As
a psychology student, I’ve been working in a psychology lab as an RA since last
semester. All the researchers work for our project are considered as a team,
and I think we’ve been a successful team.
There
are four people work in our teams, one of us is a psychology graduate student,
who is our supervisor, and the rest are undergraduate RAs. The graduate student
is supervised by her professor. I think the structure of our team is similar to
the Simple Hierarchy structure, where the professor on the top plays the role
of the executive, and the graduate student is the manager under the executive, while
us, the undergraduate RAs, are workers under her.
In
order to organize our lab tasks, we built a task log on Google DOC, where we
can see each other’s tasks, and update our individual task status. I think the
task log does not only help us to keep the tasks organized, but also makes us
feel monitored as we updating individuals’ work status publically. This could potentially improve our
efficiency, and also saves a great amount of transaction cost on
monitoring.
Our
major tasks in the lab include participant recruitment, experiment conducting,
and data analysis. Our graduate student supervisor usually assigns tasks for us
based on her knowledge of us. For example, individuals who are good at software,
such as Excel, will have more tasks of data analysis, but she would also ask us
to train each other in the lab, so that we are not only working on what we are
good at, but also learning new skills. My job in the team was to do recruitment
and data analysis.
I
think our team is successful because we always get the tasks done with great
qualities, we have opportunities to learn from each other, and we’ve built
great relationships between team members.
There
are many factors contribute to success of our team. First we maintain good communication
between each other, secondly we are all monitoring each other , and thirdly, we
all help each other to achieve progress.
One thing you did not discuss but might have considered is you got the RA position and likewise how other members of the team got their positions. Team member selection is an important consideration for producing a cohesive team.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing you might have addressed is whether mistakes are ever made and what happens in that case. You did say you are learning new skills. We've discussed briefly in class that learning and failure are pair. At issue is how much autonomy the undergraduate RAs have versus whether the graduate student interceded when something is not right. Managing that sort of thing is an art. There is no right way to do it.
One other thing I wonder about in what you wrote is whether there is some seniority differences among the undergraduates, which would create a bit more hierarchy than you indicated. The faculty member is doing this sort of research in an ongoing manner. When your cohort of undergraduates RAs has left the university there will be a different cohort that has replaced them. (And ultimately a different graduate students as well.) How is that future replacement reflected in the structure of your current team? It would be good to explain that some, if possible.
Hello Prof Arvan,
DeleteI do think that the selection of team is an important consideration. Actually I think it was competitive for me, because there were over 10 applicants, but the lab just wanted one undergraduate student to replace the one of the RA cohort who left the university. So as a new RA, I did experience some seniority differences among undergraduates. There was a girl who'd worked in our lab for 2 years, and she acted like a leader of us, too, but I liked it because she was being friendly and tutorial.
You've also mentioned mistakes, and I do agree that failure and learning are pair, but I do not think any of us experienced major mistakes.I think it is because as undergraduate RAs, most of our tasks are rather basic.