Marshmallow challenge!

Describe the different personalities and communication styles of people in your team.How did people work together? What helped or hindered collaboration?

    In our team, almost the German classmate builded the  structure. At first, I need to the member structure of our team. We have 5 member, 3 coming from west,frankly communicati

ng with English, 2 coming from east, a Japanese girl and me. And both of us are not good at English. It means 2 of us have the problem of communicate with other member, that’s why we didn’t say a lot when talked about how to build the tower, but luckily there is  a English guy speaking Japanese smoothly. In the discussion, both of us talked few words. Other member, who use direct communication style, were very active and asked our ideas often.At the end, even we had different communication styles, but seems we had a same goal, so we helped each other and finished our challenge.

Member1: American female;direct communication style;expressive emotional communication style

Member2:German male;direct communication style;expressive emotional communication style

Member3:England male;direct communication style;expressive emotional communication style

Member4:Japanese female;indirect communication style;restrained emotional communication style

Member5:Chinese female;indirect communication style;restrained emotional communication style

     In my mind, it is the language and background cultural  that hindered collaboration. I think both of east people are using restrained emotional communication style, because of afraid of making mistakes in using English. As we all known, Japanese has a cultural about avoiding embarrassed theirselves, and a lot of Chinese people are afraid of losing face.  Although they asked our ideas, we just hesitated and answered few words. It waste too much time. As I mentioned before, a same goal help us finished our challenge, even we had difficult in communication.

Question:

Q1: Did you finish the marshmallow challenge?

Q2: What is the most difficult part in working with other cultural background people?

Q3: When you meet with difficulty of communicating, what would you do?

Q4:What lets your team bullied the tower so high/low?

Q5:What hindered you to communicate with others?