WD4
The Leader is Jack Ma of Alibaba
This week you will further explore the effectiveness of your leader through an analysis of teamwork in his or her organization. Review this leader’s organization and assess what the group behavior was like under this leader (Chapter 9). How were teams implemented in the leader's organization? Were they successful? What could have been done better? (Chapter 10)
Be sure to use actual examples from the literature and cite your sources appropriately. Be sure to include extensive research outside the textbook and also to cite the textbook correctly including page numbers. You are expected to use at least two academic or business sources other than your textbook each week.
Be sure your first post each week directly addresses the prompt above. Your remaining posts should continue to further the depth and breadth of the discussion by responding to your professor or classmates.
Chapter 9
Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
1. 1 Distinguish between the different types of groups.
2. 2 Describe the punctuated-equilibrium model of group development.
3. 3 Show how role requirements change in different situations.
4. 4 Demonstrate how norms exert influence on an individual’s behavior.
5. 5 Show how status and size differences affect group performance.
6. 6 Describe how issues of cohesiveness and diversity can be integrated for group effectiveness.
7. 7 Contrast the strengths and weaknesses of group decision making.
MyManagementLab ® Chapter Warm Up
If your professor has chosen to assign this, go to the Assignments section of mymanagementlab.com to complete the chapter warm up.
Crushed by the Herd
Answer quickly: If you were an employee of this car’s manufacturer and could have prevented the accident that killed two people and injured a third, would you?
No doubt you answered “yes” automatically, but if we took a few minutes to think about it, we might have to honestly answer “maybe.” When we are members of groups as powerful as those in General Motors (GM), it can be very difficult to predict our behavior. Our perceptions of right and wrong can become skewed, making even straightforward ethical decisions like this one confusing.
Courtland Kelley of GM (which made the Chevrolet Cobalt in the photo) learned firsthand the pressures groups can exert on an individual. As the leader of GM’s U.S. safety inspection program, he expected his workgroups to act upon the serious safety flaws he found in the vehicle. Instead, “Group after group and committee after committee within GM that reviewed the issue failed to take action or acted too slowly,” a later report noted. Kelley’s colleague, auditor William McAleer, agreed that management refused to acknowledge safety issues with vehicles. “Any time you had a problem, you ran into resistance,” he said. “Nobody owns [the] defect. And the plant can say, ‘It was working when it left here.’ And the supplier can say, ‘My part was good.’ It relieves everybody of responsibility.”
When Kelley pushed harder to have the Cobalt’s faulty ignition switch addressed, management actively discouraged his efforts. The group ordered him to stay quiet about defects and rename them as mere convenience issues. At one point, his direct supervisor forbade him to share data on serious defects with McAleer and threatened to transfer him to a lesser position on the outskirts of town, while the management group tried to stifle the information. Kelley said, “I heard them have many discussions about not wanting to notify the government, not putting voice mails out to dealers, because the government could get them” and learn of the defects.
When Kelley couldn’t be silenced, the group pressured him into toning down the wording in his reports and shuffled him into less responsible jobs. McAleer, who suffered similar circumstances until he was laid off in 2004, observed, “The system acts as if raising a safety issue internally were an act of corporate treason.” Kelley landed off the organization chart in a “special assignment job,” where he was told to “come up with charts, predict warranty for the vehicle, but not find every problem that GM might have.” McAleer said of Kelley, “He still has a job—he doesn’t have a career. He has no possibility of promotion.” Kelley was not fired likely only because he brought lawsuits against GM.
On the positive side, Kelley’s efforts have doubtlessly saved lives. After 13 deaths and 54 crashes, 2,084,000 Cobalts were recalled, as were almost 70,000 other vehicles with defects he found. From this standpoint, the battle he fought and his years in a “GM purgatory” job have been worth it. “I felt morally responsible to fix a problem that I found in a vehicle,” he said of his work on the Chevy Trailblazer. However, his heroic efforts have cost him many court battles, and he has developed chest pains, panic attacks, depression, and insomnia. “I clearly saw him age drastically,” his doctor, Van Alstine, said. “You just knew he was under a tremendous amount of stress. . . . It shook him to the core.”
Sources: G. Gutierrez and R. Gardella, “‘Willful Ignorance’ Ex-Auditor Blasts GM for Cutting Safety Program,” NBC News, July 9, 2014, http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/gm-recall/willful-ignorance-ex-auditor-blasts-gm-cutting-safety-program-n152311 ; T. Higgins and N. Summers, “If Only They Had Listened,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 2014, 48–53; and S. McEachern, “General Motors ‘Whistleblower’ Was Told to Back Off after Finding Safety Flaws,” GM Authority, June 19, 2014, http://gmauthority.com/blog/2014/06/general-motors-whistleblower-was-told-to-back-off-after-finding-safety-flaws/ .
The story of Courtland Kelley’s attempts to counter the effects of group pressure provides us with a powerful example of the ways groups can (mis)behave. Even though Kelley resisted for all the right ethical reasons, sometimes countering group pressure can mean costly consequences for the individual, as he found.
Groups have their place—and their pitfalls. Some groups can exert a powerful positive influence, and others can be tragically negative. The objectives of this chapter and Chapter 10 are to familiarize you with group and team concepts, provide you with a foundation for understanding how groups and teams work, and show you how to create effective working units. Let’s begin by defining a group.
Chapter 10
Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
1. 1 Analyze the continued popularity of teams in organizations.
2. 2 Contrast groups and teams.
3. 3 Contrast the five types of team arrangements.
4. 4 Identify the characteristics of effective teams.
5. 5 Explain how organizations can create team players.
6. 6 Decide when to use individuals instead of teams.
MyManagementLab ® Chapter Warm Up
If your professor has chosen to assign this, go to the Assignments section of mymanagementlab.com to complete the chapter warm up.
Teams That Play Together Stay Together
At SmugMug, an online photo sharing company, every day is a photo opportunity. If you’re hired there, you might be expected to enjoy photography, have extensive Web knowledge, and be willing to work in teams. You might even be expected to become a subject in photos the organization posts. But would you anticipate having to crawl through muddy trenches under barbed wire with your team as these employees have? They’ve just finished the hard-core 10–12-mile obstacle course experience provided by Tough Mudder, an organization that creates physical challenges for organizational teams like those at SmugMug.
The mission of Tough Mudder is simple: solidify teams through a shared experience. Co-founder Chris MacAskill said, “You get muddy and tired and beat up. It is like the Marines and boot camp. The more athletic help the less athletic because you want to finish together as a team. At the end, you are arm in arm, and there are big smiles and high-fives.” Tough Mudder events like the one pictured here teach values like mental grit by providing fun, success, and thrills. It seems to work, according to Lynn Gruber of Fortune, who remarked, “The teamwork and camaraderie out there was amazing.” To date, the organization boasts a track record of over 100 events, 1.5 million participants, 4,000 Tough Mudder tattoos, and a 95 percent participation rate.
Is Tough Mudding not your cup of tea? Then perhaps you should consider employment at Grid Connect Inc., a software firm in Illinois. The game there is ping pong, and “Everybody plays, nobody can opt out. You can take your frustrations out playing ping pong. When you aren’t playing, you can root for the underdogs,” said founder and CEO Mike Justice. He is the trophy holder and his father is the official scorekeeper, but still, he says, the organization’s tournaments enhance team building for his employees. “It’s a real confidence booster. It was one of the best things we ever did for morale.”
Perhaps old-fashioned athletic leagues are more your thing? Most companies have leagues for organized sports, which may or may not enhance their work teams. At Offerpop, a social-marketing firm, “The sports teams help to make everyone more comfortable with each other,” said CEO Wendell Landsford, although he says the real team building happens during postgame drinks. Jerry Schranz of public-relations agency Beckerman personally learned an important job skill while captain of the softball team. He observed, “It is very difficult to give up the ball as a starting pitcher, where you think that no one can pitch as well as you. It was something I had to learn to do: delegate to others and let it unfold.”
For all the good that intentional team-building recreation can do, note that programs such as Tough Mudder’s may be more successful than off-hours sports leagues. John Pinkham of PAN Communications Inc. was in charge of the Boston PR firm’s casual soccer team. He said, “Turns out the fun league we signed up for was super competitive, with ex-college players and Europeans who kicked the ball faster than I thought was possible.” In response, losers either tried to out-strategize the perpetual winners or quit. Those that stayed tried to have fun no matter the score. Pinkham said, “I think everyone was glad they played, and it brought us more together as colleagues and friends—just maybe not as teammates.”
Sources: B. Haislip, “Play Ball!” The Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2014, R4; M. L. Shuffler, D. DiazGranados, and E. Salas, “There’s a Science for That: Team Development Interventions in Organizations,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 6 (2011): 365–72; and Tough Mudder website, www.toughmudder.com , accessed June 23, 2015.
Do teams that play together stay together, as the opening discussion suggests? There is definitely an upside to shared experiences, as we will find in this chapter. There may also be something about unique, unexpected challenges that bring teams together, as Tough Mudder claims. We are, however, cautioned to consider the effects of these “play” exercises, including possible discrimination against employees who are disabled or physically unfit. We will consider more types of team-building strategies, and teams in general, in this chapter.