Summary

This approach is for use in anticipation of a short to medium term project in which students are to work together in a team. It affords the team the opportunity to identify and agree to a set of ground rules in the form of a social contract which they will all respect in order to facilitate optimal teamworking and consideration of one another’s wellbeing.

How it works

1. Tutor: baseline insight and understanding of the literature on collaborating teams, creativity and team performance, team dynamics, emotional intelligence and social contracts.
2. Class: Reflection on prior experience: facilitate some reflection on previous teamwork experience – what went well? What didn’t go so well? What could have been done differently?
3. Introduce the social contract as a tool to enhance the teamwork process in this particular context and an opportunity to implement some of these solutions in practice. If applicable refer to evidence and literature which identifies the characteristics of optimal team performance and benefits of implementing a social contract.
4. Supply a template contract and suggest possible areas for consideration (see examples below).
5. Underline the need for consensual decision-making – all team members must agree to all the ground rules.
6. Suggest the team use their first meeting together to agree the contract along the following lines:

• Invite each team member write an expected behaviour on a post-it note/appropriate online tool e.g. Miro.
• Continue until all contributions have been exhausted.
• Group contributions by theme and remove any duplications.
• Discuss each contribution and seek clarification if necessary.
• Agree as a team which behaviours and guidelines to which team members would like to hold themselves and others accountable.
• Address how impasses, conflict, non-compliance and dissatisfaction will be dealt with.
• Encourage teams to save the contract where it is accessible to all team members and revisit it regularly and if they are encountering difficulties or compliance is lapsing.
• At the end of the project facilitate reflection on the benefits/disadvantages of the social contract.

In terms of module design there is also an opportunity to build learning from teamworking and implementing a social contract into the learning outcomes mapped to a final piece of reflective work. In such an assessment, students might be encouraged to reflect on their experience of working as a member of a team and evaluate the effectiveness of the social contract in relation to their experience of working together.

Practical Example

I lead a consultancy module in which PG student teams work on live project briefs set by client organisations in the creative and media industries.

In the first session, in addition to assigning teams to projects, we explore the process of forming as a project team. This includes a reflective element as noted above in which students are encouraged to reflect on their prior experience of teamwork. As one of the assessments is a reflective essay about their learning from working as a member of a creative project team, I deliberately afford the teams as much autonomy around their team process as possible whilst also aiming to create a supportive learning environment. Therefore, I do not make the use of a social contract mandatory but provide and explore tools and techniques to enable the students to optimise their team’s performance – the social contract is one such tool which I strongly recommend but, in this case, it’s the students’ decision whether or not to employ it. Prescribing the use of a social contract as a condition of teamworking may be more appropriate in other contexts.

Areas for the team to consider:

• Respect
• Trust that others will do their work
• Accountability
• Direct communication
• How to address conflicts before they become destructive
• How to create the space and conditions necessary for all team members to participate and have input
• Time management

It might be useful to think of this in regard to time, process, behaviour, roles and resolution:

Temporal

e.g. All members will be punctual. Meetings will start 5 minutes after the agreed time and everyone needs to be present and prepared by then.

Procedural

e.g. We should attend all meetings unless there are unavoidable circumstances such as illness.

Behavioural

e.g. All members agree to come prepared to meetings by reading and keeping up to date with information and with ideas relating to tasks and decisions to be made.

Roles

e.g. Roles will be assigned prior to a meeting or, if this is not possible, at the beginning of a meeting. Roles will rotate each meeting.

Resolution

Step 1: The group members will isolate areas of disagreement, and the group will.

Additional Information

There are many template team contracts available but the critical point is that the team decide what is important to them:

Individual Perspective

Teams who have followed the guidance to employ a social contract have reported experiencing a greater degree of mutual support, ‘team spirit’, commitment to the work and clearer sense of purpose when working together. They have also noted how they have felt more confident in reminding others of what was agreed and reinforcing positive behaviours when challenges arise. Teams who focus on process as well as task completion consistently out-perform those who are solely task driven in their approach. They show greater resilience in overcoming obstacles, managing conflict, and are able to synthesise their collective endeavours into a more unified final outcome. I believe supporting teams to attend to process as well as product in this way can facilitate a transformative rather than traumatic teamwork experience.

Student Feedback

This section contains quotes and comments made by students during the interview stages of the project. After gathering pedagogies such as this one, we described them to a pair of peers and asked them to reflect on the efficacy, potential and impact whereby they produced these comments:

• "This is a great example of incorporating the student voice, allowing students to be held accountable for their actions. I remember a teacher employing a similar technique and it was beneficial for the group, as it positively contributed the atmosphere of the class and relationship between myself and the tutor. I could really tell the difference, it definitely felt like a more comfortable space for learning and discussion."

Additional Resources

Illustrative bibliography on team dynamics, reflective practice and optimising collaborative and creative team performance:

• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 191–215.
• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.
• Baron, R. S., & Kerr, N. L. (2003): Group Process, Group Decision, Group Action. (OUP: Buckingham).
• Barczak, G. et. al (2010) Antecedents of Team Creativity: An Examination of Team Emotional
 Intelligence, Team Trust and Collaborative Culture. Creativity and Innovation Management Volume 19, Issue 4, pp.332-345
• Bertcher, H. (1994): Group Participation: Techniques for Leaders and Members (Sage: London)
• Born P. (2012) Community Conversations (BPS Books: Toronto & New York)
• Boud, D., Keogh, R., Walker D., (1985): Turning Experience into Learning (Kogan Page: London)
• Brandler, S. & Roman, C. (2015) Group Work: Skills and Strategies for Effective Interventions (Routledge)
• Brookfield, Stephen (1987): Developing Critical Thinkers: Challenging Adults to Explore Alternative Ways of Thinking and Acting (Open University Press: Buckingham
• Brookfield, S. (1987): Developing Critical Thinking (SRHE/OUP: Milton Keynes)
• Conye, Robert K. (1999): Failures in Group Work - How We Can Learn from Our Mistakes (California, London: SAGE Publications)
• Curşeu, P.L., & Schruijer, S.L. (2010): Does conflict shatter trust or does trust obliterate conflict? Revisiting the relationships between team diversity, conflict, and trust. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 14(1), pp. 66–79
• Drach-Zahavy, A., & Somech, A. (2001): Understanding team innovation: The role of team processes and structures. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5 (2), pp. 111–123
• Farh, J., Lee, C., & Farh, C.C. (2010): Task conflict and team creativity: A question of how much and when. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(6) pp.1173–1180
• Griffith, B. A., & Dunham, E. B. (2014). Working in teams: Moving from high potential to high performance. Sage Publications.
• Harvey, S. (2014). Creative synthesis: Exploring the process of extraordinary group creativity. The Academy of Management Review, 39(3) pp. 324–343
• Hesterman, S. (2016). The digital handshake: A group contract for authentic eLearning in higher education. Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice, 13(3), 1-24.
• Johns, C. (2004): Becoming a Reflective Practitioner (2nd ed.) (Blackwell Publishing: Oxford)
• Johns, C. (2006) Engaging Reflection in Practice: A narrative approach (Blackwell Publishing: Oxford)
• Katzenbach, J.R., Smith, D.K. (1993). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high performance organization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
• Kozlowski, S. W. J. and Ilgen, D. R. (2006) ‘Enhancing the Effectiveness of Work Groups and Teams’, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 7(3), pp. 77–124.
• Kolb, D. (1984): Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Prentice Hall: New Jersey)
• Mackay, A. (2016) Motivation, Ability and Confidence Building in People (Routledge: London)
• McCrimmon, Mitch (1995): ‘Teams without roles: empowering teams for greater creativity’ in Journal of Management Development, Vol. 14 no. 6, pp. 35 – 41
• Moon, J. (2004): A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning (Routledge: Falmer, London)
• Moon, J. (2006) Second Edition: Learning Journals: A handbook for academics, students and professional development (Routledge: London)
• Moon, J. (2013) Reflection in Learning and Professional Development: Theory and Practice (Taylor Francis) (e-book)
• Oakley, Barbara, Rebecca Brent, Richard Felder, and Imad Elhajj (2004), ‘Turning Students Groups into Effective Teams’, Journal of Student Centered Learning, 2(1), 11.
• Paulus. P. (2000): Groups, teams and creativity: the creative potential of idea-generating groups Applied Psychology: An International Review 49 (2) pp. 237 – 262
• Riordan, Christine M., and Kevin, O’Brien (2012), ‘For Great Teamwork, Start with a Social Contract’, Harvard Business Review (April 17).
• Schon, D., (1983): The Reflective Practitioner (Jossey-Bass: San Francisco)
• Thompson, L., (2003): ‘Improving the creativity of organizational work groups’ in Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 17 no. 1 (2003), pp. 96 – 109
• Thompson, L (2004): Making the Team: a guide for managers (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall)
• Tuckman, B. W. (2001): Developmental Sequence in Small Groups'. Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal pp. 66-79.
• Van Lange, P.A.M. , Joireman, J. , Parks, C.D. and Van Dijk, E. (2013b), “The psychology of social dilemmas: a review”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes., Vol. 120 No. 2, pp. 125-141.
• Vermette, P. & Kline, C. (2017) Group Work that Works: Student Collaboration for 21st Century Success (Routledge)
• Eldridge, E. (2012). TED Talks: Why Collaboration is an Individual Effort. TED * University of Missouri. 21 April, 2012. Available at https://ru-clip.com/video/DmGn2X9SETk/why-collaboration-is-an-individual-effort- emily-eldridge-at-tedxmu.html