MGT 410

Social roles/functions of a group

-Serve to keep the team operating effectively. -when filled, team members feel more cohesive, and less likely to suffer from social loafing, groupthink, or a lack of participation from members. 1. Cooperative role: supporting those with expertise towards team goals. This is a proactive goal, 2. Communicator role: includes behaviors that are targeted at collaboration, such as practicing good listening skills and appropriately using humor to diffuse tense situations. HAving a good communicator helps the team feel more open to sharing ideas. 3. Calibrator role: important role that serves to keep the team on track in terms of suggesting any needed changes to the teams process. May involve settling disagreements.

Norms

-shared expectations about how things operate within a group or team. -this understanding helps teams become more cohesive and perform better. -powerful way of ensuring coordination with a team. -new employees learn to understand and share the assumptions, norms, and values that are a part of the organizations culture, and must learn the norms of their immediate team.

Boundary spanning roles/functions of a group

-teams that engage in greater level of boundary-spanning behaviors increase the teams effectiveness. 1. Consul role: includes gathering information from the larger organization and informing those within the organization of team activities, goals, and successes. Often filled by managers or leaders. 2. Coordinator role: Includes interfacing with others within the organization so that the teams efforts are in line with other individual teams within the organization

8 symptoms/definitions of them

1. Illusion of invulnerability: shared by most or all group members, which creates excessive optimism and encourages them to take extreme risks. 2. Collective rationalizations: members downplay negative information or warnings that might cause them to reconsider their assumptions. 3. An unquestioned belief in the groups inherent morality: when incline members ignore ethical or moral consequences of their actions 4. Stereotyped views of outgroups: seen when groups discount rivals abilities to make effective responses. 5. Direct pressure: exerted on members who express strong arguments against any of the groups stereotypes, illusions, or commitment 6. Self-censorship: occurs when members of the group minimize their own doubts and counter arguments 7. Illiusions of unanimity: occur, based on self censorship, and direct pressure on the group. The lack of dissent is viewed as unanimity 8. The emergence of self-appointed mind guards: happens when one or more members protect the group from information that runs counter to the groups assumptions and course of action.

SMART goal

A goal that is specific, measurable, aggressive, realistic, and time-bound. Goals that are SMART are quantifiable, have a timeline, are relevant to corporate objectives, and are difficult to so they challenge the individual, but are not too challenging.

Groupthink

A group pressure phenomenon that increases the risk of the group making flawed decisions by allowing reductions in mental efficacy, reality testing, and moral judgement. Groupthink is the most common in highly cohesive groups.

Groupthink w decision making

A tendency to avoid an critical evaluation of ideas the group favors.

MPS=[(skill variety+task identity+task significance)/3]x autonomy x feedback

According to this formula, autonomy and feedback are more important elements in deciding motivating potential compared to skill variety, task identity, or task significance. Job characteristics interact with each other in this model. If someone's lacking autonomy or feedback, regardless of levels of variety, identity, and significance, the motivating potential score will be very low.

4 group tasks

Additive tasks: usually work together on same/similar tasks. Ex: customer call center. Size: depends on task Best way to work: working alone Conjunctive tasks: worst member/worst performance. Ex:origami. Allows specialization and mass production/speed. Size depends on task. Rewards are usually based on the groups outputs. Best way to work: single member group disjunctive tasks:there is a right answer or way to do a task. LArger group size is best. Usually rewarded on group output. Best way to work is with a single leader Compensatory tasks: may or may not be a right answer, but some ways are better than others. Size depends on task. Rewards are typically group rewards. Best way to work is a self managed team.

Process loss

Any aspect of a group interaction that inhibits group functioning.

Self managed teams

Are those that manage themselves and do not report directly to a supervisor.

Best size of a group

As the number of group members increase, the effort of each member decreases. Ringelmann effect.

Rules

Behavioral guidelines agreed upon explicitly by all group members.

Empowerment

Contemporary way of motivating employees through job design. These approaches increase worker motivation and have the potential to increase performance.

Tasks Roles/functions of a group

Contractor role: includes behaviors that serve to organize the teams work, including creating team timelines, production schedules, and task sequencing. Creator role: deals more with changes in the teams tasks process structure. Example: reframing team goals. Contributor role: Important, brings information and expertise to the team. Sharing knowledge and training those with less expertise. Completor role: Also important, transforms ideas into actions. Following up on tasks. Critic role: "devils advocate" behaviors that go against assumptions being made by the team.

Job Characteristics Model

Core Job Characteristics, Psychological States, Outcomes

Relationship between performance and feedback

Feedback is one of the most important elements in deciding performance.

Tuckmans 5 stage group development

Forming, storming, norming, performing, and later adjourning. A linear process.

Tuckmans 5 stage group development: What they are and how they differ

Forming: group comes together for the first time. Tend to be positive, avoid conflict, and observant. Storming: once group members feel sufficiently safe and included. Become more authentic and more argumentative. Get stuck in this phase a lot. Norming: Often feel relief at this stage. More committed to each other and the groups goals. Feel energized, ready to work. Establish their own ground rules (norms) and define the procedures and goals. Make big decisions. Ideal time for social or team building events. Performing: Members are more interdependent, individuality and differences are respected, and group members feel themselves to be at a greater entity. They get work done and pay attention to how they are doing it. Adjourning: Bittersweet, celebrate a job well done. Realizing how you adjourn may make a difference for future performance. After action review, learning what went wrong and how to do it differently next time.

Autonomy

Is the degree to which a person has the freedom to decide how to perform his or her tasks. Example: chef at a small restaurant who has control over the menu has higher autonomy than a chef at a chain who oversees the process. High-dealing with problems quickly and effectively. Less likely to adapt to "this is not my job." Creative.

Negatives with goal setting

Learning decreases, adaptability declines, single kindness develops, ethical problems increase.

Positives with goal settings

Make you think outside the box, energize, give direction, make you think outside the box, provide challenges.

Punctuated Equilibrium Model

Much more dynamic and cyclical in nature. In this model, revolutionary changes occur in brief, punctuated bursts, generally because of a crisis or problem that breaks through the systematic inertia and shakes up the deep organizational structures in place. In sum: groups can repeatedly cycle through the storming and performing stages, with revolutionary change taking place during short transitional windows. Periods of stability and periods of rapid change. While disruption and chaos and conflict are seen as inevitable in a group, those events can represent opportunities for innovation.

How to prevent bad decisions

Nominal group technique: ensuring all members participate fully Delphi technique: using questionairres instead of bringing invidiuals together to make a decision. Majority rule: greatest number of votes is selcted consensus:reaching a general agreement. Group decision support systems: computer based, able to combine communication and decision technologies to make better decisions. Knowledge management systems: share information is important, and spending reflects its reality decision trees: diagrams w yes or no questions until you reach the end of the tree.

Feedback

Refers to the degree to which people learn how effective they are being at work. Relationship between feedback and job performance is more controversial, employees need more than just feedback to feel motivated to perform better.

Anchoring bias example

Selecting a new computer based on a low price without analyzing what software, warranties, and peripherals come with it.

Job characteristics model: core job characteristics

Skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback

How organizations apply goal setting principles

Specific and measurable: "increasing sales by 10%" is specific. Performance tends to be higher. If they are not specific and measurable, you'll never know if you reached the goal. Aggressive: Effective goals are difficult, not easy. Aggressive goals also called stretch goals. Easy goals do not provide a challenge. Aggressive goals require people to work harder or smarter, performance tends to be dramatically higher. Realistic: Goals should be difficult, but be based on reality. If a goal is impossible, it will not have any motivational value. Impossible goals punish employees and is cruel and will demotivate employees. Time Bound: Goal should contain a statement on when it should be reached. Example: increasing sales by 10% by December."

Hindsight bias example

The former mayor of Wuhan has been criticized for not taking action earlier to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Presence of the 5 core job dimensions leads employees to experience 3 psychological states

They view their work as meaningful, they feel responsible for the outcomes, and they acquire knowledge of results. This leads to overall job satisfaction, internal motivation, higher performance, lower turnover. Also, higher levels of collective organizational engagement, which leads to higher firm performance. Meaningfulness is most important. Only 13% find their work meaningful. Five core job characteristics lead to three psychological states which leads to 5 outcomes.

Over confidence bias examples

in a culture study, participants were very sure about their predictions that Americans would be more risk-taking than Chinese.

Task Identity

refers to the degree to which a person is in charge of completing an identifiable piece of work from start to finish. Example: Google employees are given ownership over projects, and they work on it from beginning to end,.

skill variety

refers to the extent to which the job requires a person to utilize multiple high-level skills.A car wash person who cashiers, maintains car wash equipment, and and manages the chemicals would have high skill variety.

task significance

refers to whether a person's job substantially affects other people's work, health, or well-being. Example: janitor cleaning an office might find the job low in significance, but a janitor cleaning the floors in a hospital may see their role as essential in helping patients get better. Higher significance= higher performance and better at dealing with stressors.