Group Projects Are Hard in Every Time Zone

I've gotten used to school. A little. Okay, a very little.

I've only taken three courses so far, but one thing has been on my mind in an interesting way, so I figured I'd write it down.

The 12-hour reply

Some of my courses come with group assignments. Teams are mixed across countries, which turns everything into a negotiation: time zones, schedules, even how each person likes to study. Group projects are hard. Always have been. Turns out an ocean in between doesn't fix that.

So I set myself one rule. It's my education anyway, so I'd rather just value the fact that we're all showing up and doing this together.

If someone trolls, or doesn't participate, I don't lose much sleep over it. It's my learning. If I do more, I learn more. That's pretty much the whole philosophy.

And yes, I know the leadership textbook answer. Pull people in, drive engagement, keep the team moving. But when I've never seen these people's faces and a single back-and-forth takes at least 12 hours, my realistic options are waiting for a reply. And then waiting some more. Deciding someone is a bad teammate because they went quiet for a day just feels wrong. We're students, we have jobs, we're adults. Everyone has something going on. So I factor all that in and try to keep things friendly.

The East splits up. The West sits down.

After a few rounds of this, I started noticing a pattern. Not a race thing, to be clear. More of a where-you-grew-up thing.

Students from Asian countries, me included, start with the goal. We need to solve assignment A? Great. You take A', you take A'', everyone goes off and works, then we merge it and submit. Very goal-driven. The whole instinct is to divide the work so it gets done as fast, as efficiently, and as painlessly as possible.

(Yes, this is my own narrow slice of experience. I know it doesn't apply to everyone.)

My Western teammates move differently. Hand them a problem and the first reaction is: "Let's get together and talk about it!"

Every single time, my reaction was: huh?

Shouldn't we figure out who does what, do it, and then talk? Isn't a meeting with no agenda just... a meeting? I honestly thought it was inefficient.

But after watching the same pattern play out a few times, it started to make sense. The Asian side of the team splits up to hit the goal. The Western side talks it out to generate ideas. One side optimizes for getting it done. The other puts more weight on the conversation itself.

If I had to put it in Korean terms, it's the "whatever, let's just meet up and talk" energy.

So I looked it up

Out of curiosity, I went digging. There's more research on this than I expected.

My favorite is a 2002 study by Heejung Kim, a Korean-born psychologist now at UC Santa Barbara. The title alone is great: "We talk, therefore we think?" She had Asian American and European American participants solve reasoning problems while thinking out loud. Talking hurt the Asian Americans' performance. It didn't affect the European Americans at all. Her argument is that the tight link between talking and thinking is a Western assumption, and not one that's necessarily shared in the East.

I'm not going to lie, that one stung a little. Maybe the reason "just talking" felt inefficient to me is that thinking out loud isn't how I think. For my Western teammates, the chatty meeting was the thinking.

That doesn't make "always meet first" the winner, though. In a 1987 study, Diehl and Stroebe found that people brainstorming together as a group came up with fewer ideas than the same number of people brainstorming alone and pooling the results. The main culprit was production blocking: while one person talks, everyone else is stuck waiting for their turn. So my "isn't this inefficient?" wasn't totally off either. I'll take the small win.

Then there's a study that basically describes my situation. Maznevski and Chudoba (2000) followed three global virtual teams for 21 months. The effective ones ran on a rhythm: regular, deep face-to-face meetings, with shorter remote check-ins in between. Not all talk. Not all split-up. The rhythm between the two is what made it work.

Not better or worse. Just a different angle.

When I think about the social and cultural context, it kind of clicks. This is just my impression, but East Asian societies have often been about running hard toward a result through work and output, while Western ones have often opened new markets through conversation, debate, and the odd ideas that come out of both. Historically and culturally.

The point isn't which way is good and which is bad. It's a difference in perspective. Watching a team with no set agenda talk its way into solving a problem, sometimes landing on a better idea than the one we started with, genuinely stretched the way I think.

I had no idea about any of this back in Korea. Different countries, different cultures, completely different ways of looking at the same problem. Fascinating.

But fascinating is fascinating. Group projects are still hard.

To my past team and my current one: thank you, really. Next time, I might even be the one saying "Should we just hop on a call first?"

Maybe.

References

• Kim, H. S. (2002). We talk, therefore we think? A cultural analysis of the effect of talking on thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4), 828–842.

• Diehl, M., & Stroebe, W. (1987). Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: Toward the solution of a riddle. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497–509.

• Maznevski, M. L., & Chudoba, K. M. (2000). Bridging space over time: Global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness. Organization Science, 11(5), 473–492.