Learning Resource

Ethics of Teamwork

Much of your future work will be organized around group or team activities. Four issues, based on well-known ethical values, are especially important. How do groups achieve justice (in the distribution of work), responsibility (in specifying tasks, assigning blame, and awarding credit), reasonableness (ensuring participation, resolving conflict, and reaching consensus), and honesty (avoiding deception, corruption, and impropriety)?

Defining Terms for Professional Ethics

value "refers to a claim about what is worthwhile, what is good. A value is a single word or phrase that identifies something as being desirable for human beings" (Brincat & Wike, 2000). Let's look at some key values for professional ethics.

Reasonableness is used to defuse disagreement and resolve conflicts through integration. Characteristics include seeking relevant information, listening and responding thoughtfully to others, being open to new ideas, giving reasons for views held, and acknowledging mistakes and misunderstandings (Pritchard, 1996).

Responsibility is the ability to develop moral responses appropriate to the moral issues and problems that arise in one's day-to-day experience. Characteristics include avoiding blame shifting, designing overlapping role responsibilities to fill responsibility gaps, expanding the scope and depth of general and situation-specific knowledge, and working to expand control and power.

Respect involves recognizing and working to maintain the capacity of autonomy in each individual. Characteristics include honoring rights such as privacy, property, free speech, due process, and participatory rights such as informed consent. Disrespect circumvents autonomy by deception, force, or manipulation.

Justice means giving individuals their due. Justice breaks down into kinds such as distributive (dividing benefits and burdens fairly), retributive (fair and impartial administration of punishments), administrative (fair and impartial administration of rules), and compensatory (how to fairly recompense those who have been wrongfully harmed by others).

Trust is, according to Solomon, the expectation of moral behavior from others (Flores & Solomon, 2003).

Honesty is truthfulness as amidpoint between too much honesty (harmful bluntness) and dishonesty (deceptiveness, misleading acts, and mendaciousness).

Integrity is a meta-value that refers to the relation between particular values. These values are integrated with one another to form a coherent, cohesive, and smoothly functioning whole (Flores & Solomon, 2003).

Questions to Ask While Planning a Group Project

How does your group plan on realizing justice? For example, how will you assign tasks within the group that represent a fair distribution of the workload and, at the same time, recognize differences in individual strengths and weaknesses? How does your group plan on dealing with members who fail to do their fair share?

How does your group plan on realizing responsibility? For example, what are the responsibilities that members will take on in the context of collective work? Who will be the leader? Who will play devil's advocate to avoid groupthink? Who will be the spokesperson for the group? How does your group plan to make clear to individuals what their tasks and/or role responsibilities are?

How does your group plan on implementing the value of reasonableness? How will you guarantee that each individual participates fully in group decisions and activities? How will you deal with the differences, nonagreements, and disagreements that arise within the group? What process will your group use to reach agreement? How will your group ensure that every individual has input, that each opinion is heard and considered, and that each individual is respected?

How does your group plan on implementing the value of academic honesty? For example, how will you avoid cheating or plagiarism? How will you detect plagiarism from group members, and how will you respond to it?

Use your imagination and be specificabout how you plan to realize each value. Think preventively (e.g., how to avoid injustice, irresponsibility, injustice, and dishonesty) and proactively (how you can enhance these values). Don't be afraid to outline specific commitments. Expect some of your commitments to need reformulation.

Obstacles to Group Work

Abilene Paradox. Chuck Huff's Good Computing (as cited in Janis, 1982) presents an example of a group where no one gets what they want: "The story involves a family who would all rather have been at home ending up having a bad dinner in a lousy restaurant in Abilene, Texas. Each believes the others want to go to Abilene and never questions this by giving their own view that doing so is a bad idea. In the Abilene paradox, the group winds up doing something that no individual wants to do because of a breakdown of intra-group communication." 

Groupthink is the tendency for very cohesive groups with strong leaders to disregard and defend against information that goes against their plans and beliefs. As described in Huff's manuscript (as cited in Janis, 1982), the group collectively and the members individually remain loyal to the party line while happily marching off the cliff, all the while blaming outsiders for the height and situation of the cliff.

Group Polarization. Here, individuals within the group choose to frame their differences as disagreements. Framing a difference as nonagreement leaves open the possibility of working toward agreement by integrating the differences or by developing a more comprehensive standpoint that dialectically synthesizes the differences. Framing a difference as disagreement makes it a zero sum game; one's particular side is good, all the others are bad, and the only resolution is for the good (one's own position) to win out over the bad (everything else). (Weston provides a nice account of group polarization in Practical Companion to Ethics. This is not to be confused with Cass Sunstein's different account of group polarization in Infotopia.)

Note: All of these are instances of a social psychological phenomenon called conformity. But there are other processes at work too, like group identification, self-serving biases, self-esteem enhancement, self-fulfilling prophecies, etc.

More Obstacles to Group Work

Free Riders are individuals who attempt to "ride for free" on the work of the other members of the group. Some free riders cynically pursue their selfish agenda while others fall into this pitfall because they are unable to meet all their obligations. (See conflict of effort.)

Outliers are often mistaken for free riders. Outliers want to become participants but fail to become fully integrated into the group. This could be because they are shy and need encouragement from the other group members. It could also be because the other group members know one another well and have habitual modes of interaction that exclude outsiders. One sign of outliers is that they do not participate in group social activities but they still make substantial contributions working by themselves (e.g., "No, I can't come to the meeting. Just tell me what I have to do").

Hidden Agendas: Cass Sunstein introduced this term. A group member with a hidden agenda has something to contribute but, for some reason or other, holds back. For example, this individual may have tried to contribute something in the past and been shot down by the group leader. The next time, that person might think, "Let them figure it out without me."

Conflict of Effort often causes an individual to become a free rider or an outlier. These group members have made too many commitments and come unraveled when they all come due at the same time. Students are often overly optimistic in scheduling and tightly couple work and class schedules while integrating home responsibilities. Everything goes well as long as nothing unusual happens, but if complications arise, it becomes impossible to keep the problem from affecting other areas of your schedule. Developing a schedule with periods of slack and flexibility can go a long way toward avoiding conflict of effort. Groups can deal with this by being supportive and flexible, but it is important to draw the line between being supportive and carrying a free rider.

Best Practices for Avoiding Obstacles to Group Work

  • To avoid the Abilene Paradox, use an anonymous survey at the end of the solution-generating process to ask participants if anything was left out that they were reluctant to put before group. Designate a devil's advocate charged with criticizing the group's decision. Ask participants to reaffirm group decisions (perhaps anonymously).
  • To avoid groupthink, members should be assigned "the role of critical evaluator to each member, encouraging the group to give high priority to airing objections and doubts" (Janis, 1982, p. 262–271). The leader should be impartial at the beginning, and when options are being considered, the team should divide into subgroups that meet separately. Outside experts and colleagues should be invited to meetings and "encouraged to encouraged to challenge the views of the core members" (Janis, 1982, p. 262–271).
  • To avoid polarization, set quotas for brainstorming and wait until the quota has been met before criticizing ideas. Try to frame the problem in terms of interests rather than specific positions. Negotiate or innovate to resolve conflicts based in situational constraints by pushing back those constraints.  Negotiation, whether regarding situation constraints or not, can involve one side conceeding something to the other while being compensation by a corresponding concession. Logrolling is when parties lower aspirations for a less important item in exchange for a concession from the other on something more important, whereas cost-cutting means that one party's aspirations are lowered and the corresponding cost reduction is used to compensate that party.  Bridging refers to finding a high-level point of agreement between two parties and using that to construct a solution to work toward that agreed-upon interest (Huff, Frey, & Cruz, as cited in Janis, 1982).    

Points to Consider at the End of a Project

Don't gloss over your work with generalizations like, "Our group was successful and achieved all of its ethical and practical goals this semester." Provide evidence for success claims. Detail the procedures designed by your group to bring about these results. Are they best practices? Why or why not?

Reflect on your group's activities for the semester even if difficulties arose. Schedule a meeting after the end of the semester to finalize this reflection. If things worked well, what can you do to repeat these successes in the future? If things didn't work out, what can you do to avoid similar problems in the future? Be honest, be descriptive, and avoid blame language.

Self-evaluations—group and individual—are an integral part of professional life. They are not easy to carry out, but properly done, they help to secure success and avoid future problems. Groups often have problems, so this self-evaluation exercise is designed to help you face them rather than push them aside. Look at your goals. Look at the strategies you set forth for avoiding Abilene, groupthink, and group polarization. Can you modify them to deal with problems? Do you need to design new procedures?

References

Brinat, C. A. & Wike, V. S. (2000) Morality and the Professional Life: Values at Work. Prentice Hall.

Finholt, T. & Huff, C. (Eds.), Social Issues in Computing: Putting Computing in its Place. McGraw-Hill. 130-136.

Flores, F. & Solomon, R. (2003). Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life. Huff, C. & Jawer, B. (1994). "Toward a Design Ethic for Computing Professionals." In C. Huff & T. Sunstein, C. R. (2006). Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 217-225.

Janis, I. (1982) Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (2nd ed.) Wadsworth.

Pritchard, M. (1996). Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral Learning. Kansas University Press.

Urban Walker, M. (2006). Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations After Wrongdoing. Cambridge University Press.

Weston, A. (2002). A Practical Companion to Ethics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Licenses and Attributions

Ethics of Teamwork from Business Ethics by William Frey and Jose A. Cruz-Cruz is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. © 1999-2016, Rice University. UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license. 

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