Unit IV Assignment OT&B

BBA 3451, Organizational Theory and Behavior 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit IV Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

4. Examine effective teamwork. 4.1 Explain a plan for team effectiveness, including ways to account for different personality types

and the team effectiveness model. 4.2 Apply the Five Cs to a team.

Course/Unit Learning Outcomes

Learning Activity

4.1

Unit Lesson Chapter 8: Team Dynamics Chapter 9: Communicating in Teams and Organizations, pp. 250–267 Unit IV Assignment

4.2

Unit Lesson Chapter 8: Team Dynamics Chapter 9: Communicating in Teams and Organizations, pp. 250–267 Unit IV Assignment

Reading Assignment Chapter 8: Team Dynamics Chapter 9: Communicating in Teams and Organizations, pp. 250–267 To access the following resource, click the link below. Dylvel Motivation. (2016, August 6). Elon Musk - Motivation: Starting a company [Video file]. Retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8arCDoxZ8 Click here to access the transcript for the video.

Unit Lesson In this unit, we will be looking at team effectiveness. We will discuss what the term entails, how teams progress through the group dynamic process, and more. We will also reflect back to earlier units where we looked at the organization as an organism. Remember that we discussed how organizations function like the human body. Everything in the body must work together to ensure survival: heart, lungs, brain, skeletal structure, cells, and muscles. The same is true with having an effective team. Such things include composition, size, skill sets, members’ needs, cohesion, leadership, and values. Before we look at the team effectiveness model and its components, let’s review some examples. There are some classic scenarios in history that provide quality examples for you to embrace and reflect on. Note, that history is a very powerful learning tool, as it gives us information on what worked and what did not work.

UNIT IV STUDY GUIDE

Team Dynamics and Communication

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The 1980 Olympic men’s hockey team was later known as the “Miracle on Ice” (Colvin, 2006). Why? A group of college athletes took on the best national hockey teams in the world, including Sweden, Finland, and the powerhouse juggernaut the Soviet Red Army team. The USA team was seen as the underdog, a team that had no superstars on the national scene and was not matured in age or in depth, and the Soviet Red Army team had played together for years (Colvin, 2006). What made the USA team win a gold medal? Determination, spirit, teamwork, commitment, team values (rather than personal values), and a great coach, Herb Brooks, who provided leadership and a focused mission statement.

Now, let’s look at the 2004 Olympic basketball team known as the “Dream Team.” The team was stacked with talent—LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson, and more. The result was a dismal finish, barely winning a bronze medal (Colvin, 2006). Age, immaturity, poor selection of team captains, coach Larry Brown, and conservative play all contributed to the failure. In essence, the random assortment of superstars did not work together in unison and did not have a coach who provided a laser-focused approach (Colvin, 2006). There is a logical process to building a team and being a good team player and/or leader. Brian Billick, in his second year as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens, led his team to a championship. Although his book is dedicated to leadership, an entire chapter is dedicated to building great teams. In the book Competitive Leadership: Twelve Principles of Success, Billick and Peterson (2001) emphasized the team effectiveness model. Mitchell (2011) interviewed Brian Billick, and five major points were made that mirror the team effectiveness model.

1. Create a team structure that can be easily followed by players. 2. Develop a strong relationship and open communication with players, which includes sharing a strong

vision and clear expectations. 3. Ensure common sense and common practice balance out. 4. Know the individual needs of players and their individual motives. 5. Provide clear expectations of hard work, and if failure occurs, provide encouragement.

Even professional teams’ coaches implement the team effectiveness model within their structured environment. As you continue with this lesson and master comprehension of the models, reflect back to Billick’s comments. Billick, in a sense, took the lessons from Herb Brooks who focused a great on leadership, creating a winning environment for the team, employing team strategies of support with relationships, and integrating all this toward the mission of winning a championship. By looking at the five major points above, one can see why the 2004 Olympic Dream Team experienced failure. The importance of this? Learn from history. Reflect on the challenges, and reach back to a knowledge base and use it to your best set of situations. Find great people who have solid concepts of ideas and creativity who are willing to work together. Embrace the concept of working hard. The video below describes Elon and his brother who slept in their office when starting their company. They made their company a priority and enjoyed the challenge. They explain how employees will try harder when they enjoy their jobs. The challenge is providing employees with an opportunity for them to focus on their skills and contributions to the success of the company. To access the following resource, click the link below. Dylvel Motivation. (2016, August 6). Elon Musk - Motivation: Starting a company [Video file]. Retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8arCDoxZ8 Click here to access the transcript for the video.

1980 Olympic men’s hockey (Zbyszynski, 1980)

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Team Effectiveness Model More than likely, you see team effectiveness and ineffectiveness in your daily life. At work, at home, at your child’s sporting events, in college sports, or even in major league sports, you see teams that work well together and teams that struggle to connect with one another. There are four major components of an effective team that need to operate in synch with each other; they are team design, team effectiveness, team processes, and organizational and team environment (McShane & Von Glinow, 2018). Team design: The team design is comprised of three factors, which are task characteristics, team size, and composition (McShane & Von Glinow, 2018). What this means is you have to have the right people for the task. If you are solving an engineering problem, you cannot have retail specialists. If you are solving a national security policy, you cannot have the board of education at your child’s school. Therefore, task drives the composition or the skill sets needed. Team size is critical—the larger the team, the harder the communication and the more supervisors are needed to have a smaller span of control. To make this clearer, think about the composition of a college football team that includes 80–100 players, all with specific skill sets, and two assistant coaches who run each specialty (i.e., offense and defense). It would be impossible for the head coach to take on all of this specialty training, be effective, and develop the weekly game strategy. Also, in the mix of design is diversity (the melting pot) of talent, experience, backgrounds, and cultures. All can be a huge asset as well as a huge liability to your team. Leadership, respect, active listening, and perspective will assist in dealing with team diversity. Team effectiveness: Team effectiveness can be achieved through task accomplishment, satisfying members’ needs, and maintaining team survival, which means getting through the storming phase (discussed later in this lesson) (McShane & Von Glinow, 2018). Task accomplishment requires planning, organizing, leading, controlling, and staffing. These are the functions of management and work as a realistic baseline for any task accomplishment by a team. Task assessment involves asking where the team is currently, where it needs to be to meet a need, what resources the team needs to meet the task, what resources the team needs in general, who the personnel should be composed of, and how much money is needed to accomplish the task. Satisfying team members’ needs is a bit challenging. In order to do this, you have to know what the members’ needs are specifically. To do this, you must know your team’s personalities and skill sets. You certainly do not want to put your analytical team person (number cruncher) in charge of customer relations. You want to mesh the skill level to the task. This will be the first logical step in keeping people happy. This all sounds great in theory. All you need to do is have a group of people divided up by task and skill sets, and everything will work just fine. But, this is not always the case. If you discuss this with someone who is very experienced in the field of leadership, he or she may tell you that team effectiveness and design go hand-in- hand, and conflict can be quite disruptive. To illustrate this point, consider the challenges that Colonel Stars Preczewski, head coach for the Army West Point Rowing Crew team, faced with his team and how he solved them (Colvin, 2006). The main point is that Coach Preczewski created two rowing teams (varsity and junior varsity [JV]) based on developed criteria objectives that produced a quantitative score for the rowing positions for the varsity team. The varsity team was comprised of the best rowers from the upper-class, experienced, superbly athletic rowers. The varsity team was comprised from the top eight who were rank ordered. The JV team was comprised of the eight remaining individuals who scored lower on the developed criteria score. What were the results? The JV team beat the varsity team 75% of the time (Colvin, 2006). Why? The JV team just went out and rowed. They viewed themselves as underdogs with nothing to lose. The varsity team had internal conflict regarding who was the best, who scored higher on what measured attribute, who should be the captain, and who was contributing the most. Team processes: Let’s make an assumption that everything so far is working out well with your team design and effectiveness. The next step will be to consider team development that includes forming, norming, storming, and performing (Straker, n.d.). This is the most challenging part of any team because teams are comprised of different personalities (extroverts, introverts, sensors, thinkers, judgers, intuition, and feelers.). Think back to the unit regarding personality assessment, which you completed earlier in the course. This is certainly a challenge for any team to mix different personality styles together. The link below provides a great overview of the team development process by taking you through all five stages. You may find it helpful to review this resource in more detail

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To access the following resource, click the link below. Straker, D. (n.d.). Form, storm, norm, perform. Retrieved from

http://changingminds.org/explanations/groups/form_storm_norm_perform.htm The faster you can get everyone to get over the storming phase and start working together, the stronger the team will be. There will be some disturbances, conflicts, and hurt feelings; however, the more mature the individuals are, the faster the team can execute working together and achieving success. Now that you have reviewed the resource above and McShane and Von Glinow’s (2018) descriptions, the biggest takeaway here is exposure. Your exposure to this process should make you more effective within any team you are assigned because you know what to expect. It might even be beneficial to be the team leader and outline these steps for everyone and explain what dynamics are going to happen, what to expect, and how to deal with them as a team. Organization and Team Environment The main components of this step are rewards, communication, and leadership (McShane & Von Glinow, 2018). Leadership is a component of each criteria of the model as leadership is the center of gravity that keeps the team on track, organized, and functioning. Leadership sets awards, leadership solves communication problems, and leadership comprehends how to structure the team (by skill sets and personalities). Awards can be money, status, or promotion. Five Cs of Effective Team Member Behavior We have looked at the team effectiveness model and its components. Just like the human body, teams have many components that must work together. McShane and Von Glinow (2018) have highlighted the Five Cs of effective team member behavior, which include cooperating, coordinating, communicating, comforting, and conflict-handling. However, do not overlook the significance of human interaction. Human interaction is different for all of us; we all have different needs and behaviors. By knowing the behaviors, you can be that much more effective in making your team work and meet the goals and objectives assigned. Integrating Team Development Consider what all of the following have in common: engine, transmission, belts, pistons, crankshafts, spark plugs, fuel injection, power, and torque. They are all a part of some type of mechanical engine such as in an automobile, train, and aircraft. The function is to convert energy into power. Think about organizations. What is the energy? How does it transition to organizational processes and success? The very simple analogy above demonstrates the important concept of integration. To convert fuel and produce motion, many parts must work together. Reflect again back to the analogy of the human organism to an organization. To move the body forward, there are many integrated parts that must all work together. The same is true for teams. Skill sets, personalities, focus on tasks, and decision-making all must work together. All must have clearly defined objectives, goals, and expectations for the team as a whole to integrate together to produce results. Teams do not have belts, pistons, fluids, oil, or pipes. However, a common factor they have is active listening to work together. What is active listening, and how does it contribute to self-directed work teams? With active listening, you are engaged with the person who is speaking. You are listening to the intent and content of the communication so you can take action. Self-directed work teams (SDT), according the McShane and Von Glinow (2018), are cross-functional groups who complete a series of tasks individually to complete a larger group project. Wow! This is a lot to take in. Let’s break it down so you can see how important active listening is to a group.

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 The first part is the concept of a cross-functional team, which means there are multiple compositions of people (e.g., research and development, sales, production, marketing, human resources, legal).

 The second part is working as a team and completing tasks independently. Therefore, the individual members of the team must communicate and practice active listening to understand the individual roles and what the other members of the team need. Without active listening, the team can easily break down. Teamwork, team interaction, and building effective teams are critical for any organization. The better organized the team is, the clearer the vision for the team is, the more likely a team will be in discovering and experiencing success. As you move on to your assignment for this unit, reflect on the lesson’s key areas of learning.

References Billick, B., & Peterson, J. A. (2001). Competitive leadership: Twelve principles for success. Chicago, IL:

Triumph Books. Colvin, G. (2006). Why dream teams fail. Fortune, 153(11), 87–92. Retrieved from

https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direc t=true&db=bth&AN=21114960&site=ehost-live&scope=site

McShane, S. L., & Von Glinow, M. A. (2018). Organizational behavior: Emerging knowledge, global reality

(8th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education. Mitchell, R. (2011). Grandin and Billick speak their minds. Refrigerated & Frozen Foods Retailer, 9(4), 10.

Retrieved from https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direc t=true&db=bth&AN=61442030&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Straker, D. (n.d.). Form, storm, norm, perform. Retrieved from

http://changingminds.org/explanations/groups/form_storm_norm_perform.htm Zbyszynski, H. (1980). USA - Soviet Union 1980 match.jpg [Photograph]. Retrieved from

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_-_Soviet_Union_1980_match.jpg

Suggested Reading In order to access the following resource, click the link below. The below link was discussed in the unit lesson and provides an additional explanation of the team development that includes forming, norming, storming, and performing: Straker, D. (n.d.). Form, storm, norm, perform. Retrieved from

http://changingminds.org/explanations/groups/form_storm_norm_perform.htm