Introduction:

Reflection is a critical review of the process of the team’s learning and behaviours (Lew &
Schmidt 2011). Reflecting allows us to understand our strengths and weaknesses so that we
can learn and apply them to our future projects. This report is based on our reflection during
the course of the assignment, demonstrating the reasoning of having a mixed gendered team
structure, the flow of the team’s processes and our realised strengths and weaknesses.

The formation of the team is facilitated by factors such as abilities, characteristics and role
assignment within the team, not necessarily depending on the characteristics of the task or
shared intentions (Fransen & Kirschner & Erkens 2011). Our team structure consists of
mixed gendered members with diverse personalities. Due to the pandemic, we were restricted
to an online means of discussion. Forming the group socially online was not ideal as factors
such as behaviour, values and abilities of one's traits are concealed behind screen. With
minimal knowledge of these traits, we found out that each of us had different styles of
communication and strengths. It was inevitable that we faced difficulties such as
miscommunications on how the assignment will be handled.

Evaluation and reflection were constantly done as a team throughout the assignment. Our
takeaways were that frequent online meetings were paramount to improve communication,
problems should be shared within the team and expectations should be set.

Group structure: Gender Diversity

The group was created via the module Telegram group. Our group is a mixed gender group
which is composed of 3 females and 2 males. The idea of having mixed-gender groups came
to us as mixed-gender groups have better cooperation in the team compared with single-
gender groups (Ivanova-Stengel & Kubler 2011).

According to Merchant (2012), males tend to be more goal-orientated and result-focused,

which suggests that they would be analytical when making decisions. Merchant (2012) also
states that females tend to be more relationship-orientated, which suggests that they would be
more careful when interacting and dealing with complex information. Our team is more
female dominated as we have more females than males in the team. It is stated by Bear &
Woolley (2011) that groups with more women showed greater equality in conversational turn-
taking, which leads to members being responsive. This allowed better utilisation of the
knowledge and skills within the team. We managed to use the difference between females
and males to maximize the benefits of the group task which helped us to achieve better
performance and output for the group task.

Gender diversity enables the expansion of knowledge within the team (Ritter-Hayashi &
Vermeulen & Knoben 2019). The gender diversity in the team has become one of our
strengths as we were able to learn and apply knowledge to the group work from our
counterparts that we were previously unaware of.

Team processes

We started off by creating a Telegram group to communicate with each other. We proceeded
to create and share Google Docs and Google Slides so that we could work together
simultaneously.

Team processes : Trust

We manage our conflicts by using collaborating style to achieve a win-win situation, to gain
mutual understanding and build trust. It is supported by Schnackenberg & Tomlinson (2014)
that transparency in the team helps to facilitate trust. Trust is extremely important for
teamwork as it is based on the belief that team members are credible and will fulfil team
expectations by keeping their promises working hard towards common goals. When the team
has mutual understandings, all the communication barriers will be eliminated (Dabaj 2011).

In the virtual setting, social or contextual information, such as a member's social background
or abilities may be lost. One of our strengths is that despite coming from different educational
backgrounds, where some of us were from engineering or science courses, it did not let it stop
us from communicating effectively. We ensured that there was transparency in the team,
where all information was shared in our telegram group, which allowed the team to have trust
in each other.

Team processes : Communication

Our journey as a team was not always smooth sailing. The fact that we did not go beyond
texting had led to a weakness in the team. Our communication as a team was passive from the
start till the end of our assignment. There was little initiative to assign the tasks and properly
allocate the tasks based on each member’s strength. As a result, our tasks were assigned
based on a first come first serve basis, with expectations not conveyed, which is said to be a
form of passive leadership (Harold & Holtz 2014).

Looking back, we could have adopted a high assertiveness servant leadership proposed by
Ferris (2020), where a leader gives the instructions while the members are willing to follow
but need direction from the leader to accomplish the goals. Our meetings could have been
conducted offline, as Lilian (2014) claimed that virtual teams are more difficult to manage
than face-to-face meetings.

Beside our passive communication, the language proficiency amongst our team was different.
Some of us preferred to use Singaporean English (Singlish), which is considered as a
semantic barrier and psychosocial barrier. This communication barrier had led to information
being misunderstood. Tenzer & Pudelko & Zellmer-Bruhn (2020) states that such barrier
influence reduces team participation. Upon reflection, we realised that we could have
followed Tenzer & Pudelko (2015) suggestion by setting a common goal and setting a rule to
avoid code switching in the team to improve the communication within the team.

Conclusion

Throughout the assignment, our team successfully overcame limitations and learned skills
that could only be taught through the experience of working in a diverse team. Through
thorough reflection, we realised that our team still had room for improvements, especially on
our communication skills. With these improvements made, we are certain that we will be able
to work more efficiently and effectively as a team. During the short span of time working
together, we also learned that a strong build of trust and respect goes a long way in a team
and that working in a diverse group is an advantage as it allows us to utilise our individual
unique strengths to tackle tasks. Overall, working as a team proved to be a beneficial learning
experience for all of us.
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