Group Dynamics in University Housing


In late October 2016, I was hired on by University Housing to become a Residential Advisor (RA), to replace someone who had been removed from the position around a month prior. To briefly explain the organizational structure of Housing staff, an individual RA works with a staff of around ten other RAs, in my case eleven, a ‘Multicultural Advocate’ (MA), under a direct supervisor, the Resident Director (RD), who reports to further levels of upper management.

The staff of each hall arrive up to three weeks before the academic year officially starts to undergo training and in the process do a lot of team building exercises. As a result of being the only people on campus at the time, most staffs grow relatively close with one another and, as is stated in Boleman and Deal chapter eight, work out an organizational hierarchy that is right for them. People who are content to lead, lead, those who wish to fade into the background, fade. As a mid-semester hire (which is very rare, most replacements are put in at the semester break, which may have added to some confusion), I was thrust in outside of this pre-determined hierarchy, and it took some time to find my place.

Usually, I tend to be a very outspoken, lead-from-the-front type of person, I feel perfectly content challenging norms and structures that aren’t particularly efficient or that exist at odds with how I envision them. So, when entering this structure, I probably overstepped my bounds to some extent. I’ll recount one anecdote to accentuate this point: arriving in late October, my first few weeks on the job were decidedly embroiled in election season hysteria. University  Housing takes a decidedly left-leaning stance on most every issue, and places a heavy focus on Social Justice issues. Without going into too much detail, I do not. So, when our weekly Wednesday staff meeting on November 9th was replaced by a post-election ‘group healing’ session by Housing high command, I was somewhat flabbergasted. I really don’t like to mix politics and work at all, and I was surrounded by people for whom that was not a problem, who were also in a somewhat volatile emotional state. Much of that night consisted of voices angrily decrying a problem I didn’t see, and as I’ve learned to do at University, I was contented to shrink back and let the tide blow over; however, certain sections had enforced participation, and not wanting to lie, I let my true inclinations be known: that I thought this was a waste of my time, and that people were dangerously overreacting.

I also pointed out that if we wanted to serve our whole residential community, we couldn’t just write off whatever portion of that population that was happy with the results of the election, which most members of my staff were very willing to do. In hindsight, I made a fundamental error here: I challenged the status quo and wasn’t even particularly eloquent about it. I received a few formal complaints from at least the MA and another RA, and for a while I think I was on rocky terrain. I had to spend a lot of my 1:1 supervisor sessions working through these complaints instead of actually training for my job, and I think my relationship with a lot of my staff last year was permanently underdeveloped as a result of those first few weeks. While the situation never really boiled over, I learned to keep my mouth shut and fade into the background when people were discussing politicized events during work time, which, unfortunately is all too often. I wish I could say there was a happy ending or a consensus reached, but the reality is that as an employee challenging the system wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I took the least offensive role I could within it.

From my own perspective, I don’t really think I did anything outlandish or particularly ill-intentioned, but evidently that was not the case to my fellow staff members. Whether they saw my actions as a challenge to the balance they had made with one another, and didn’t feel like accommodating, or whether I had just struck a nerve, I don’t think I’ll ever know. From my supervisor’s perspective, she probably would have rather had me do my formal training than work on interpersonal staff grievances.  

Were I to time travel back and be a part of this situation again, I would probably have simply “strategically misrepresented my interests” during the forced participation, taken an inoffensive stance, and then stayed quiet. In the long run, it would’ve helped my group dynamic with my staff, allowed me to get better training and become a more efficient employee, and thus be a better member of the team. I don’t know if that’s entirely possible, I think that this conflict was probably always inevitable, an unfortunate side effect of bringing politics into the workplace is that people are going to differ on it, and in this day and age that is becoming an increasingly unhealthy thing.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanNovember 10, 2017 at 3:02 PM

    Yours is the first post I've read that takes a real world situation that you experienced rather than write about a movie or TV show. Thank you for doing that. I think the real experiences provide better lessons and since so far I've seen none of the movies and TV shows that other students wrote about, it is harder for me to connect with that. On the other hand, I want to mildly scold you for exaggerating when it was unnecessary to do so - second paragraph second sentence - the only people on campus at the time - that's not true. I understand wanting to be fluid in the writing and I believe I got your intended meaning from that sentence, but you should strive for accuracy. It will improve the writing overall.

    Now, as to telling the story itself, there is a mystery to me in reading this, which is how you got the job and what were the circumstances that led this to happen. I gather it was unusual. But I could still use more background to understand things. So I will speculate here and you can correct this part since I sure it will be erroneous. (But absent hard information, that is what people do, n'est-pas?) So, for starters, some RA screwed up and they had to can him. They needed a replacement, to be found then and there. You were an upper class student living in the dorm, so you became a candidate for this reason. You hadn't thought to become an RA until then, but they said they'd pay your room and board, so you decided it was a good deal. Had you gone through normal channels to become an RA, the political differences you mention, starting in paragraph three, might have blocked you from getting the job. Under the circumstances, those differences didn't come up till after you became an RA.

    Now, I just made that up, so I'm sure it is wrong in many ways. But if it were entirely true, it would then explain many of the things you say that follow. My point here is not my explanation. The point is there needs to be some explanation so the story makes sense. As it is, things seemed kind of disjointed when reading this.

    Now, a different reaction to your story. In class on Thursday you may have noticed I tried to frame things as if you are managers in training. So how should you have considered the situation if it was somebody else just like you going through the experience but you were there in the capacity of a manger?

    My view on these things is that you can can have political disagreements with people whom you already know reasonably well and whom you've bonded with to some extent. There is then a solid foundation already. I wrote a blog post about this earlier in the year that you might find interesting to read. It's called <a href="http://lanny-on-learn-tech.blogspot.com/2017/03/on-learning-to-argue-with-people-where.html>On learning to argue with people where we disagree - what's possible and what isn't.</a> If many of the other people in the room were essentially strangers to you at the time of that meeting, I would encouraged you to bite your lip and not chime in. However, whoever did hire you to be an RA bears some responsibility here. The situation does seem quite unfair to you.

    You come to much the same conclusion in the last paragraph, but I want to note that if you did have a better rapport with the people, then some discussion of politics might be helpful and useful - people sharpen their thinking when they are not preaching to the choir. However, as you note, it is a very emotionally volatile time at present, so I for one would one do this in one-on-one conversation with somebody I know already. I would not do it in a larger group. The downside risk is larger than and the ability to get the genie back in the bottle is far less.

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    Replies
    1. Professor ArvanNovember 10, 2017 at 3:04 PM

      Sorry that I screwed up the link. I hope it works here.

      Delete
    2. Alan Kreuger Econ 490 Fall 2017November 12, 2017 at 12:11 PM

      To somewhat elaborate on your point of confusion: I had actually applied to become an RA the previous year, was not hired, but they kept me on reserve as an 'alternate.' However, without informing the new hires nor the alternates, they completely changed the job description over that summer from one based around programming activities to one around becoming a pseudo-educator in four facets of University life, one of which is entitled "social justice exploration," which is, in my view, outside of the core mission of Housing, and it's what I take issue towards.

      As for your post on learning to argue with peers, I've largely come to the same conclusion. Friends with similar interests are usually able to look past differences in ideology in favor of the shared common experience. In fact, most are more than willing to sit down and hash out their worldview with you, feeling secure enough to do so without reprimand. People want to learn from one another, and while consensus is easy in an echo chamber, the echo chamber across the hall is building an entirely different one.

      What I will say is a slight deviation, in my own thinking, is that I do believe that in today's society, it's more difficult to reach that state of comfort. I think people are naturally more inclined to focus on the difference rather than the similarity, thus making those tete-a-tetes a little fewer and further between

      Delete
  2. Susan Athey Econ 490 fall 2017November 13, 2017 at 3:03 PM

    Your post highlights an unfortunate reality of our present times. People love the idea of encouraging diverse opinions, in large part because of the accepting image it creates for themselves, but in actuality they struggle to hear opinions that differ too much from their own. Especially on sensitive topics like politics or religion, if people are unprepared for a polar viewpoint to arise, they react with criticism and, too often, hostility. What’s saddest in these responses is that as soon as you take a defensive stance, you shut yourself off to learning something new. Even if you are firm in your beliefs, there is still something to be gained from understanding why it is that someone else believes what they do. How did they come to see the issue that way? What experiences shaped that belief?

    I say ‘they’ when really, I should be saying ‘we’, because I think this is something we are all guilty of from time to time. I agree with Professor Arvan that the situation you were put in seemed unfair. There are times when we have all chosen to bite our tongue rather than risk an uncomfortable confrontation. By forcing your participation in the group setting, you were stripped of the passive yet peaceful option. Your remaining choices were to misrepresent your beliefs or be honest and face the consequences. I believe you chose the lesser of two evils, as honesty with brutality beats a lie.

    Regardless, your supervisor should have anticipated that, in a diverse group of individuals, not everyone would bare the same beliefs or react in the same way. He should have been prepared to handle the situation in a way that might have dissipated some of the tension; even if it would have been a cheesy line about ‘how nice it is that we all have different opinions and that’s okay.’ After all, that seems to fit within the responsibilities of a good leader. As you noted in your post, you were also speaking up to point out that there was a significant portion of the population that might have a different emotional response to the election. Your role as an RA clearly involved interactions with both types of people. It’s interesting to imagine that, had your colleagues reacted to a resident in the same hostile manner they responded to you, your MA presumably would have had a different response. Perhaps you can be thanked for priming their responses and clearing their initial negative reactions from the air before this could have happened.

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