Team Contracts and Group Projects

A Team Contract is a "document prepared by each team prior to starting work on group projects. Students should be held accountable and responsible for their own actions. Students will develop their. own "rules of engagement" through development of a Team Contract." (gatech, 2017) In a few of my classes we have had to do these and it was a waste of time for these classes. As a group we came up with this contract which took about 3 hours total for one of the classes and it basically had generic stuff that we had to do as individuals in the group. In theory this sounds good like everyone should do this but in actuality nothing would have been different if we did not do them. All our assignments still would have gotten done at the same level of performance that we did them with the contract. This is because of a few reasons. The first reason was because there was an evaluation at the end of the class for your peers so if someone did not keep up with what they should have been we would have went to town on them in the performance eval at the end of the semester. The other reason is specifically related to our group. We were all pretty good students who genuinely would feel bad if we were not contributing equally to a project as everyone else. This has been the theme for almost all my group projects and in the Paul college almost every class is made up of group projects. When it comes t group projects I have never been a fan of them. I personally like things done a specific way unless its a boss telling me they would like it a different way. This has always made it hard for me to be supportive about other members ideas and decisions. In some group projects I have found myself doing more work then I should only because I know that the stuff I might produce would be better quality then my group members. This is not always the case but it has happened quite often where group members just do not know how to do something so I take it over out of the fear that they might not do as well. Overall I understand that group projects are meant to represent the real world and that most organizations require groups for projects. This being said once its your job it makes it much easier because most the people there are competent and have proved worthy of receiving the position the are in.