Cindy despite occupying the same position in the company. He reasoned that the losses to the company were likely negligible and tried to push it under the table by dealing with the issue later when products are actually returned and are proven to have caused significant losses. Cindy was outraged by what she saw as a blatant disrespect of code of conduct and lack of remorse took on a similarly nasty attitude which resulted in a lot of friction caused by their personalities as discussed in the book chapter. Neither backed down and it became more of a power struggle than a right or wrong issue as both individuals had similar titles. Office atmosphere was tense as the rivalry blew over between finance and sales divisions.The issue eventually forced the CEO to fly in from Germany and resulted in lengthy investigations from a hired third party and more detailed auditing (lots of wasted time and money). The outcome was a hostile work environment for the better part of the year and both Cindy and VP of sales being forced to take an extended unpaid leave to let things cool over.
Looking at this post mortem from the VP of sales' perspective, I can understand the decision as he felt for posting results so that the division which included nearly a hundred people could go home happily with their bonuses. From Cindy's perspective, it was her job to audit and make sure that company finances are kept in tight check. The real take away from this is that both individuals could have dealt with this by avoiding open confrontation which negatively affected the working environment. Instead, a more amicable approach would have been appropriate until it was deemed that the practice was indeed a violation of code of conduct and had resulted in losses to the company. The atmosphere was so tense and toxic that Cindy later reflected that she shouldn't have acted based on her emotions and considered the effect such confrontation would have on her colleagues.

Sharing and caring

The article deals extensively with the issue of equity and egalitarianism. I found it interesting how Haidt talked about the communal effort during the wars as I simply can't see such a selfless, coordinated effort happening today on a societal scale. Incentives drives effort in the same way that lack of incentives discourage effort. In reading the article, I thought, kids share marbles, yes, but these are young toddlers who have yet to experience societal pressures, expectations and competition. Moreover, these are merely marbles which hardly equates to the same worth as, say, money. So is it really suitable to draw such a parallel comparison between the social experiment and society? What if the toddlers were replaced with adults and marbles with things of monetary value, could they replicate the same results? When we study indifference curves in economics, one of the primary assumptions is that more is better. Hence what drives the rich and powerful to resort to underhanded methods to obtain even more money. When referencing procedural fairness, what exactly does Haidt propose? Is it possible to establish a fair system that can fairly allocate resources, and what would the determining factor be? Hours spent? Quality of work produced? Or something entirely different?

During one of my summer internships, I was part of a team that had to produce a detailed market analysis for a new product targeting a specific consumer group. The start of the project was brainstorming and coming up with ideas. We used a software similar to google docs which allowed team members to share ideas, but no credit was given to who wrote it unlike google docs which displays the name of the contributor after the sentence. Progress was slow and no one really paid attention to the document. Each week however, the team held a meeting in which we planned and discussed key information gathered in front of the project leader who was a lot more senior than the group members. I still remember, the day before the first meeting, there was scarcely half a page of idea and material posted onto the document. But come time for the meeting, everyone was throwing around what types of research articles they found, competitor information and similar market studies. Part of me (the cynical part) thinks this was due to the fact that during the meeting, the project leader would applaud good finds and ideas by personally mentioning the person's name while the document was simply available to all of the group members and was anonymous. For selfish reasons, it therefore made no sense for members to extensively share with each other the precious information they found through combing the internet and company archives. This experience I think ties well with Haidt's example of his mom hanging around his grandparents to collect the foil from the cigarette packages. Such action would realistically be of no personal gain to her as she would not be recognized for the effort, but nevertheless she did it for the sake of the greater good. That's what was truly striking about the article when I read it because I feel that kind of mentality is becoming rarer and rarer today.

Income risk

I can into the university with a political science degree with the intention of doing law. However, after a couple years and realizing that law school was just not as attractive a career choice as it had been before I came into college, I added an economics degree to increase my chances of finding a job in the financial sector which I gained interest in. I took further steps to reduce risk of being unemployed after graduating by interning during every summer the past three years. I am fortunate enough to have received a return offer last summer which guarantees me a job position after graduating. I currently know the salary and location of my work if I take the return offer which really gives me peace of mind knowing I won't be jobless. My tuition was also taken care of entirely by my parents which significantly broadens the number of choices I can make upon graduation.

With regards to the experiences of others, a friend of mine who recently graduated sticks out the most. My friend graduated from the U of I with a computer science degree and landed multiple job offers in both east and west coast. Most of these offers were very attractive ones such as Google which he interned for two summers in a row. From sophomore year onward, he consciously streamlined his resume and tailored himself to the firms he wanted to work for through coding competitions, computer science clubs and internship experiences. These experiences made him very prepared for post graduation job hunting as he had a solid idea of what to expect during interviews (especially how to tackle the technical interview which is a crucial portion of the programming job process).

He has now worked in Google for two years without hiccups and has plans to hop jobs and maybe try the East Coast for a change. Although this seems like a boring example, I find his experience and preparation process very motivating and inspiring. During a recent catch up phone call I had with him, he reiterated the importance of tailoring your resume and having a specific interest instead of aimlessly throwing out resumes hoping for a hit. His rationale is that the job market now is simply too competitive for the "shotgun" approach.

Illinibucks

Assuming that Illinibucks can only be used solely for the purpose of academic related activities and campus services, the primary use of Illinibucks would likely be to get priority in class selection, adviser meeting and fund provision services like SORF. These are what I personally would use Illinibucks for. I had trouble this semester getting a slot in several 400 level classes which was unfortunate since I had a strong interest in them. Adviser meetings were also hard to schedule durign the beginning of the semester which delayed some of my selection processes. Finally since I'm on the board of one of the SORF funded organizations, getting priority in the funding process would have helped greatly in speeding up the planning process.

As for prices, since Illinibucks would be allocated to all students, the services would become somewhat of a commodity. Too low a price would mean that Illinibucks would lose a lot of it's value if everyone is willing to use it. This could result in students essentially having to pay for Illinibucks to select classes that they would previously have gotten under the system without Illinibucks. I'd say this is analogous to the strategy of some airlines that force customers to incur hidden fees. Too high a price would probably result in no one using Illinibucks and heavy complaints from students that this gives an unfair advantage to students from more affluent families.

I had an experience with this during Middle School. Each year the school allows students to choose a location around the world to travel to as a school sponsored outing. Each country group is capped at 20 students with the selection process favoring seniority and order of last name (which rotated each year). Hot spots like Europe would be snatched up during the first round by seniors leaving the less popular destinations like South East Asia for underclassmen. The school decided during my sophomore year to allow students to pay an extra fee to pick earlier which drew huge complaints from parents with several families deciding to simply boycott the school excursion. Needless to say, the policy was quickly reverted.