The Lumen and Absorb Teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering

The root cause of MGI’s process problems are a lack of direction and clear personal responsibilities. When looking at the team meetings it is very clear that there was little organization to their efforts. It also seemed as though there was not sufficient purpose to the team’s efforts. Many members were more interested in validating their ideas on what to do to others rather than exchanging ideas or creating an open environment. Quiet often there would be time spent on one topic, then another, then more and more without resolving the first topic. The arguments between Sasha and Dana, the HBS students and the musicians, and

Some people may be good at developing someone else’s idea and so are more effective within a team than working alone.

In this case, the new teams are breaking up established social relationships. Developing teams may also lack knowledge and/or the skill set required to fulfil their job role, and therefore may affect the morale, confidence and/or efficiency of the team.

“Teamwork is critical to successful use of talent, skills, knowledge and labor in a globally competitive marketplace. All members of a team and organization have something to share with others and something to learn” (Kaye, & Hogan, 1999). Combined “Learning Team D” has a lot of strengths some of the innate tendencies are that a majority of the team is tenacious. As a whole they seek to get things done quickly. The members all express confidence in their ability to achieve and make things happen. They are able to create a plan of action and follow-up routines. The team is able to take calculated risks when making decisions. The team is able to see things in black and white. This makes it easier for them to delegate and take charge when it is required. Members often downplay

I believe McClelland’s Need Theory is the best motivational theory to apply to this group of team members. Everyone chosen in the group appears to have a high need for achievement. His theory also states the following. “Achievement-motivated people share three common characteristics: (1) they prefer working on tasks of moderate difficulty; (2) they prefer situations in which performance is due to their efforts rather than to other factors, such as luck; and (3) they desire more feedback on their successes and failures than do low achievers”( Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013, p.209). If this project is a successful one, the reward in the form of positive feedback will be rewarding to the group. This project could be what determines the future of this company. All three of the characteristic in McClelland’s theory apply to this

Sawyer speaks a lot of truth in this paragraph about how collaboration is what makes all of the amazing innovative teams spark new ideas. Groups should not be self-centered but they need to be empowered by the whole and not its parts. As

When doing so the other group members were active listener, by using their whole body verbally and nonverbal. Like facing the speaker and giving eye contact and try to avoided interruption. The group also acknowledges the thoughts of the speaker by giving constructive feed back. Due to the effectiveness of the group communication, we were able to build trust, respect and understand the issues and make decision for effective change. We illustrate this by coming together as a group one again to accomplish the goal we initially wanted to accomplish. Since the first organization that we had chosen was incorrect, so we had to make the necessary changes to accomplish our goals. The other effective feature is the purpose of the group. Kozier et al (2010) stated that the effective group purpose is when “goal, task, and outcomes are clarified. Understanding and modified so that members of the group can commit themselves to purposes through cooperation” (p.401). For instance, each individual was assign a task and knew what was to be accomplished. As group we all decided to meet at suitable day and time which was beneficial to all team members, because we could commit to the group and focus on what needed to be achieved.

According to teammates’ narratives, we find that Max did a good job in the teamwork processes, especially in terms of Interpersonal processes. When teammates gave him valuable advices, he put them into his revised draft immediately which did foster team member’s motivation and creativity. In addition, he expressed his own feelings of satisfaction regarding the high-quality work his team members did which enhanced team spirits, motivation, and confidence as well.

As previously alluded, one of the major contributing reasons for the apparent discrepancies is the lack of leadership capacity of Chip. Chip has demonstrated that he is not a leader, but merely a manger. He is certainly at fault in compromising the critical links in the expectancy theory model. Looking at the front of pulling vs pushing the followers , we can see that Chip is doing mostly pushing motion. At the effect-Performance linkage, Chip’s micromanagement of people’s work plan and presentation conveys the message of distrust and lack of confidence in his team members. This certainly contributes to the lack of motivation. He does not have careful consideration of the ability of some of his team members. He also is also pretty stingy about giving out encouragement to his team members. Chip certainly does not try to make his team member feel productive, involved and competent. At the performance-Outcome linkage, Chip is also missing the mark. Chip does not seem to be able to provide fair treatment to some of his team members. For example, Hector was unfairly tasked with extra responsibility of the departing team member. In addition, Chip does not uphold integrity on certain aspect of the work.

Generally, the team dynamics are good and the team works well together since the members know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Looking at the team from the context of Tuckman’s model of team development, I believe that the team is past the forming, storming, and norming stages, and we are now at the performing phase. The performing stage is usually characterized with optimal task attainment and a high level of cohesion, collaboration, and communication as well as genuine pride in the successes of the team (Management training Australia, 2015). Everyone within the team is strategically aware and understands what the team is doing and what is expected of them. The leader delegates activities with minimum supervision and members within the team look after one another. Although disagreements may arise every now and then, the team is now mature enough to attend to such disagreements and solve them in a positive way. The following are the team members;

While team dynamics and cohesion play a great role in the success of any team, we believe that external factors (situation, system) can profoundly affect behavior and performance. The importance of creating an environment that supports great people and encourages them to support one another so the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts is undermined by this statement. Even a great team can’t be guaranteed to fix a mediocre idea or come up with good ones every time. The system/environment have a big role in the success of a team.

The failure and success of various project teams isn 't dependent on the level of intellect but instead on the variety of behaviours demonstrated by each individual. There are nine roles in total and each team member can acquire a variety of those roles to different extent (Belbin, 1971). My team had three coordinators; Wu Chang, Tsolaye and myself. Coordinators are responsible to delegate tasks to each member of the team (Belbin, 1971), but in my team Wu Chang was the primary preference in coordinators but she was a bit shy by nature so she coudnt step up. Tsolaye and I were the shapers and Tsolaye being the primary preference was blunt and challenging by nature (Belbin, 1971). So Tsolaye was the first one to step up and speak for the team and assigned each one of us the initial tasks to start up with the project. Moreover, as it was the first time that we interacted and didn 't know much about each other, we didn 't follow the designated roles much initially. The plant is supposed to be the idea factory, because of their creative skills. In my group Fan was the primary preference in plant and I was the tertiary preference, so Fan was able to come up with new budding ideas and was also able to build upon them because he was also the secondary preference in resource investigator (RI), and RI are also able to build upon others ' ideas as mentioned by Belbin. Fan was in short the idea generator and the executor as well. Fan came up with

Project management in today’s challenging economy requires collaborative effort across an organization. Project managers are expected to make the most out of their team regardless of its composition. Therefore, unless the group operates as a high performance team, the project will not successfully balance the trade-off among cost, schedule, and quality. Relying strictly on the science of project management leads to an unspoken assumption that members on the project team would harmoniously work together to meet the project deliverables. We have seen time and time

Amabile, T. M. & Khaire, M. 2008, “Creativity and the role of the leader”, Harvard business review, vol. 86, no. 10, pp. 100.

Humans have been forming groups since the beginning of humanity. We are constantly categorized as a group at the basic level as a species, as an ethnicity, and as a society. It is speculated that our success and evolution as a species is based on our ability to work with each other in collaboration on many levels to ensure our survival. Groups have enabled us to get things done efficiently, whether by combined physical effort, mental effort of generating ideas, or support of others. At its most effective, a group is considered a team. Teams are formed when