Assignment about Trust

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