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A Brief Note On The Article Communities Of Commitment, By Kofman And Senge

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CULTURE DYSFUNCTIONS

From the article Communities of Commitment, by Kofman and Senge, three fundamental problems where addressed as the main reason behind organizations’ culture dysfunction:
The first fundamental problem is fragmentation, where problems are fragmented into pieces. Even though individuals perform better by doing what they know best, it is better to work as a team to solve the problem rather than working in isolations (Kofman & Senge, 1993).
The second fundamental problem is competition, so individual inside the organization should focus on achieving goals instead of becoming the best. And like they said, people should not become defensive and afraid to make mistakes (Kofman & Senge, 1993).

The third fundamental …show more content…

"We have a more experienced and talented executive team than any of our competitors. We have more cash than they do...We have better core technology. And we have a powerful board of directors. Yet in spite of all that, we are behind two of our competitors in terms of both revenue and customer growth. Can anyone here tell me why that is?" Kathryn opens her speech in the meeting of her direct reports with that, then she concluded with “There are five reasons why teams are dysfunctional.” (Lencioni, 2008).

The first was the absence of trust, and it accrues when members being unable to show their weaknesses; to be vulnerable and open with one another. That result in becoming defensive, which lead to huge waste of time and energy. Trust is the foundation of any successful relationship, personal or professional, and when it’s broken, it is extremely hard to repair. When employees feel they can’t trust leaders they feel unsafe, which lead to spend more energy on self-defense and looking for a different job than performing at their job. And to overcome this dysfunction teams are encouraged to share experiences. One of the best ways to achieve this would be the Team Effectiveness Exercise, where members identify the most important contribution that each peer made to the team (Lencioni, 2008) (Gibson, 1979).
The second dysfunction happen to be the fear of conflict, where teams

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