Our Team at a Hackathon

The themes of these posts do tie into other posts. In my first post, I had talked about my experience at a company with a decentralized organizational structure, and the productivity problems I observed due to the relaxed management style. I could have talked about the same story, but more about opportunism in the work place. In that post, I had mentioned that employees in that company were using clocked hours for entertainment like playing pool, which ties to opportunistic behavior -- they were not clocking in hours completely truthfully because of their own needs to relax and they sacrificed the productive work they might have been able to finish if they worked instead. This makes me wonder that, do the transaction costs of decentralization and installing the entertainment-related equipments help with productivity because they allow the employees to be happier and more self-motivated, or do the transaction costs lower productivity because the employees are more prone to act opportunistically? Could there be a simplified economic model where transaction cost of decentralization and equipment is on the x axis, and the productivity (however quantified) on the y? Would it resemble a bell curve? How does an organization determine the sweet spot on top of the bell curve? 

In my second post, I had used some stories that my mother told me about opportunistic employees she had encountered over the past few decades. In that post, I focused on talking about employees working extra diligently around the yearly performance review, and how some would talk badly about others to get an upper hand on these reviews. The same situation could be talked about in an organizational structure point of view. My mother's company has a low and flat organizational structure where they are not many layers -- which causes a high level of ambiguity in employees' job descriptions. The reason why I mentioned that is because if they have had a more tall and narrow organizational structure, where employees talking badly about other employees directly to the CEO would occur a lot less. In general, opportunistic behavior would occur a lot less if channels of communications were less interconnected, because employees might take advantage of that. Or, would it also have a bell-curve like pattern where organizations have to obtain an optimal spot for how wide-and-low or narrow-and-tall the structure is to minimize opportunistic behavior.

In my third post, I talked about my experience with a smaller team and how efficient we were in achieving our goal. We were great at distributing work and staying on task despite the time constraint we had and how small our team was. On the other hand, I could have talked about our success in terms of our high levels productivity and self-motivation, which ties back to opportunism, or lack thereof. To keep the members of a team from doing opportunistic things, the most direct way is making sure that everyone do share a common goal.

The process of writing these posts for me had been reading the prompts early on, and thinking about it when I was free, and finally organizing my thoughts into a post by the end of the week. I feel like I could have done that differently because I do not always remember everything. Instead, I think writing some of these ideas down onto my notes on my iPhone would help me retain these ideas more.

If I could write my own prompt, I think I would not change it too much. I like the open ended style questions because it really fosters thought and allows us to apply these things into real life. Exams are more straight forward but I find myself forgetting about the concepts as soon as the exams are over.