Hitchhikers And Coach Potatoes On Teams: Article Analysis

The article is taken from “Journal of Student Center Learning” and its title is “ Coping with Hitchhikers and Coach Potatoes on Teams”. It discusses people’s different personality that you may encounter with in the university, work field and even in the life as friend or relatives. In general, people have different personal characteristics that you need to deal with when you work in team, group project..etc..The purpose that the author is trying to explain is the importance of working and communicating effectively to achieve certain assigned tasks regardless of your variable personal characteristics. The intended audience of this article is college students and the author explained about his/her targeted group in the first paragraph of the …show more content…
This group consist of four students members, tow of them has really difficult personal characteristic that makes the group unable to deal with them appropriately. According to the author, the hitchhikers and coach potatoes are kind of people that you need to take an action toward theme especially if they are memebers of your project group. The hitchhikers( jack) is always count on others to do his work and he uses the group for his own interests. While the coach potatoes (Henry) is not putting much effort to work with the team and get the job done. Both of them are burden on the group’s members. In this part (second paragraph), the author is objectively explaining why he /she puts the blame on the group. In other words, the grope is “absorber”, from the very beginning because they absorbed jack’s problems and they did take actions towards his appropriate actions. However, the author gives suggestions of what the group should have done to avoid the unwanted behavior of the hitchhikers and coach potatoes. The solutions that are drawing in this article are simple and applicable. The groups should have mirroring or reflecting back dysfunctional behavior of both the hitchhiker and coach potatoes in order to let them take the responsibility of their own actions and not the other group members. To solve the problem the author gives the common characteristic of the groups that may allow the hitchhiker to take advantages for the group. One of the most important characteristics is the tendency to feel responsible of others and doing their works. At the end of the article the author concluded that those both persons “ hitchhikers and coach potatoes” could be any one in your personal or professional career. Therefore you have to take an action and apply the techniques that he/ she suggested in the