Personal Reflection Paper

Running head: PERSONAL INFORMATION
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Personal Reflection Paper
Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Affiliation
Date

PERSONAL INFORMATION
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Personal Reflection
The easiest part about the whole exercise was the formulation of feasible solutions to
the issues of salary and wage cost reduction and the determination of redundancy in the
company workforce. The most difficult part has to be the process of sense-making and
situation analysis. The development of arguments that critically and comprehensively
describe the issues highlighted in the case study was considerably challenging for me. With
regard to challenges associated with group-based decision making, the main problems
encounters were: communication errors, groupthink, group polarization, and social loafing.
Communication errors occurred resulted from poor understanding of what individuals in the
group we trying to share. As a result, there were misconceptions and misrepresentation of
argument given by team members. Groupthink was also observed when two members agreed
on a point but the third member was still apprehensive but in order to keep our evening
meetings going he/she was forced to agree with what was stated by the other two. Group
polarization was witnessed as in the formulation of solutions to the underlying case study
issues. For instance, the solution that the company should shut down to avoid further losses is
an extreme solution that would not have been considered by the team members individually.
Lastly, social loafing was the biggest issue because individuals were unable to effectively
contribute especially when another member demonstrate some level of expertise in a given
area. As such, a considerable amount of time was wasted trying to get all members to
contribute equally across all areas of the group-based decision making incentive (Ambrusy,
Greinerz, & Pathak, 2009).
I was given the role of ensuring that every member shared feasible ideas and
arguments that could then be discussed by the group as a whole. The valid points were passed
and documented while the points that were view unnecessary or speculative where dropped
from the decision-making process. There given advantages to group-based decision making