University Reflective Writing: Professional Practice and Employability

This reflective writing assignment details a student's experience working in a group to develop professional workplace practices. The student reflects on their individual role, which involved researching academic resources and developing the introduction. The assignment covers team dynamics, including the allocation of responsibilities, conflicts, and leadership styles. It analyzes the application of Belbin's team roles, conflict resolution within the group, and the leader's democratic and transformational approach. The student evaluates what worked well, such as communication, and identifies areas for improvement, like timely submissions. The assignment references relevant academic sources to support the reflections on team development and professional practices. The assignment is a self-assessment of the student's contribution to the team project, focusing on the practical application of professional principles.

Running head: PRINCIPLES OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE FOR EMPLOYABILITY
PRINCIPLES OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE FOR EMPLOYABILITY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

Individual Reflective Writing
Description
In the group of five members, we are given the responsibility of working on
developing professional workplace practices. The team members of the group are A,
B, C, D and (Me). The leader of our team has summoned two group meetings to
discuss the assignment requirements and allocating the individual responsibilities to
be performed. The discussion on developing the team roles and responsibilities had
given us the chance of preparing our conceptions clearly. Unfortunately, I could not
attend the first meeting (on 26 September- 3 p.m.) due to my illness. The second
meeting (28 September- 2.30 p.m.) was to assign us the duties and discuss on the
decisions taken. Both the meetings were held in the office conference room.
My role
The work that had been assigned to me being an individual in the group was to
develop the introduction and report on two academic resources for representing my
perception and research skills on team development and professional practices in
employability. I had worked on the given demand of my job role where I researched
on different scholarly articles and journals about professional practices over the
internet. The researching helped me develop the ideas regarding trending practices in
the corporate industry. I developed an introduction on the assigned task and reviewed
two sources.
Others’ roles
The other members of the group were in charge given the responsibility to develop
four other sub-parts of the topic of our discussion. Out of them, D was asked to
develop the conclusion part. Hence, A, B and C were involved in developing the other
parts of the paper.
Interprets the Belbin team roles concept (Belbin, 2012).

Conflict in the group and resolving
As member D was supposed to develop the conclusion of the task, he expected the
rest of us to communicate to him with all our researched items that will make it easier
for him to develop an analytical conclusion, member A was not able to provide his
part of research on time. Thus, it led to a minor conflict between member A and D as
well as the rest of the members. However, we had been maintaining cooperation with
each other for attaining the group objective (Raes et al 2015).
Leadership and decision making in the group
The leader of the group member B was in-charge of discussing the concepts gathered
and take decision of rendering the outcome. Our research were easy to understand and
interpret. However, the team leader had been asking us for opinion in developing the
assignment in a better way. Member B had shown an approach of democratic and
transformational leadership that benefitted us (Volkov and Volkov, 2015).
Ways that the group experience worked well and ways it could have been
improved
According to my experience while performing in the team assignment, we performed
well in communication and maintaining positive integrity. The point that I feel could
have been improved was issue of delay in submission. Due to a minor fault of delay
from member A’s side, the entire assignment suffered a little procrastination.
However, neither our team lead nor the rest of us indulged in the blame-game and
equally accepted our faults in team performance (Rahbi et al 2017). Preparing the
assignment on or before the final deadline would have given us time to think and
revisit the places that we might have thought of fixing or replacing.

Reference
Al Rahbi, D., Khalid, K. and Khan, M., 2017. The effects of leadership styles on team
motivation. Academy of Strategic Management Journal.
Belbin, R.M., 2012. Team roles at work. Routledge.
Raes, E., Kyndt, E., Decuyper, S., Van den Bossche, P. and Dochy, F., 2015. An
exploratory study of group development and team learning. Human Resource
Development Quarterly, 26(1), pp.5-30.
Volkov, A. and Volkov, M., 2015. Teamwork benefits in tertiary education: Student
perceptions that lead to best practice assessment design. Education+ Training, 57(3),
pp.262-278.