Name: Sumukh Prakash Kane

ISE 544 Assignment no 2.

Spring 2017 (Prof. Ali Nowroozi)

USC ID: 2733952034

Due date: 14th February, 2017.

Homework #2 (3@10 Points = 30 Points) ISE544 – Spring 2017 (NOWROOZI)

1. Consider the four different types of teams (Th. Ch. 1, P. 8 & Lecture 1, Slide 25).
Focusing on INTEGRATION in the team performance model (Thompson, P. 23),
what are the key advantages and disadvantages of “Self-Managed Teams” (2
items each)?
Tip: Use the Hackman model on page 23. Follow the steps, starting with the
team context, discuss essential conditions that closely relate to INTEGRATION
and then making conclusions about them performance with respect to
INTEGRATION.

DO NOT JUST REPEAT THE INFORMATION IN THE BOOK OR FROM THE

CLASS DISCUSSIONS.

Advantages:

 When teams are Self-Managed, roles for individuals become far more
flexible.

 Self-Managed teams have a greater focus on overall business outcomes

rather than being governed by project level objectives.

Disadvantages:

 Due to job rotations organizations suffer from early inefficiencies.

 High investment is required for skill development.

Relation to Lecture 1 (Slide 17):

As the team members in a Self-Managed team have the liberty to manage the
methods to achieve the goals, the individual role becomes significantly flexible.
This dynamic shifting of roles and responsibilities allows people to get experience
at different level of accountability within the organization leading to personal
development and growth. This also leads to the team members having a greater
focus on the overall team objectives as instead of just working on getting the
project done, they constantly have an eye on the big picture.

At times this flexibility may lead to excessive job rotations within the organization
which may be the cause for inefficiencies. The team members may require time
to develop some new skills to adjust in their new roles this may lead to excessive
delays in completion of the project. In such a setup some team members may
show inability to blend in to the new team structure and thus some investment
shall be needed for their skill development, this also has the potential in delaying
the project.
2. Provide one REAL example of two communication biases coupled together (e.g.
perspective taking failure and transparency illusion) to threaten team performance.
Refer to your personal experience (school, work, etc.) and relate your experience to
what your learned in this course. Also discuss what could have been done to avoid
these effects?

Example: A real world example of the two communication biases coupled together would
be a team working on a project. A team member may have an exaggerated sense of
nervousness about how his inputs and ideas shall be received by other team members
(Transparency Illusion).The team member also has a perspective-taking failure in this
case as he is predicting the mental state of his team members and their views about
himself and his work.
I had a similar experience while working on my undergrad term project. My project was
Hydrogenation reactor design for Vanaspati Ghee, since I had worked on Hydrogenation
reactors before I was comfortable about the entire project and could well act as a leader
but I was very nervous to convey the same to my team. I was essentially nervous in
asking or convincing them to make me the Leader as I had different notions about what
my teammates taught about me.

Corrective action: Psychological factors are fundamental in influencing the performance

of the decision maker as they compromise the decision making process. Ambient and
contextual factors may create high risk situations that dispose decision makers to
particular biases. Fatigue, sleep deprivation and cognitive overload may appear to be
important determinants.
It is therefore recommended to make such decisions in a positive Psychological state. A
major way of avoiding any such biases shall be not having any emotional value towards
the person or the project while making such decisions.

3. Read Thompson’s discussion on Transactive Memory System (pp. 148-151).

Develop graphs showing the relationship between “Team Longevity (L) (p. 159)”
and “TMS development and/or use” for two criteria of your choice (for example
you could choose to compare tactical teams with creative teams on one chart).
Make sure to include “routinization versus innovation” in your discussion.
[May be discussed in the class]

Transactive Memory System (TMS) is a shared system for attending to,

encoding, storing, processing and retrieving information. A TMS developed in
many teams implicitly to ensure that important information is not forgotten.
Teams who thus work together for a longer period of time are bound to develop a
effective TMS that shall improve the productivity. However, there is a
countervailing force at work in teams that have been together for a longer period
of time, namely, routinization as certain working relations may become
entrenched over time.

Let us consider the relationship between TMS and Team longevity in case of
tactical teams and creative teams.

In case of both creative team and tactical team initial TMS development shall
rapidly improve team productivity. In case of the Tactical teams the TMS rapidly
increase with team longevity and it reaches a peak or maximum value, after this
peak has been crossed the TMS value is more or less constant.
In case of creative teams the TMS increases with time and reaches a well-
defined peak but starts falling rapidly after this peak.

In case of both these teams the TMS helps to increase productivity as it is driven
by innovation and team effort but after a certain point of time the team members
get too familiar and comfortable with each other and this routinization results in
lack of innovation. TMS may prove to be counterproductive in case of creative
teams after a long duration of time as the team members have more or less
stopped analyzing or working on the problem as a whole as they have identified
which team member is good at what. TMS thus shows a sharp decline for
creative teams after the peak has been crossed.
Manager led team vs Self Managing team

In case of manager led teams the manager is the leader who defines the goals,
methods and functioning of the team. The team itself is responsible for the actual
execution of the task. The TMS in case of such a team is relatively high and it
reaches a sharp peak pretty soon and after the peak is reached TMS shows a
constant but significantly high value.

In case of self-managing teams a leader or manager determines the overall

purpose or goal for the team but the team is at liberty to manage the meathods
by which to achieve that goal. In this type of a team setup individual roles are
very much more flexible and thus team members are less dependent on others to
accomplish their task. TMS therefore takes much more time to establish in such
teams and it shows a relatively low value and remains constant over time.
Routinization is quite common in both Manager-led teams as well as Self-
managing teams but it is less prevalent in Self-managing teams. Self-managing
teams show great amount of innovation as the team members have the liberty to
manage their meathods to achieve their goals.