Short Assignment 1
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:
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.
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.
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 [nGenera Corporation], 2009). 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.
We are born to be
engaged and to engage others, which is what trust is largely about. If it’s
human to trust, perhaps it’s just as human to err for there are some tendencies
that skew our judgments. (Roderick M. Kramer , 2009) In order to minimize the
bias rooted from our mindset, forming teams to organize talents with
different backgrounds and personalities is an efficient and effective approach
to solve the inherent mankind problems to promote trust and increase productivity
eventually.
Building on the social psychologist Morton Deutsch’s research on trust, suspicion, and the resolution of conflict, and on his own experience over the past 15 years consulting with organizations and executives on trust, Robert F. Hurley developed a model that can be used to predict whether an individual will choose to trust or distrust another in a given situation. (Appendix 1) We will adopt this model to analyze scenario which is more effective in terms of building trust between two given scenario and make some recommendations basing on the conclusion.
In the Model for
Trust developed by Robert F. Hurley, the final choice is mainly decided by two
groups of factors: Decision-Maker Factors and Situational Factors. 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 latter 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 different
dimensions just as below:
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.
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 him/her 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.
3. How many
similarities are there between them? Similarities here both can refer to the
background, personality and current position in the organization, and with
those similarities can easily establish a common ground among all team members.
In the scenario one, there will be a period of time for team members to find
similarities between themselves and supervisor, but team members from scenario
two would feel more free to contact with each other because of no position
difference which usually acting as a barrier in the team.
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.
Reference
Amabile,
T. M. (1998). How to Kill Creativity.
Harvard Business Review. Spetember-Octoboer 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://eco
4. http://con
5. http://kyf
6. http://lik
