Thursday, March 8, 2012
Week 6, Post #3
When doing the reading for this week the concept of cooperation really seemed to resonate with me. Cooperation is essential in interpersonal communication and can benefit most everyone in their daily life. “ Cooperation means working together rather than against one another” (pg.110) This central idea discourages competition and encourages working together and engaging in honest communication. From my experience cooperation increases levels of trust, openness and collaboration. Specifically, in personal relationships cooperation leads to more of a happy median, versus a “ win-lose situation.” When this approach is taken in situations it allows people to focus more on their similarities, and less on their differences. An example of when cooperation helped the situation is when I was placed in a group with a classmate that I had worked with before and had a negative experience with. When we were placed in the same group for a second time we were both cooperative, which allowed us to work together producing a result that mutually satisfied both parties.
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I agree with you that “Cooperation is essential in interpersonal communication and can benefit most everyone in their daily life.” I’m wondering what was different this time when you were placed in a group with a person with whom you had previously had a negative experience while working in a group.
ReplyDeleteYou inferred that you had been willing to cooperate last time, but not the other person. Did the other person feel more like competing rather than cooperating last time? Or did he or she just not keep up with his or her part of the work?
The authors of our book write, “Cooperation is a situation in which we place greater emphasis on the quality of an interpersonal relationship than on the outcome.” So in order to have a win-win situation and a mutually satisfactory result, you both needed to value and work on an interpersonal relationship. This time, did he or she see that it would be a win-win situation if they cooperated? Or did you have a discussion with them that led to their changed behavior?
Regardless, we have to have cooperation with one another when we are communicating. If we dont, miscommunication will occur and lead to conflict. I think that with anything we don in life with another person, we have to have cooperation with each other because we miss so much if all that happens is arguments. Cooperation does lead to a happy medium because if we cooperate effectively with communication, that both parties are satisfied in the end. Cooperation is key to successful relationships as well. If relationships refuse the idea of cooperation then there will never be an ending to an ongoing problem
ReplyDeleteCooperation is definitely necessary in interpersonal relationships. Without cooperation, people would not be able to work together to resolve conflict. People are always going to have their own thoughts and ideas that do not match up with the people they have a relationship with. Very rarely will you share the same exact idea/thought as someone else. Because of this, people must be willing to cooperate with others to accomplish even the simplest things. At my job we have to solve problems on a daily basis. Being that there are four of us, we often have very different opinions on how things should be done. Rather than work against each other, we work together to come up with a solution that will work best for the store.
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