- Description
MGT 312T Wk 4 – Apply: Effective Groups and Teams
Linking Influence Tactics with Outcome
Influence tactics are used in order to attempt to affect and change behaviors of others. This activity is important because, as a future manager and OB practitioner, you must have a good understanding of these tactics in order to strengthen your chances of success.
The goal of this activity is for you to link different influence tactics with various outcomes of the influence process.
Read each description. Match the outcomes with the best-fitting descriptions. Pay close attention—some descriptions might fit more than one outcome, but there is only one way they all combine to be correct.
- Building commitment
- Short-lived impacts
- Persuasion
- Accept change
- Long-term impacts
- Commitment
A large measure of interpersonal interaction involves attempts to influence others, including parents, bosses, coworkers, spouses, children, teachers, friends, and customers. Researchers developed a useful body of research that generated nine influence tactics. This activity is important because managers need to understand both how they influence and are influenced by others.
The goal of this activity is for you to demonstrate your knowledge of the nine influence tactics.
Read each description. Match the influence tactics with the corresponding descriptions.
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Empowering a Team of Your Peers1
In general, exceptional performers will find themselves promoted to higher positions; these promotions generally mean that individuals will now also be supervising former peers. This activity is important because in the process of embracing a position of power, new managers also need to learn how to empower their former peers.
The goal of this activity is to show how part of being an effective manager is empowering your peers.
Read the case about Jennifer’s promotion to supervisor. Then, using the 3-step problem-solving approach, answer the questions that follow.
Jennifer was a highly regarded and top-performing marketing associate at an international pharmaceutical company. Due to her exceptional performance and other skills and abilities, she was promoted to manager. This transition meant she was now the supervisor of her former peers.
Her first assignment was a new product to be launched in a foreign market. To formulate and ultimately execute a successful product launch, Jennifer and her team would need to gather market data, learn and share information about the competition, analyze financial details, coordinate with other product managers, hire and work with an advertising agency, and secure regulatory approval.
Jennifer had personal experience and success doing most of these things, but now she had to do them on a much larger scale and in the context of a team she managed. Being a high performer, she was determined to get all the details right. Therefore, when any element was late, done poorly, or just not up to her expectations, she stepped in and did it herself. Her work life quickly expanded to 15-hour days and weekends.
Jennifer’s involvement in so many aspects of the product launch prevented her from mentoring and developing her team members in the ways they clearly needed. They seemed to lack a sense of accountability, knowing that if their work wasn’t up to speed the boss would step in and complete or correct it. Jennifer noticed this and feared her team was not learning to produce high-quality work on its own. Not only would this hurt the current project, but other departments and teams would come to know it and be less willing to work with them in the future, damaging Jennifer’s own performance and interests and those of her team.
Jennifer was extremely reluctant to go to her boss for help, because she had been told she’d earned her new position, and it was a test for another role with still greater responsibility.
Assuming you are Jennifer, what would you do?
Jennifer is confronted with low team performance; which of the following would you recommend to overcome this problem?
Multiple Choice
- Have a better work-life balance
- Build a coalition
- Consult with her boss about what to do
- Utilize self-promotion
- Implement psychological empowerment
Jennifer’s team members are producing poor work, but instead of addressing the poor work, she is just fixing it herself. What team-level process from the organizing framework needs to be taking place, but is not?
Multiple Choice
- Relationship quality
- Conflict and negotiation
- Performance management
- Team performance
- Stress
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Optimizing Team Performance at Google1
Effective teams can make the difference between a business’s success and failure. This exercise is important because in order for managers to build effective teams, they must recognize the strengths and weaknesses of potential team members and develop their teams accordingly.
The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate the positive impact of effective team building.
Read the case about the role of Project Aristotle at Google; then, using the 3-step problem-solving approach, answer the questions that follow.
Google is well on its way to ruling the universe. Whether this is its actual goal or not, the company’s short- and long-term success depend on the performance of its work teams. Realizing this, Google applied its immense human, technological, and financial resources to finding out what makes top-performing teams so effective. Despite its legendary achievements, the company knew that teams vary considerably in terms of their performance, member satisfaction, and level of cohesion and conflict. To understand why, it did what it does best—collect and analyze data. It created Project Aristotle and spent millions of dollars to gather mountains of data from 180 teams across the company. The only thing more surprising than what it found was what it didn’t find.
What Did Google Expect to Find?
Google sliced and diced the team data looking for patterns that would distinguish the most successful from the less successful teams. It expected that some combination of team member characteristics would reveal the optimal team profile. Such a profile or pattern never emerged. Google examined seemingly everything, such as team composition (team member personality, experience, age, gender, and education), how frequently teammates ate lunch together and with whom, their social networks within the company, how often they socialized outside the office, whether they shared hobbies, and team managers’ leadership styles.
It also tested the belief that the best teams were made up of the best individual contributors, or that they paired introverts with introverts and friends with friends. To the researchers’ amazement, these assumptions were simply popular wisdom. In sum, “the ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.” Even more puzzling was that “two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness,”2 said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division.
What Did the Company Actually Find?
It turned out it wasn’t so much who was in the group but the way the group functioned or operated that made the performance difference. Group norms—expected behaviors for individuals and the larger team—helped explain why two groups with similar membership function very differently. But this finding was only the beginning. Now Google needed to identify the operative norms.
Members of the Project Aristotle team began looking for team member data referring to factors such as unwritten rules, treatment of fellow team members, ways they communicated in meetings, and ways they expressed value and concern for one another. Dozens of potential norms emerged, but unfortunately the norms of one successful team often conflicted with those of another.
To help explain this finding, the Project Aristotle team reviewed existing research on teams and learned that work teams that showed success on one task often succeed at most. Those that performed poorly on one task typically performed poorly on others. This helped confirm their conclusion that norms were the key. However, they still couldn’t identify the particular norms that boosted performance or explain the seemingly conflicting norms of similarly successful teams.
Then came a breakthrough. After intense analysis, two behaviors emerged. First, all high-functioning teams allowed members to speak in roughly the same proportion. Granted, they did this in many different ways, from taking turns to having a moderator orchestrate discussions, but the end result was the same—everybody got a turn. Second, the members of successful teams seemed to be good at sensing other team members’ emotions, through either their tone of voice, their expressions, or other nonverbal cues.
Having identified these two key norms, the Project Aristotle team was able to conclude that many other team inputs and processes were far less important or didn’t matter at all. Put another way, teams could be very different in a host of ways, but so long as everybody got and took a turn when communicating, and members were sensitive to each other, then each had a chance of being a top-performing team. With this knowledge in hand, now came the hard part. How to instill these norms in work teams at Google?
How could Google instill the appropriate communication practices, as well as build empathy into their teams’ dynamics?
What is the main issue in this Google case?
Multiple Choice
- What Google found about working in teams versus working individually, via Project Aristotle
- Differences in group and team performance
- Lack of minority dissent at Google.
- The composition of Project Aristotle team members
- Inability to identify effective group norms
In order for Google to implement its findings from Project Aristotle, and instill the norms of high-performing teams, it should promote which of the following?
Multiple Choice
- Focus on group survival
- Clarify central values
- Write formal rules
- Avoid embarrassing teammates
- Focus on the composition of teams
Google discovered that all high-functioning teams allowed members to speak in roughly the same proportion. Which maintenance role would be responsible for encouraging group members to participate in discussions?
Multiple Choice
- Energizer
- Information seeker
- Harmonizer
- Follower
- GatekeeperCorrect
Which of the “3 Cs of Effective Teams” did Google find to be the least important?
Multiple Choice
- Capacity
- Communication
- Charters and strategies
- Collaboration
- Composition