Teamwork Turmoil – Action Plan by the Team Members

The basic motivation for forming a team – and one that also resonates with the learning team

in the Teamwork Turmoil case – is that members can play on each other’s strength and foster

results that are better than what could be individually achieved. However, sometimes such

objectives which look easy in theory are quite difficult to achieve in practice for many reasons.

A group is essentially the collection of individuals – and while these individuals come together

towards achieving a mutual goal, the diversity in approach, thoughts, and influences that they

bring is often a double-edged sword. Group success can be explained in terms of Process Gain,

which manifests when team members interact, while Process Loss refers to any aspect of the

group that hinders team functioning and is often used to describe a situation where the team

operates sub-optimally. Basis our observations of how ‘turmoil meeting’ has progressed and

concluded, we note several fault-lines that potentially hinder learning outcomes, and which

need to be promptly addressed. The team in question realizes that all is not right with and has

decided to look inwards to come up with an action plan for future meetings. Luckily they do

have a large repository of resources to draw insights and inspiration from since the topic of

team management and group dynamics has been and continues to be focus of substantive

interest among academicians and business practitioners alike. In the subsequent text below I

will draw upon some of the best practices to present practical approaches that the team might

have identified to help alleviate address their challenges and ensure that they effectively meet

the common objectives. I will try to address the action plan from the perspective of the team

members.

Build Trust and Respect through Realization of Diversity

As the team members got down to brainstorming over the meeting outcome, they

acknowledged the fact that theirs is a culturally diverse cohort drawn from various ethnicities,

educational backgrounds, and professional experiences; however, they also share some
similarities in terms of the age groups, their interest in sports (although different ones!), and

similar future aspirations. The team went through several studies on the impact of cultural

diversity in teams, that indicated that heterogenous groups consistently outperformed

homogenous groups on complex problem-solving tasks. However, what really struck them was

that newly formed culturally diverse teams experience a much higher level of process loss in

the beginning, which this diminished over time due to regular feedback and the amount of

additional time spent for resolving process problems. The team quickly realized that in a

multicultural working environment, they should be very careful of how they conduct meetings

as often seemingly harmless behavioural traits could be misinterpreted. The team decided to

establish some ground rules for the members to build trust: active participation with minimum

absenteeism, a no device policy during case discussion with all note to be taken on paper,

mutual respect and avoidance of personal remarks. The team members also initiated an open

conversation among themselves to share individual feedback on what might be hurtful to

others. Through the feedback process, the each of the member was able to identify some bias

in behaviour which he or she was oblivious to, for example, Onyealisi was surprized to find

that his comments were viewed as sarcastic by other team members, when he was only trying

to lighten the situation. He made a mental note to check such remarks in future. The team

collectively decided to spend the last five minutes of every meeting in the future to answer

questions on what went well, and what could have been done better.

Establish a Common Meeting Agenda:

The team also realized that it did not have a clear roadmap for these learning sessions and that

there was incongruence between themselves on the core expectations. While all of them

genuinely saw value in peer learning, and respected each other’s experiences, they felt that

there were some nuanced differences in what each was trying to take from the meeting. For

example, while Cooper, who has a degree in accounting, was keen to use the platform to discuss
both basic concepts on the different subjects as well as brainstorm on case takeaways, Onyealisi

was mostly indifferent to the content; on the other extreme was Delery. who was primarily

interested in bringing the meeting to an early conclusion. In order to maximize the efficacy of

future meetings, the team decided to put to paper their intended learning outcomes in order to

set the agenda for subsequent meetings. Through the exercise, the team arrived at a common

agenda to be followed – for e.g. they would start with a 15 minute session on conceptual

topics, follow it up with thirty minutes per case discussion, and then wrap it up with any follow-

up questions from the previous sessions during the next quarter hour. This would ensure that

the meeting is time-boxed and all the points are well covered. Further the team decided that

they would create a team collaboration portal (such as OneNote or SharePoint) where

members can post any queries that they would like to discuss in the meeting, so that others are

aware before hand on the discussion points and can prepare themselves accordingly if needed.

Further, the short, bulleted agenda of the meeting will be shared on the prior to each meeting.

Balance Trust with Monitoring to Ensure Higher Performance:

The learning team in the current case context is a self-managed team, meaning that there is no

assigned leader. All the team members play the dual role of a leader and member at the same

time and have discretion to decide the work allocation and set the ground rules for how to

conduct tasks. In such a situation, the interplay of trust – defined as that willingness to be

vulnerable to the decisions of other party in a situation of risk – and monitoring plays a critical

role in performance. In fact, when trust and monitoring are pitted against each other, research

suggests that such self-managing teams with very high level of individual autonomy will do

better when trust is lower than when trust is higher. There could be several reasons for such

teams to avoid monitoring each other, social forces, a perception that monitoring involves a

lack of trust among team members, or just negative connotation and an implicit assumption

that it could adversely affect individual motivations. Whatever be the reasons, too much trust
at the cost of monitoring in individuals with high autonomy harms performance. They realized

that they face a the similar challenge in their team – a group of high calibre and autonomous

individuals who while working towards a common objective, have no control over the actions

of others towards facilitating the same goal. Once the issue is recognized, the team decides to

enforce a mechanism of monitoring in which they pair up in groups of two before every meeting

to ensure that within each pair the members have come prepared to the discussion. To ensure

that members of pairs are changed, they decided on the pairing for the next meeting by picking

chits at the last five minutes of each meeting.

Foster Intrateam Co-opetition:

The team further discovered through the help of reading materials that a key ingredient of

motivation in a team setting is a balance between cooperation and competition among the team

members. This essentially involves the teammates cooperating to ensure peer-based learning

and development, but also competition among themselves to bring out the best performance

from each of them. As the team would have noted from Nancy Kate’s cooperation-competition

matrix published in the Academy of Management Executive (August 2001), high levels of

cooperation and competition makes for highly energized individuals who work together

effectively, which low cooperation and low competition results in unmotivated and

uncoordinated individuals. The team members in fact recalled some specific incidents that

happened in the ‘turmoil’ meeting and realized that they were precisely facing the issue of low

cooperation and high competition among themselves – resulting in highly driven individuals

but who work at cross purposes. For example, there was an instance where Martin, rightly

chastised Onyealisi, that he was underprepared for the discussion, but she also questioned his

benefitting from the work of other team members. While Martin was correct in pointing out

that Onyealisi needed to be prepared to make the discussion useful, but her approach to put

him down seems to point to elevated level of competition at cost of cooperation. Further there
was another incident when Delery shot down Cooper’s request for discussion on a topic, and

instead asked him to consult the professor on his own. Both Martin and Delery when they came

across the competition-cooperation model and reflected back on the meeting, realized that

implicitly their actions had been counterproductive to team’s motivation and decided along

with the larger team to make sure that they channelize their competitiveness positively without

undermining other members. For this as part of the action plan, they decide to set up some basic

ground rules for their discussion – no criticizing each other’s ideas; do not make personal

attacks and references; build upon on other’s ideas; practice positive reinforcement to

encourage team members expression themselves; allowing competition only in context of

dissemination of ideas when discussing a specific case point.

Figure: Impact of Intrateam Cooperation and Competition (Source: Academy of Management

Executive, Nancy Katz, August 2001)

Highly cohesive team but Highly energized individuals

High

individuals not driven to who work together

peak performance effectively

Unmotivated and Highly driven individuals

Low

uncoordinated individuals but working at cross purpose

Low High

Commitment to Minimize Absences and Delays:

The team members also realized that it takes time for a new team to coalesce, and it is important

that all members consistently show up during the meetings, and keep others informed in case

they need to be excused for unavoidable reasons. They were guided by research that suggested

that effective collaboration is driven by how well the team members know each other and can

pre-empt each other moves (in a learning team, this could perhaps motive members to better

prepared themselves for the discussion when they can speculate potential counter arguments

that other team members could raise). In fact the suggestion to ensure that consistency in team

meeting is enforced, came from Onyealisi himself who realized that he had been far less

punctual and that his absenteeism was keeping the meetings from being more effective. The

team decided to set up recurring calendar invites so that each of them have the meeting details

at their fingertips and can inform others in advance if they are unable to attend. Further to

ensure higher compliance, it was mutually decided to ensure that each of them strive to

maintain at least 90% of attendance during the course of the meetings.

Select a Leader on Rotation:

While a self-manged team is organized to reduce hierarchy, increase flexibility and improve

self-esteem, one of the negative consequences is that in such a setup, sometimes a shared

responsibility becomes no ones’ responsibility. In such situations, it is a good idea to ensure

that the team elects a representative to steer the team towards its objectives and ensure that

digression and counterproductive behaviour is minimized or eliminated. The leader could be

selected on a rotation basis so that the benefits of a self-managed team is still retained and the

members continue to see themselves as equal stakeholders, collectively responsible for the

outcomes. After reviewing several best practices on working in self-management teams, the

team members discovered that they also needed to have a team leader to drive the meeting

agenda. With memory of how the recent ‘turmoil’ meeting had evolved into a cacophony free

for all, fresh in their mind, the team was completely sold to the idea that one of them should
take the responsibility to steer the meeting effectively. They come up with the idea to have

each of them preside over two consecutive meetings (to ensure that any spill over discussion

are managed by the same leader). Further if the designated leader would not be available in the

meeting for some reason, the next one in sequence will assume leadership role for that meeting.

The team also realized that this would have the added advantage of reducing absenteeism as

the team leader would also be responsible for reminding everyone else to attend the meeting

on time. This they believed would act as a ‘soft push’ for others to make sure they are available

and prepared for the discussions.

Incorporate Task Reciprocal Interdependence

During the course of their analysis of team dynamics theories, they came across the concept of

task interdependence, or the degree to which team members are dependent on each other to get

information, support or relevant materials the analysis. Since, the team was quite diverse in

terms of the ethnicity, educational background, and prior professional experience, they realized

that of the three types of interdependences (pooled, sequential and reciprocal), the best fit for

them would be to adopt the reciprocal interdependence model, that is to ensure that for every

case discussion, each of them goes through the complete case study and comes prepared with

an analysis and viewpoint on all the relevant sections of the paper. This approach will help all

of them gain from the diversity in the team and bring to fore contrasting views based on

individual differences.