If a group of people is locked in a remote place, they will start to have tribal dynamics, which means very complex social relation and fight for higher status within this tribe.
This will happen against their conscious will. I never have been in the EA hotel, but I was in other similar small groups of single minded and positive people, and they all typically ended with internal conflicts, which affected my productivity and didn’t contribute to the cause.
What are you doing to prevent such social dynamics?
My impression is that many similar projects are share houses or other flat hierarchies. IMO a big advantage of the model here is a top-down approach, where the trustees/manager view it as a major part of our job to limit and mitigate interpersonal conflicts, zero sum status games etc.
I’m not sure I buy the premise here. I agree that tribal dynamics exist, but I don’t think these all necessarily lead to negative group dynamics. I’ve certainly been in toxic environments where these do exist, but City Year had tribal dynamics that were mostly healthy and led to the correct incentives where the people doing the most good had the highest status, and the way to gain higher status was to do more good. I think the EA hotel (as I detailed in the above post) has generally trended towards a healthy culture.
Tribal dynamic is evolutionary built to increase the productivity of the group, and the group as whole may act great, despite, say, bulling of just a few members. My personality traits increase my chance to be in such situation more often, and I am sharing my experience with groups.
I haven’t really seen any bullying behavior in the way you’re talking about at my time here, and I don’t see any indication that it will evolve in that way, if that helps.
If a group of people is locked in a remote place, they will start to have tribal dynamics, which means very complex social relation and fight for higher status within this tribe.
This will happen against their conscious will. I never have been in the EA hotel, but I was in other similar small groups of single minded and positive people, and they all typically ended with internal conflicts, which affected my productivity and didn’t contribute to the cause.
What are you doing to prevent such social dynamics?
My impression is that many similar projects are share houses or other flat hierarchies. IMO a big advantage of the model here is a top-down approach, where the trustees/manager view it as a major part of our job to limit and mitigate interpersonal conflicts, zero sum status games etc.
I’m not sure I buy the premise here. I agree that tribal dynamics exist, but I don’t think these all necessarily lead to negative group dynamics. I’ve certainly been in toxic environments where these do exist, but City Year had tribal dynamics that were mostly healthy and led to the correct incentives where the people doing the most good had the highest status, and the way to gain higher status was to do more good. I think the EA hotel (as I detailed in the above post) has generally trended towards a healthy culture.
Tribal dynamic is evolutionary built to increase the productivity of the group, and the group as whole may act great, despite, say, bulling of just a few members. My personality traits increase my chance to be in such situation more often, and I am sharing my experience with groups.
I haven’t really seen any bullying behavior in the way you’re talking about at my time here, and I don’t see any indication that it will evolve in that way, if that helps.