Team Production With Gift Exchange

In the New York Times article, a scenario created by two developmental psychologists Michael Tomasello and Katharina Hamann was explained. This scenario was meant to study and explain a child’s reaction this “share-the-spoils” idea based on certain situations and connecting that to the adults. The “share-the spoils” concept is, to my understanding, the description of when a person, more specifically a child in the study, is willing to share their success or rewards with another person/child. In the study, there were slight variations to each scenario to help try and identify when people are more willing to “share-the-spoils” and what the root of this willingness is.

When the three different situations played out, Tomasello and Hamann had interesting findings. They found that during their study, the children were less willing to share their earnings and create equality when they were either randomly given the better earnings, same idea as “finder’s keepers,” which wasn’t much of a surprise to me. Something more interesting, though, is that even when the two children performed the same exact task separately which resulted in unequal results, the “rich” child was still less willing to share.

The third scenario, which was actually the first one played out in the study and what the other situations were varied around, was when the children had to work together to get the earnings. When this scenario occurred, it was much more likely for the “rich” child to share their earnings with the other child because it was essential for them to work together to be able to get the earnings. I think that this scenario in particular relates the most to the idea of positive team production and gift exchange, while I do think that the other scenarios are definite possibilities during team production in cases such as group projects or in your career.

At the company that I will be working for next year, employees, excluding the sales representatives, are paid based on a salary and are eligible for a bonus at the end of the year based on certain criteria. This criteria is determined at the beginning of the year in a meeting with the president of your division or an executive of the company with very specific tasks and numbers that need to be met to ensure your full bonus. While I didn’t have direct experience with one of these meetings as an intern and have yet to have this meeting since I am still a student, a co-worker of mine was willing to explain the process to me during my last day of the internship when I had just received my offer to come back next year.

The criteria for this bonus wasn’t based off of how the company did as a whole, which would work in your favor if you did well but the company didn’t but wouldn’t work in favor of those who were hoping they could be lazy if the company was constantly growing without them. I feel like in many instances with companies, commissions or bonuses are based off of solely personal successes that would help the company and don’t focus much on the collaboration that is stressed so greatly at this university, as well as many others I’m sure. Something that I like about my company, however, is that a person’s individual bonus will be dependent on their respective team.

To be clearer, my company is a pharmaceutical product distributor and the company is broken up into product divisions which many employees view as their own mini company. In these terms, a percentage of one’s bonus will be dependent upon the success and growth of their product; something that I think promotes inclusion. Clearly there are tasks that are very specific to each person to make sure that they are doing their part, but there are also portions of the bonus that cannot be achieved alone, which makes your goals the goals of your co-workers at this company. Knowing this aspect of the company in retrospect started tying things together for me. I had always noticed that within my product division that everyone was very inclusive and willing to help on another, and while I think that one of the reasons was because they sincerely liked each other, knowing that their overall bonus was dependent on each other’s success made sense as well.

Other company’s have a different culture than this, the simplest one I can think of would be that of a car dealership. Your co-worker would be less willing to invest their time into help you with your work since you will be gaining commission off the sale and your co-worker won’t. I think that situations such as these could relate to the other scenarios of the study where the child was less willing to share their earnings because of the dumb luck they got it or simply because inequality was apparent.

Risk Behavior

In class, we talked about how younger people typically are more tolerant to risk than older people. I have an older sister who is twenty-seven years old and, while she has only been in the work force for six years, I think that her actions involving financial risks have echoed this theory rather consistently.

My sister was advertising major here at the University of Illinois. She graduated with high honors in her major, but I don’t think that anyone that goes into advertising expects to make tons of money, especially when they are just starting out. When my sister graduated college, she had an internship with a small healthcare advertising firm in a Chicago suburb. This was the first job that she had that was relevant to her major. After that summer of interning for the company, she was offered a full-time position and has been there ever since.

For the first two years after graduation, my sister lived at home with my parents so that she could save up money to live in the city. This technically would be a risk adverse thing to do, but I honestly think the only reason she stayed home is because she wouldn’t have been able to live otherwise with the money that she had saved up thus far. My sister thought that after two years of saving, she had enough money to move out so she moved into the city with one of her friends. When she lived there, she seemed to be living the dream life. From the outside looking in, I saw my older sister whom I had always looked up to living in this great neighborhood in the city in a nice apartment with her best friend and was constantly going out to eat and shopping. This was the life that I have aspired to have since I saw her achieve it.

It wasn’t until recently, however, when my sister moved out of the city and into an apartment in the suburbs with her fiancé that I realized that life wasn’t as perfect for her as I had made it out to be. While she was living in the city and doing all the things I just described, she wasn’t saving any money during the two years that she lived there. My sister shared with me this summer that it took nearly her entire paycheck every month to live the lifestyle that she wanted in the city, and that while she misses living there, she is so happy that she is finally saving money, because she is in that place of her life where she is thinking about marriage and buying a home and having a family.

When my sister first told me that she went two years without saving anything, I was a bit taken aback because I couldn’t imagine living like that. The way my sister explained it, though, is that that was going to be the one time of her life to live in the city with her best friend and not have anyone else depending on her, so she wanted to have the full experience and do whatever she wanted. She was willing to do so even if that meant working overtime now and saving all of it so that she’ll have money for a wedding and a down payment on a house. Now, even though my sister has a much smaller cost of living, I hear her saying things such as, “I can’t afford that,” because she knows that she has some ground to make up. I think that this scenario of my sister almost perfectly exemplifies the theory that younger people are able to tolerate risk more than older people. I was able to see this transition in risk even within just a few years of her being in the job market.

Being able to witness and learn from my sister is something that I will always be grateful for. I have always looked up to my sister, and in ways also envied her successes which made me strive to do good things, better things, as well. I feel like I came into college knowing the system a lot more because I was able to witness my sister going through it. I picked a “hard” major, actuarial science, partially because of my love for math but also because of the salary I could achieve. I don’t think that I thought of salary at the time as a factor of risk and more so just an idea that was good at the time. What I will say, however, is that I think that I have gotten myself in internship opportunities early on in my college career, at least relative to my sister who got her first on after graduation, in hopes of saving money for later on. Even when I was a sophomore, I was actively looking for internships to build my resume and save some money so that I could reduce risk in the future when I hopefully move into the city with some friends. I was one of my only friends with an internship after sophomore year because I was one of the only ones that tried. I now already know where I’m going to work full time after graduation, and I would attribute that to seeing my sister go through this experience and learn that I’m going to have to be a bit more risk adverse now so that I have tolerate the risk I will endure when I more into the city in the coming years.

Reflection

After skimming through my previous blog posts, I’m not sure if there are particular themes that I could point out that would tie all my posts together. One similarity between my posts, however, is that I have always used personal experiences to explain the prompts. I think that in a way the prompts have been set up in a way that encourages each student to talk about personal experiences and tie them back to course themes.

When I first saw the title of this course and learned about what this class was going to be teaching us, I was confused, but by being able to relate real life experiences to the prompts and class discussions it has made everything easier to learn.  I think the one prompt that I struggled the most with in terms of knowing exactly what the prompt was asking for and what experience in my life I could relate it to was the “opportunism” post. I will say, however, that after looking at your comments on my post, reading some posts of my peers and participating in the class discussion, I think I have been able to understand the prompt and theme much more.

Trying to think of connections to course themes aside from addressing the prompts that have clearly already been answered was a more difficult task, kind of how I felt when I was trying to think of an experience for the “opportunism” post that I just explained. I think that the themes that I personally was able to connect more obviously with my posts were the ones that I felt I had already had exposure to, which isn’t really a surprise. In the “opportunism” post, I had difficulty defining the term, which lead to me taking a long time to complete my post. In subsequent posts, including the team structure and “Illinibucks” ones, I was able to write the entire post fairly early and have the chance to go back to it and make edits, due to the fact I felt like I connected more with the theme in the posts.

I think overall, however, being able to write my post early, step away from it and come back is one of the ways I have evolved as a writer for this course. I have become a freer writer in that aspect. During the first couple of posts, I was pretty scared felt uncertain of the expectations and how I would be able to meet them, something I believe hindered my writing. Due to this, I felt like I became a much more tense writer, and would make an outline for what I wanted to write about the post. All this planning in the outline took time away from my actual writing, which meant I would write my post closer to the deadline which wouldn’t give me the opportunity to step away from the post and go back to it with a fresher perspective. Composing my posts with time to spare has also afforded me the chance to try and look at the post from a perspective other than my own in attempt to answer more questions.

In the future, I personally would like to see more posts like the “Illinibucks” one. I think that while at first it seemed like a very broad post, the terms were something that everyone was aware with. The fact that we were talking about the university, a commonality between all of us, allowed me to focus more on the prompt and class content instead of focusing on explaining the background of the personal experience I use in said prompt. By this, I mean that in the “Illinibucks” prompt I didn’t have to explain how things such as class registration works because it’s assumed we all know, while in a prompt like the organization or team structure one, I was very focused on explaining aspects of the organization or team as oppose to the course themes. Overall, I think that the comments about our posts have helped me personally evolve as a writer and made me more prepared for future prompts.