Student
Name: Tang Jing (Ada)
Student
ID: 53306162
Few days ago, I participated in a wealth
management experience program. And as the only one without any experience on
investment, accounting or finance, I felt stressful. Other members seemed to be
really active and smart especially in class when every mentor can observe our performance.
However, things were entirely different when we had to finish an assignment about
financial plan in one week without supervision of those mentors. At very beginning,
some members turned up for a while in the online discussions and said they were
sorry to be late. In consideration of that they were busy with courses, I decided
to undertake the majority of work by myself while other members picked up the parts
they were interested in. We also made agreements on deadline and format. But
when that day came, just three people including me showed up in the online discussion
group while the others disappeared no matter how many messages were sent, which
led to the situation that few things were settled down. Eventually, I did the
remaining work and stayed up until 3：00 a.m. What’s more?
2 minutes before the final presentation we were still modifies the lecture notes…
Actually I treated this assignment as an opportunities
to show our communication skills, analytical ability and team spirit under the pressure
of limited time and resources. We should have done it on time and perfectly.
Because our group had so many excellent
members with great backgrounds-most of us are financial students from University
of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.And their performances in class were really
good. I thought the reliability of my team members were quite high without hesitation.
When some members said they were too busy with the courses, I trusted them and showed
the willing to help with the belief that this situation is temporary and we should
put overall interests first. Although there was a risk that we cannot finish the
assignment, I tried to convince myself that they were too busy to finish their own
parts on time. But as time went by, I recognized that my team members were not credible
and I had to do the rest of work by myself. Otherwise, there was nothing to present.
Kramer (2009) showed that “confirmation
bias” means that we pay more attention to, and overweight in importance,
evidence supporting our hypotheses about the world, while downplaying or
discounting discrepancies or evidence to the contrary. This tendency is an
explanation of my belief that these financial students from famous universities
who performs actively in class will be responsible for the assignment with or without
supervision. I am overly-confident in some correlate observable cues, like
famous universities, majors and overestimate my team members’ trustworthiness.
And in order to change my “Blind Worship” and reduce the influence of social
stereotypes, I need to control the extent of trust based on the understanding towards
people. Specifically, I just knew these people for a couple of days and the most
frequent type of contact is chatting. So with superficial understanding on
their personalities, the relationship between us should not be too close. Appropriate
trust with mutual supervision instead of fully trust is recommended in a
new group. In this way, we will put work and whole interests first and reduce the
possibility of destroying trust, which is less risky.
References
Roderick M. Kramer.
(2009). Rethinking Trust. Harvard
Business Review, 87(6), 68-77. Retrieved from http://hbr.org/2009/06/rethinking-trust/ar/1
