Garrett Brown

Internal Competition A Curse For Team Performance OBHR 3310.002 Edgington Garrett Brown

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Team Overview The team that was assembled would be classified as a Project Team. Due to the nature of a project team, there is no team chemistry at the beginning of the project since this is the first time the team has been formed. Another requirement for this type of team is to have input from members of different types of training and expertise. However this team ran into the to many cooks problem with fifteen members in the team. Seven members would have been the best option. It would have been small enough to force everyone to work on a single task together, but large enough to have an array of technical experience to aid the project team. Another factor that hurt the team overall was the group diversity was fairly limited. All were transplants from India only a few had experience working onsite. Also a lot of the individuals had previous experience with each other and tended to stick together through the duration of the project. This individualist mentality was only further solidified due to the process of pooled interdependence that developed early on. Each component of the project was performed by different team members which would later come together to finish the project. A good choice of task interference would have been to use comprehensive interdependence. Even though the group is large and they have to work on different tasks, having them check in with the other groups would have helped greatly with the communication between tasks. In one instance Lia Aarthi claimed it took her days to find the other group member that had a connection to her training material and course work. That is a lot of wasted resources that should be prevented. So with all of the problems created during the forming stage of the team development cycle, it was only inevitable to have problems during the storming stage. In this stage

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brainstorming is an important part that gives direction and ideas for the project. However, during each meeting instead of brainstorming in a constructive manner, each group inside of the team began putting forth their own agenda, and not listen to others. This lead to disagreements that were never solved and eventually spilled over into the norming stage which never truly formed due to this. Pete Philly A major stressor that Philly was dealing with during this time was a spousal divorce. This created a work-family conflict which obviously affected his job performance with the duration of the project. Through the entire process his coping mechanism was to go with supported practices, which is to have other coworkers help him with his work load. Except he relied on one person, Rishi, instead of the entire group. If he had delegated the work across the project team, that could have brought them together and helped keep each one informed and on task. Another problem with his management style was the lack of hierarchical sensitivity. He only weighed the opinions of one person and ignored the inputs of everyone else. One such instance was when a senior team member Sidharth was wasting resources by not sharing information he already had with some of the team members and making them spend days to find it for themselves. This was a serious waste of time and effort that puts the team back on their schedules, lowers moral, and generally creates infighting. This problem was reported to Philly as well as an idea to combat this problem from happening in the future. If the advice to make a common folder had been taken, not only could have this problem been avoided in the future, but have created a more comprehensive task interdependence in the group.

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Over the course of the project it was obvious that employees were struggling and divided amongst and consistency with severely lacking. To solve this problem Philly should have instilled a type of performance management standard for everyone to adhere to. This way if someone was failing behind or not keeping up with the other groups they would have known what to do and how to do it. In a field like creating several different systems, an evaluation that uses critical instances can be very helpful. You can evaluate each project an employee works on and can critique them to perform better at their job. With so many junior members part of the team, this method can really mold the younger team members into better workers, not just for this project but for future projects as well. Management by objectives (MBO) is another performance management technique that could have helped Philly avoided the process loss experienced by having team members werent on the same page. By managing by objective this problem is at least reduced and everyones work adheres to the same standard. Role ambiguity, role overload, and role conflict are all resolved by delegating work in a coherent fashion. Another problem MBO can solve is to create a schedule everyone can agree to. This is in contrast of him creating difficult due dates then when employees meet those due dates, to say they didnt. This would be stopped by management by objective because both manger and employee agree on the time period and method used to achieve mutually set objectives. An added benefit would be to build a relationship with each employee individually. Sai Rishi

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From the beginning Rishi developed his own psychological contract with the company and believed that if the project went well, he was owed a possible promotion, pay hike, and future off-shore projects. Rishis main objective was to make himself look better, even if that ment at the expense of his team mates or the quality of the overall project. He actually limited his chances to stand out by having a low staff validity approach with his boss. Instead of making any recommendation good or bad, Rishi simply followed what Philly had to say. Rishi was an open gossiper in the work place. He was willing to discuss problems his superiors faced in their private lives as well as belittling those under him as well. In each case Rishi was trying to put others down while making himself look better in the eyes of his group. When mentioning Phillys divorce, he wanted the others to know that he will be the one that will have to complete all of Phillys task work. In the case where he mentions Saras incompetence for the project, he never discussed the problem with Sara at all to potentially solve this problem. He never tried helping Sara to make her work better, which in turn would have made the project better as a whole. Instead it was widely believed by junior team members of the staff that Rishi actually took pleasure from making them feel inferior. His incivility towards those he felt were beneath him were actually increased to those who tried to stand up for themselves. This incivility turned into personal aggression through his daily verbal harassments and bullying of team members. Lastly his biggest counterproductive behavior was that he tried to purposely damage the organizational process of creating the tutorial for the client team. Instead of following protocol typically done with creating drafts of the training material before working up to the final completed project. Rishi saw this as an opportunity to hurt the career of a team mate in order to make himself look better. Instead of working with the draft to make it better he took the first

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draft straight to Philly and the client. Rishi knew that the draft would go over poorly so that he could personally fix all the errors in the draft, which is what he should have been doing in the first place. It is as if he wanted everyone to know how much he was doing on the project so he could get all of the credit. Conclusion One silver lining found during this project that it was reported to HR to be fixed. The company would have been hurt even more if these kind of team technique were passed down to future projects, which would have led to far reaching consequences. Besides hurting the overall image of the company as incompetent, such a poor work environment would damage employee commitment to the company. The possible loss of valued employees increases when they are forced to work in a hostile environment that closes them off from everyone else. In fact the erosion model shows that employees with fewer bonds in the company are more likely to quit. These bonds become weaker and weaker the less an employee wishes to be around the people they work with. Even worse is going into work knowing that whatever happens the people above you want you to fail so they can reap the rewards. Problems are going to occur in in a team setting no matter what happens. The important thing is to have strong leadership that can correct these problems or inspire the rest of the team to overcome these problems. The whole point of creating a team is to achieve more than you would by yourself. In this situation, the team turned into a bunch of individuals competing against each other creating more process loss than gain.