Understanding Decision Making Within Teams: Analyzing the factors that lead to strong and successful outcomes
Abstract:
Introduction Decision -making is a critical detail and necessary task in all aspects of life, but when groups of people are tasked with this process there must be steps covered to insure success. When examining decision-making within distributed groups, topics such as diversity, performance, communication, preference, and structure need to be investigated. Upon critiquing and examining multiple sources, one will have a deeper and more critical outlook on this complicated yet important topic. The topic under review will uncover the best practices in understanding decision making
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Without motivation the team is stagnant and not able to make sound choices together. In this event there is normally a team member who takes on the majority of the work, in order to help the team progress at some level. But cultural diversity can’t be such a negative factor in the decision making process, and one would think that it would adversely be a positive addition to teamwork. Indeed (1) explains that, cultural diversity is in fact a positive factor that must be cultivated by each member. The diverse backgrounds of the team must be willing to engage and embrace the opinions and experiences in which these opinions of the members come from. The process of team information elaboration was studied, and it was found that there are three team member goal orientations that frame this information exchange (1). The first is the learning approach orientation, in which the focus is on developing knowledge and increasing self-competence, and performance evaluation is directly involved with self-improvement. This approach allows the individual team member to seek and find meaningful knowledge to bring back and contribute to the team. The next goal orientation is the learning avoidance orientation, where the individual team member wants to hold on to the information he/she already knows and does not need or wish to learn anything extra or different. The last is performance avoidance orientation, in where the team member’s focus is on
This in turn can increase the creativity and innovation within organizations. As well, individuals from diverse backgrounds are able to provide companies with insight into foreign business practices, translation assistance, and offer detailed information to assist in market penetration. A diverse working team can also improve decision making by providing different perspectives on problems. Individuals embrace working alongside other cultures, as it is a personal learning process that will prove useful in the future.
“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
The culture of team is weak, as there are no established norms and values or ground rules. As such, there was a discrepancy in the development of the team during the norming stage, as discussed previously. The team also engaged in a cultural clash in terms of industry areas, country/ethnic differences, and subcultures. The MGI founders related to a creative and artistic industry, while the students were business focused. The cultural differences manifested themselves in terms of language and expectations. And finally, within the subgroups were individual subcultures, which lead to a difference in values, roles, purposes, and goals especially when disagreements between these subcultures occurred (Hofstede, 1998). Multicultural teams can be more
1. Understand the features of effective team performance within a health and social care or children and young people’s setting
My team members are Sara, Wei, Rijuta, Rohit, and Craig. We are one of the more, if not most, culturally diverse groups in the class because we hail from China, India, New Zealand and the Philippines. When looking at our majors, there was not much diversity because five of us are in Marketing and only Rohit is in Global Business. Only four of us in Marketing have been classmates in the previous term and prior to this term, we never experienced working together as a team. Sara told us she wanted to be in a team where everyone would pull their own weight, and she said that it looked that each of us wanted the same thing. The six of us agreed to form a team because we all valued
To close the gap between actual and desired performance, decisions need to be made. Decision making involves making a selection from among alternative courses of action. Implementation and evaluation of the implementation provide feedback into the next cycle of group decision making.
National cultural differences increase the potential of productivity while increasing the complexity of a team processes (Pernet, 2005). Potential benefits of diverse teams are the greater creativity flow from the different cultural backgrounds of the team members, and the greater diversity of perspectives, arguments, alternatives, which could lead to better problem solving, decision-making and innovation. Moreover, the reaction possibility increases to changes in the social and professional environment, and thus the flexibility in the context of globalization. In addition, there is less risk that the team's productivity is reduced by groupthink, which is a practice of reasoning or decision-making by a group, characterized by uncritical acceptance or conformity to prevailing points of
It is argued that team cognition provides information on team effectiveness, especially when a shred of understanding guides these activities. Therefore, cognition encompasses shared goal orientations. In an event that members have differences regarding the goals set by the leader, the issues could debated, providing an environment to create a shred understanding of the objectives to be
The journal paper ‘Cultural diversity and team performance: The role of team member goal orientation’ by (Pieterse, Van Knippenberg & Van Dierendonck,2013) is to investigate the members goal orientation in the relationship between performance and cultural diversity. The contribution of Pieterse, Van Knippenberg & Van Dierendonck (2013) is that they have developed and test the theory under the CEM model on how achievement setting stimulates the team member goal orientations that affect performance relationship. Pieterse, Van Knippenberg & Van Dierendonck (2013) also stated that pervious researchers have recognized the performance benefit of diversity could have stronger creative, problem solving and decision- making on more complex task but they missed one perspective, which is not only the relatively objective task feature may have a role, but also the motivational orientations that are cause by a given achievement.
The positive impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can contribute creativity to a high-performance team. Membership diversity offers a rich pool of information, talent, and varied perspectives that can help improve team problem solving and increase creativity (Hunt, J., Osborn, R., Schermerhorn, J., 2005). Cultural diversity contributes various group input and group dynamics to the team. These two factors are essential in the high performance of a team. Cultural diversity can develop a high-performance team by allowing the diverse potentials of a team to operate. The negative impact of cultural diversity on group behavior can develop numerous of conflicts between team members. Conflicting interaction can limit or decrease the effectiveness and efficiency of productivity. There should be an awareness of the diverse culture values in order to prevent these conflicts.
Diversity in culture and demographic characteristics can be a negative impact or be one of the team's greatest strengths, depending on how the team as a whole functions and applies these different “routes to success”. A group can become a high performing team by understanding how cultural and demographic differences influence group behavior. The groups must realize that they can benefit from their diversity to their advantage and into a high performance team.
Diversity strengthens the team by recognizing the better ideas each person brings to the table. This brings about a lot of important benefits that help an organization in been a well-managed diverse workplace. Diverse work groups normally have better ideas, experience and a broader background. And tins enables ethnic and cultural diversity companies function at a global level with a better understanding of the global markets. Diverse teams posse’s cognitive flexibility because members have different education backgrounds. This involves a mix of analytical, and abstract thinkers, which enables the team to broaden their ability to handle difficulties smoothly. Having different point of views
Team-building is very important among the team we already have. The ethics of teamwork include being able to listen, cooperate and respect the ideas and needs of others. Trust is needed among the supervisor’s; they need to learn to trust decisions made, guidance given and more. Mix cultures can often create problems in the team, ensuring the team has cross-cultural team building will give us beneficial potentials. When onboarding it will also be beneficial to our team if encourage those of other cultures to apply here. When our team has diversity our customers will too. Encouraging those to shop here who are bilingual because we have bilingual employees that can help. (Alpert, 2015)
By doing so, the task was done based on the wrong job analysis of the leader. Moreover, after the roles were assigned, members did not follow the command of the leader. However, in the end, the team successfully managed to complete the task in time. Many flows could be spotted along the course of activity. In the team aspect, it was clear that the team had no collective aims. The proper communication within the team was prevented due to ethical diversity. To work in multicultural environment, Mullins (2005) suggests that some awareness should be taken into consideration, as he states ‘just because someone response question in English, they may not fully understand what is being said’. The cultural diversity in the team also made it harder for the group to form collective sense in one day. Francesco and Gold (2005) cited in Mullins, (2005, p. 323) points out that the managing of virtual team becomes much more complex today because of the issues surrounding cultural diversity such as differences values, customs, and traditions. The lack of communication also affected the team and put the team’s spirit and motivation at risk. When some individuals in the team did not have enough chance to express their opinions, it could jeopardize the team’s accomplishment (Loynes, 2004). In organization, the lack of motivation can be occurred among some remote workers since they feel that
Team learning is the process of team development and team alignment that increases team capacity, and it enables the team to operate as an effective unit. Team learning starts with team vision and continues to build upon it. The team as a unit is critical to allow for team decision-making, a staple of the modern business environment. Team learning comprises of three dimensions. First, teams need to possess insightful thinking about complex issues. Next, teams need to respond with an innovative and coordinated effort to address the issues. Finally, to execute the effort, coordination is needed across teams, which means team learning need to propagate throughout the organization. The way teams achieve this is through dialogue and discussion, the foundations of team learning (Senge, 2006).