Short Assignment 1 (Revised)

Assignment’s Description

      Kitchenware Company is an organization with a long legacy of answering to authority. Recently, a special product development team was set up to come up with a pitch to sell to the CEO, Chief Operating Officer and Marketing Director. The team was on a one-off basis and there are three members in the team. Every member was assigned from different departments. Members’ background was:

http://youtu.be/jmaWDHxqq3E 

Background information in different scenarios

Scenario 1

Supervisor: Kristina

Team members: Chris& Eddie

Underlying Rules: No laughing is allowed. No team member is allowed to talk without the permission to speak from the supervisor. The supervisor presents the pitch.

http://youtu.be/xrR7wzxdNBY 

Scenario 2

Team members: Kristina, Chris & Eddie

Underlying Rules: Everyone is equal in this company, there is no supervisor. Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with everyone. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas.

http://youtu.be/0OeDG9qyCpo 

We'd like to discuss the 2 scenarios by 3 aspects: "Trust", "Creativity", and "Teamwork".

Trust

      The new collaboration is an invaluable way to air and debate multiple views and allow consensus to emerge. Groups of all sizes can evolve through the “storming, norming, and forming” stages, to build a solid foundation for performance.( Building the Collaborative Enterprise © 2009 nGenera Corporation ) Among all three stages of collaboration, the trust has played a critical role in the process by which foster a mutual understanding between team members and improve the productivity in turn as well. In the Model for Trust developed by Robert F. Hurley (Appendix 1), the final choice is mainly decided by two groups of factors: Decision-Maker Factors and Situational Factors. (Robert F. Hurley, 2006) Former group of factors, just like how risk-tolerant and well-adjusted is the truster, are more directly related to the personalities of the trusters in a certain group and are irrational to be changed in a limited time, what we can cope with this "personal factors" is to optimize our staffing policy to be suited with team-work culture and to hire the people who are more willing to work collectively with certain kind of risk- tolerance and well- adjusted flexibility. After the team had been set up already, we should pay more attention on the later group of situational factors by which we can make the whole team more harmonious and productive. To arrive at the conclusion that which scenario is better in terms of building trust, we will go to depth in two different dimensions: How secure do the parties feel and do the parties have good communications?

      1. How secure do the parties feel? Roughly speaking, the team members from scenario one would feel more comfortable for they are used to work in a traditional hierarchical organization and they know exactly how to cooperate with colleagues and supervisors under such a kind of organizational system. Having been put into a more open and unconsolidated environment, the team members from scenario two would have no idea what to do at very beginning and hard to reach a consensus later on once there is no supervisor to control the direction and process.

      2. Do the parties have good communications? Communication itself means nothing unless it can work out a conclusion at last. Quite similar to the item above, the team members from scenario would communicate in the way they used to be without discount in express their opinions in that organizational structure, and they would easily come to the conclusion based on both the collective brainstorming and the supportive leadership within the team. In the scenario two, team members would behave more rely on their own personalities: the introvert members would not willing to express himself but the extrovert ones may dominate the discussion. No supervisor in a team means that they should spend more time to form a virtual leader to make the whole team work systematically. 

     
      All in all, the team with or without a supervisor both has its own advantages and disadvantages in creating and maintaining the trust to increase the productivity, but a team with supervisor tend to be more cohesive and efficient, especially at the critical decision making period.
 

Creativity

      In Exercise A1, Kristina acted as the supervisor of the product development team. She has rich information of the product and comprehensive understanding of the management team’s expectations. Chris and Eddie were the team members.

Chris was very excited in creating new ideas and passionate about success of the product, whereas, Eddie was more introverted technical person who was interested in developing practical functions for customers. Kristina asked the team members to develop 30 second pitch in the meeting. The discussion went through 3 stages:

      In the beginning, Kristina asked Chris and Eddie to speak their ideas about this pitch. Chris and Eddie shared preliminary thoughts respectively. Kristina said some of what they said were inspiring, but might not be interesting enough to impress the management team. She also pointed out that they have to highlight the functionalities of the kitchenware when developing the pitch. In the second stage, Kristina discussed product functions with Eddie to prioritize the most attractive selling points, and she also constantly motivated Chris to come up with as many ideas as possible to promote the selling points. During the process of idea storming, Kristina had been encouraging Chris and Eddie to come up with a lot of ideas. It seems Kristina was quite confident that she had a very clear framework of what the pitch looks like. However, Kristina was critical to assess each idea brought up by Chris and Eddie, she often pointed out one or two negative aspects of the ideas, even some of the ideas sounded quite good to her. To some extent, Chris and Eddie felt frustrated to present new ideas. Kristina had a good command of facilitating the process of result-oriented discussion, but the atmosphere of creativity had been influenced by Kristina’s dominance and skepticism.

      In Exercise A2, Kristina, Chris and Eddie had different background and knowledge, each of them was dedicated to the product development and had strong drive to make the pitch successful. It was a free discussion, Kristina, Chris and Eddie had a lot to say about their own opinions. They also inspired each other to generate more ideas. However, Eddie were very aggressive to influence the rest two to accept his ideas; Kristina and Chris also thought they had pretty good creativities.

     They had contributed many good ideas to the pitch, but there were no specific agreement on how to create the whole pitch. Thus, they spent a lot of time to compromise to each other, the arguments had been continuing for nearly an hour. Finally, Kristina, Chris and Eddie had had their own version of pitch sold to the management team.

      From the creativity behaviors discussed above, we can have the conclusions below:

      1. Giving people autonomy concerning process facilitation rather than necessarily the ends, people will be more creative. If team members have freedom around process, but they don’t know where they are headed, such freedom is pointless (Amabile, T. M., 1998). Kristina had clearly specified the goals of the pitch that enhanced creativity of Chris and Eddie.

      2. Skepticism and negativity bias kill creativity when new ideas which are not worthy of consideration (Amabile, T. M., 1998). It damaged creativity to doubt unsuccessful efforts and even creative efforts. Creativity should be encouraged by intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Kristina usually demonstrates a reaction to each new idea, which undermines Chris and Eddie’s intrinsic motivation.

Teamwork

Definition of Teamwork

Dictionary.com:

“Cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.”

BusinessDictionary.com:

“The process of working collaboratively with a group of people in order to achieve a goal.”

OxfordDictionaries.com:

“The combined action of a group, especially when effective and efficient.”

Cambridge Dictionaries Online:

“The ability of a group of people to work well together.”

      Teamwork doesn’t only refer to a group of people working together, but also in a way that each individual has to work collaboratively and productively towards the common goal.

A Successful Teamwork – Two Critical Factors

      According to Time-Management-Guide.com (2005), a successful teamwork is when the team has a Strong Synergy of Individual Contributions. The team can achieve something bigger as a group than a group of the same members working on their own individually. To build a high collaborative team, there are two critical factors: Diversity of skills & personalities and the Team’s efforts in working towards the same goals.

      Diversity of skills& personalities means that each member has different strength that can compensate each other’s weakness. Correspondingly, their different in personality can also balance and complement each other in team \collaboration (supplementary information can be found on Belbin’s Team Role Summary Description). And when team members share the common goal, they will try to contribute their best to work towards it. (Time-Management-Guide.com, 2005)

      Nevertheless, based on the findings by Lynda Gratton & Tamara J. Erickson (2007), “the proportion of strangers on the team and the greater the diversity of background and expertise, the less likely the team members is to share knowledge or exhibit other collaborative behaviors.”

Eight Factors to Build a Collaborative Team

      In our team discussion on the two scenarios, each member in the scenarios is coming from a different background and sharing a common goal. Yet the group of strangers in scenario 1 was able to maintain a harmony relationship whereas the same group in scenario 2 was not. Both scenarios fit both the critical factors but ended with a different outcome. Scenario 1 has certainly a better teamwork than that of scenario 2. But why is there a difference? How the synergy of a same group of strangers can work out a better outcome as in scenario 1? Let’s examine the difference between scenario 1 & 2 with the Eight Factors that Lead to Success developed by Lynda & Tamara (2007).

      From the table above, given that the members’ background/relationship, office environment & organizational culture are the same in both scenarios, scenario 1’s way of team collaboration is more successful than that of scenario 2. In scenario 1, the group of strangers was able to contribute their own strength and worked out a beneficial conclusion under the lead of team leader. The synergy is 1+1+1=4. Whereas in scenario 2, even each member was trying to contribute their strength in full, but without the lead and support, they were not able to agree on a single pitch. The synergy is 1+1+1=3.

      We believe that there is a close relationship between the organization culture and the successfulness of teamwork. When the organization is not providing support to foster the communicational environment/practice, a more hierarchy oriented teamwork is comparatively more competent to provide a constructive outcome.

Conclusion

By concluding the whole team discussion process, it's similar to the growing process of a tree, from root to trunk, from trunk to branches, and lastly from branches to leaves. Organization is the root, the fundamental factor that could influence the whole growing process; the trunk refers to the Trust-building and Team-work, the elements that act as the middle-man to link the organization with the people; while branches and leaves means people and ideas respectively. In spite of people talking about how to build trust or how to build the most successful teamwork, the most important essence is whether the team is able to build a strong alignment between the company culture/style and the people. In order words, without the correct communication method/style (as nutrition) that suits both the company culture and people, people won't be able to make fruitful achievements that suits the organization. 

Reference

Amabile, T. M. (1998). How to Kill Creativity. Harvard    

    Business Review. September-October 1998. 77-87

Building the Collaborative Enterprise.

    (2009). nGenera Corporation, Retrieved from http://www. ngenera.com

Lynda Gratton & Tamara J. Erickson (2007). Ways to build

    collaborative teams. Harvard business review, Nov 2007, 101- 

    109

Roderick M. Kramer (2009), Rethinking Trust, Harvard Business 

    Review, June 2009  

Robert F. Hurley (2006). The Decision to Trust. Harvard

    Business Review

R. M. Belbin (2012). Belbin Team Roles. BELBIN. Retrieved

    from http://www.belbin.com/rte.asp?id=8

Teamwork. (n.d.). In Dictionary.com, LLC. Retrieved from

    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/teamwork

 Teamwork. (n.d.). In BusinessDictionary.com. Retrieved from    

    http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/teamwork.html

Teamwork. (n.d.). In Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved from

 

    http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/teamwork

Teamwork. (n.d.). In Cambridge Dictionaries Online. Retrieved

    from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/teamwork

Time-Management-Guide.com (2005). Team work and team

    building essentials. Time-Management-Guide.com. Retrieved  

    from http://www.time-management-guide.com/team-  

    building.html

Picture Source:

1. http://news.sina.com.hk/news/20120630/-1-2705991/1.html

2. http://kelleylattaministries.com/surrender-without-trust/

3.http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/political-correctness-at-workplace-fosters-reativity/articleshow/45333544.cms

4. http://conecta2.icrossing.com/brief-en-la-agencia-digital/

5. http://kyfm.com/archives/1676

6. http://likeateam.com/20-great-quotes-teamwork/