Cultural Selfishness

A friend of mine who taught here at Jimei University gave me a good idea for solving a grading problem with team projects.  He’s working in Kunming now, but before he left he passed on his idea.  Most U.S. business schools use projects or case studies to illustrate business problems and form student teams to work on them.  This approach gets students used to working together, helps them understand the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and simulates most workplace environments where people are supposed to work together.

With a team project it’s often difficult for the teacher to know the individual contributions of each team member.  Projects are usually presented by one speaker or submitted in written form where you really don’t know who wrote what.  One way to grade the project is to give the team a single grade and have each team member get the same grade.  My friend suggested that you give a single team grade, but that the teams multiply the team grade by the number of team members and then have the teams figure out how to allocate their budget among team members.  So if a team has six members and the grade is eighty, the team has a budget of 480 which the team, by consensus, divvies up among the team.

Some of my students had a problem with my friend’s idea.  Some teams wanted to keep grade distribution more “Chinese” and give everyone the same grade.  Others thought those who contributed more ought to get the better grades.  Some complained that allocating grades based on contribution was selfish – not the Chinese way.  These kids were friends.  Some had lived together in the same dormitory for four years.  So keeping friends was important.  And some kids actually argued that the smarter kids should do the hard work anyway since they were more capable which left added time for the less capable kids to play video games.

I’m not sure any of this has anything to do with being Chinese.  Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote of a fictional character, Tom Sawyer, who made a habit of tricking friends into doing his work.  Tom Sawyer pulled his trick in Misouri or something.

I promised my students at the beginning of the term that I would teach them how business really works, so I explained merit systems and differential pay.  That’s how business works……sometimes.

A difficult problem for new managers is being fair and equitable in evaluating individual contributions particularly when some of the people he or she is evaluating are old friends.   Many new managers come from the ranks and have friends they’ve known for as long as or longer than my college seniors.  And some new managers sometimes choose friends over the business.

I think when one becomes a manager; he or she leaves one club and joins another.  While they can go to the old clubhouse and the meetings from time-to-time, they have to remember they are now in a different club. They left the worker-bee club and joined the management club.

There is kind of a rule in business that one can’t hold membership in both clubs at the same time. Of course they can keep their friends, but they can never compromise their position as a neutral, objective judge of performance – in reality or in perception.  In their new club, being a dispassionate judge of performance is what they are paid to do.  Sometimes they’ll lose a friend or two, but I think the one’s they lose, probably weren’t the friends they thought they were. 

Managers get performance budgets to divvy up too, whether it’s the skew of performance evaluations, the salary budget or the bonus pool.  They’re expected to allocate rewards and sanctions according to contribution.

That’s the way business works.