UV3266

LEARNING TEAMS: SHRINKING TO FIT (A)

The weekend before first year exams at a southern graduate school of business was
anything but restful. This particular school used the case method teaching approach; students
were also assigned to learning teams (LT) that met in the evenings to work on cases assigned for
the next day’s discussion. Joann Moyer, a first-year student, had spent the last three-and-a-half
months learning to function within a team. She was the only female among the group, which also
included Ram Bajaj, Russell Manning, Marcus Pressley, Carter Spencer III, and William
Stewart. The group usually met evenings at 8 p.m., but on the Sunday before the quarter’s last
week of classes, Spencer e-mailed the team and asked to move the meeting ahead two hours.

That particular Sunday LT session was an extreme version of a trend that had been
developing in the group for several weeks: they opened a case for discussion, ran through the
questions, figured out the answers, and moved on to the next case. The group had begun to pride
themselves on completing cases in 30 minutes or less and seemed to really enjoy getting home
earlier. But with exams looming, Moyer was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with their LT
routine. The energy level the group had sustained at the beginning of their year had almost
completely drained away—what had begun as lively case discussion sessions had changed into
more of a lecture series. Attendance had dropped off somewhat, and the level of contribution had
polarized severely: Spencer now dominated the discussion with occasional contributions from
Moyer, Bajaj, and Stewart, while two members, Manning and Pressley, barely spoke at all.

Moyer was anxious and conflicted. Since LTs were assigned, there was no choosing who
you wanted to work with. The team members were forced to spend more time with each other
than their own family or friends, and Moyer believed they all needed each other for academic
survival. But she felt the group was not prepared for exams and, further, had become fragmented
and constrained, with interpersonal conflicts brewing among the members. Spencer’s request to
change the LT time annoyed Moyer since she knew he was a big football fan and thought he
probably wanted to watch a game. She wanted to deal with her frustration but was unsure how
to approach it. Should she spend more time analyzing the situation before opening up, should she
ignore it, or should she confront team members at the end of the early Sunday session?

This case was prepared by Sondra Russell (MBA ’06) and Gerry Yemen under the supervision of Professor James G.
Clawson. It was written as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate effective or ineffective handling of an
administrative situation. Copyright  2005 by the University of Virginia Darden School Foundation, Charlottesville, VA.
All rights reserved. To order copies, send an e-mail to sales@dardenpublishing.com. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of the Darden School Foundation. ◊

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Learning Team Exposed

In the first weeks, the new MBA students arrived at their LT meetings with equal levels
of excitement and preparation.

Spencer, a CPA, tried to avoid the standard CPA appearance by wearing frayed jeans and
a t-shirt and propping his bare feet on the LT table. His Myers-Briggs self-evaluation identified
Spencer as ESTJ.1 He spent a fair amount of time attending corporate recruiting briefings but
was not involved in any of the school’s clubs.

Spencer had used the same accounting textbook in his undergraduate courses and still had
his notes and solutions to use in preparing accounting cases. Initially, different people led the
discussion in accounting, but Spencer so often corrected them that the rest of the group gradually
began to rely solely on him for accounting. Needing little time to prepare for accounting,
Spencer spent the weekends preparing the cases for the other courses.

As the academic and extracurricular pressures mounted during weeks four and five of the
seven-week terms, the team all seemed to rely more heavily on Spencer’s preparation.

Moyer was not the typical MBA student: after graduating with a BA in English, she had
worked mainly in nonquantitative fields like film and web development. The Myers-Briggs type
indicator labeled Moyer an ENTJ. She was active in the Graduate Women in Business (GWIB)
club and planned to enter the Business Plan Competition the following spring. Moyer’s father was
a CPA and an MBA, and also a very dominant personality. One of her private motivations in
getting an MBA was finally to be able to battle with her father on his own playing field, “to
eliminate some of his dominance by, in a sense, being as good at being him as he is—even better!”

Moyer began to commit only about an hour a day to preparing each of the three cases
before learning team. She would often take a full hour simply to read the case for classes like
business and political economy (BPE), leadership and organizational behavior (OB), and
accounting. She entered the LT room with an understanding of the case problem, but with no
personal experience to bring to the group in solving the problem.

Stewart had an investment banking background with an undergraduate degree in

economics. He had worked in the music industry for a few years after graduating and his Myers-
Briggs indicated he was an INTP. He was an active member of the Capital Management Club
and attended many of the recruiting functions for investment bankers. He often arrived at LT
meetings having prepared the case for BPE, because his background was in this area.

Bajaj was an Indian citizen who had lived in the United States for four years. With a
background in marketing, he attended the standard briefings with Pressley and Manning. The

1
The Myers-Briggs Type dimensions include: Extraversion—Introversion; Sensing—Intuition; Thinking—Feeling;
Judgment—Perception. For complete scoring interpretation see Darden Business Publishing UVA-PACS-0073.

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Myers-Briggs assessment gave Bajaj an ENTJ. He would often show up at LT meetings with
quantitative analysis (QA) material prepared, as he really enjoyed the class.

The youngest member of the team, at 24 years old, was Marcus Pressley. He had earned
his undergraduate degree in finance and worked in that capacity before graduate school. He was
very active in the Black Business Student Forum (BBSF) and attended the annual conference
with Manning. His Myers-Briggs scale was ISFP. Pressley frequently went to briefings and
recruiting events related to careers in finance—as a result, he occasionally missed LT.

Manning held a degree in finance and was the only member with children (two). The
results of his Myers-Briggs self evaluation was exactly the same as Spencer’s—ESTJ. He actively
pursued the investment banking recruitment, even if it meant missing LT meetings. Pressley and
Manning increasingly came to the LT session with only one or two of the day’s cases read or
prepared. After mid-quarter feedback, this trend improved somewhat, but not completely.

Spencer usually arrived Sunday nights with several cases prepared and ready for
presentation. He would often begin the meeting by e-mailing his notes on a case to the rest of the
team and reading through the notes while they listened. In the beginning they were a very
energetic and outspoken team, and, inevitably, someone would interrupt Spencer with their own
viewpoint. Pressley and Manning even leapt out of their chairs, and— particularly Manning—got
very loud and excited. A few weeks into the quarter, Spencer began the LT meeting by asking
everyone to be mindful of the volume level and refrain from shouting and interrupting. The rest
of the group didn’t say anything and seemed to tacitly agree by showing no reaction. After that
request, the behavior quieted somewhat, but the team saw less of Manning, who said he had
recruiting commitments.

As Moyer thought about the team’s average level of preparation and contribution over
the quarter (as compared to a standard level of reading all the cases, preparing all the
questions, and creating documents to share with the rest of the team), she ranked the
members’ average levels of preparedness from most to least in this order: Spencer, Stewart,
herself, Bajaj, Pressley, and Manning.

The Tuesday before Exams

Becoming increasingly uneasy about her first exam period, Moyer approached Stewart
with her concerns about Spencer’s dominance: the strength of his feelings on this point
surprised her.

On the Tuesday before exams, she ran into their LT mentor, Joe King, in the hall. When
she told King about her problem—“a member of our team is dominating our group”—he knew
right away which team member it was. Moyer said she wanted a functional team where everyone
participated; she even admitted that she was a strong personality and needed to be at least equally
as dominant on the team as everyone else. She also revealed her own preferred learning style

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from a process perspective: “What are the frameworks and how do we apply them?” She wanted
to hear everyone’s input and told King, “Often the least prepared person has the freshest
perspective, or at the very least asks the most interesting questions. Carter wants to approach the
cases from a task perspective: ‘Let’s figure out the answers and get out of here.’” Moyer invited
King to come to their meeting that evening to observe.

The “Temperature-Taking”

That night, the LT meeting started with Moyer’s request that, when King arrived, “we
have a brief ‘temperature-taking’ discussion to wrap up the first quarter as a learning team.”
Spencer reacted negatively, saying that he didn’t have time that night. Pressley agreed and asked
if they could postpone. Unwilling to postpone, Moyer compromised and suggested that they have
the discussion but keep it brief.

The discussion lasted over an hour. Moyer limited her input to trying to re-interpret other
people’s comments and possibly channeling them into “norms” for next quarter. Her efforts to create
a list of “norms” was not very successful because each norm—once articulated—annoyed one team
member or another for various reasons. The discussion itself was very lively (but not heated or
personal), and the original energy of the group seemed to be back. Pressley, Bajaj, and Manning all
suggested that the team rotate the responsibilities of the discussion leader. All of them except
Spencer suggested they discuss each case for a minimum of 20 minutes, even OB and MC cases.

After the “temperature-taking discussion,” the group continued on to their cases. Spencer led
the discussion and rushed quickly through the cases, skipping the nonquantitative courses, OB and
MC, and spending about an hour on BPE. As an observer to the learning team, King commented:

Spencer started to explain his arguments for raising interest rates in reunified
Germany in the BPE case study. As others started to participate in the discussion and
Manning suggested reasons against raising interest rates, Spencer reacted negatively.
Not exactly defensively from a personal point of view, but rather as if he has been
challenged in a professional way. Spencer continued to dominate the discussion.

Leaving out the cases that seemed more discussion-oriented than solution-oriented had
become a habit in the group, even when these were in the “harder” courses of accounting, QA,
and BPE. As Spencer became the dominant team member academically, the group also implicitly
cast him in the role of “chair,” allowing him to decide what cases to work on in Learning Team
and how to approach them.

Spencer left before 11 p.m. that evening—the first time any member of the team had left
early—and the rest all continued the BPE case without him. Moyer described the experience as
“one of the most balanced, stimulating discussions we had ever had” and said she regretted that
Spencer had missed it. Near the end of the meeting, Bajaj and Pressley both mentioned their
irritation with Spencer’s dominance, and his habit of rushing through cases. The comment was

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another first—the first time that one team member had publicly criticized another. Moyer didn’t
voice her opinion and was very surprised and somewhat gratified to hear their opinions.

The Next Morning

Moyer’s worry over exams was beginning to eat away at her sleep and her ability to think
though the interpersonal conflicts she believed her learning team was experiencing. Deep down
Moyer figured she needed to confront Spencer. The night before confirmed she was not the only
one unhappy with Spencer’s domination of the group. Yet there was a nagging feeling that she
should simply keep her mouth shut, her nose in her books, and hope the tension would pass after
exams. Why did she feel so indecisive? Was confronting Spencer wise?

This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Devjani Chatterjee's Organizational Behaviour-2021-23 Sec C & D at Indian Institute of Management - Kashipur from Aug 2021 to Feb 2022.