Bapa Bafa Experiment: Concrete Experience

Bafa Bafa Experiment Concrete Experience For the “Bafa Bafa” experiment done in class, our room was divided into two separate groups. The one’s who relocated outside were deemed the “Alphas”, the ones in the classroom were named the “Betas”. I was part of the Alpha group, and each member of our group had to follow a certain set of rules applied to us. Guidelines such as “Women are deemed the males of the group’s property” made it seem like a more of an old fashion type of society to me. Each female member of the group was not allowed to approach, or even talk to a male member unless they were talked to first. As a male, I was obviously a lot more acceptable of this rule than the female members, but it made me realize our culture had a very …show more content…
The group focus of the Alpha culture left the biggest imprint on me. This applied to a work situation would increase an employee’s loyalty to his/her company. Also if I was to focus more on the relationships I share with members of my group, we could work more effectively as a unit and not compete against one another. By implementing this theory on a group, a manager could bring together a large form of collectiveness. Something our group did that I feel was not beneficial towards our society, was the large power distance among the society. Making the female members know they were inferior to all other members would be a real confidence killer, and a big distraction at the work place. Making every employee feel that they’re important would increase compatibility along with production. With an increase in compatibility and production, efficiency would also benefit. But like the Alpha group, making one employee or group of employees would definitely hinder their production and performance. A manager, who could be comparable to the patriarch, should definitely avoid this at the workplace. An example in the work place would be assigning a group to a project. Instead of each employee trying to one up another to gain an advantage, they’d work together and focus on the company as a whole. This is similar to the Alpha trying being collective, and not trying attain profit in any way. The Alpha …show more content…
Low Context. This is the difference in speaking styles, the way one communicates to a group, and how that communication is received. A high-context culture can perceive more information from a simple set of an instructions, while a low-context culture will need more vivid details as they can’t derive a lot of info from the instructions. I think me and the whole class would be considered a low-context culture at first, because we were only following the instructions to the extent of what they said. None of us thought more of them, or perceived more than what was said. This changed more and more over the experiment as we were coming up with ridiculous ways to score more points in the end, with our whole class ultimately becoming a high-context culture. Performance Orientation also took a big role in this experiment. We were more focused on our group and to receive the most points. This drove the experiment to be more competitive. The third concept Humane Orientation, is the scale on how generous and helping people are to others. When there is low humane orientation, people are concerned more about themselves than others. This was apparent when towards the end of the experiment. Groups would take as much time they possibly could to receive the most points possible. This may lead back to Performance Orientation some, but I observed teams disobeying time limits and not caring that other groups still had to go