I’m in a uni lab for engineering, and the groups are 4 people each. My other team members are great and get their work done in a timely manner, but one particular other member constantly fails to get work done by the group-set timeframe and always gets his work in at the last minute, which makes things difficult when parts of the lab reports depend on his part. We’ve changed his duties to ones that the other duties do not depend on as much, but it’s still been difficult. In addition, this group member does not communicate with the rest of the group on issues until the very last minute, making it a stressful situation trying to proofread everything near the end. We (the other members) decided we had enough with his refusing to communicate and informed the professor of what happened, but he left a long paragraph in the group chat saying that we should have handled the situation like adults and that he is busy and we don’t know what’s going on in his life. I’m starting to feel guilty and that I should have done something different, but I’m a bit of a recovering people pleaser and would like outside perspective.
NTA
If your groupmate is “busy” and “has a lot going on in his life” then it is his responsibility to inform the professor of that, and the professor’s job to support the group.
Education setting group work sucks, and the excuse often is that you will have to work with lazy non-contributors or awkward people in the workplace so you need to ‘learn how’. In the workplace, you’re getting paid to deal with it. In education YOU are the one paying and deserve to have your learning properly supported.
If education settings are so adamant about operating like workplace settings in terms of making people work together then they need to start shaping up about managing ‘non-performers’ in the same way as a workplace would.
I don’t think anyone is a clear asshole in this situation, i understand you and your team member’s frustration with him being late all the time , it sucks when an entire group gets derailed just because of a single person’s fault , but at the same time , I think your mistake was reaching out to the professor , I think the best thing to do was to make him sit down and make him understand how his incompetent behaviour is making the entire group upset and if he doesn’t change or give a proper explanation then he might have to face severe consequences, for all you know this guy might be going through something very tough in his life right now , it could be literally be anything from a financial issue to a mental or family problem , which might have made him feel like you guys are inconsiderate and have no empathy. Reporting him to a higher authority who most likely wont care about his situation instead of calling him out immediately was a mistake
But also if he was going through something, he should have the basic sense to reach out to you all. And explain that he just can’t help but be a little late because of something personal he is dealing with , if he doesn’t communicate his problem then he is just sabotaging the entire group without an explanation, and suddenly when he gets reported he acts like he wasn’t in the wrong at all.
Both of you could have taken a better route.
NTA. If he had handled the situation like an adult (managing his time properly and communicating with the group if something was going to be late) then he wouldn’t now be in this position. This is a classic situation in group assignments, there is almost always someone who slacks off and then tries to frame it as group members being unreasonable rather than owning their own actions. Eventually these people struggle to find group members willing to work with them.
NTA, he sounds like a lazy crybaby that got caught