William J. Rothwell
Read the following vignettes. Take out a pen and a piece of paper and indicate what you would do if faced with each one.
Vignettes
Vignette One: In a call center, a work group is having trouble with one team member. Josephine Smithson, a call center representative, has worked for the company for five years and was moved to the call center several years before. But she is a disruptive influence. She is always spreading rumors about people, and she seems to thrive on creating unnecessary conflict and drama. When she is confronted by her team mates about the rumors she spreads, she denies having anything to do with them. Yet everyone knows she is lying. Team members refuse to socialize with her, and she does not speak up in team meetings to offer solutions to problems facing the team.
Vignette Two: A manufacturing plant that produces spray deodorant recently reorganized into self-directed work teams. No team has a supervisor. Each team is limited to seven people. The assembly lines in the plant are organized so that each line can be staffed with a team of seven.
Not all teams are equally productive. When team members in the plant were surveyed, they claimed that one problem is that team members do not work together effectively. Company managers decided that it would be wise to hire an external consultant to work with the teams to diagnose their problems with interpersonal interactions and find ways to solve them. The consultant decided to work from a distance with the work teams.
Vignette Three: A large advertising agency has teams working on advertising campaigns for different companies. One team consists of three people who work in the office, located in the inner city of a large metropolitan area, and four people who work from home. One person who works from home is on the west coast of the United States, while the other team members are on the east coast of the United States. While team members working from home favor this arrangement, the people who work in the office feel that they are not adequately recognized for the sacrifices they are making by traveling each day to the office. Each office worker often must travel more than an hour on trains and buses to arrive at the office.
Vignette Four: A large company has organized its global engineering department into teams working across borders. One team works in Europe, one team works in the United States, and one team works in Asia. As the work day ends in one part of the world, it is beginning in another part of the world. By working this way, the teams can slash the time it takes to get engineering product innovations to market. Cutting the time it takes to get products to market provides a key competitive advantage for the company, which faces stiff competition.
When a team in one part of the world meets with a team in another part of the world, the teams face technology challenges. These complicate business meetings online that may be punctuated by internet disruptions, power outages, and momentary conversation gaps. Some team members want to participate by video conference in various platforms (Skype, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Webex, and others); some work on mobile phones, while others work on laptops, desktops, and tablets; and some work from their homes, while others participate in company conference rooms. Cultural issues can complicate group dynamics because, in some cultures, women are less likely to participate in a group when older or more experienced males are in the meetings, and in some cultures, younger people are less likely to participate when older, more experienced or more educated team members speak.
The team leaders would like to explore ways to improve group dynamics despite the challenges posed by national cultures, technology, and worksite venues. They decide to work with a consultant to facilitate improvements in group dynamics. Their ultimate goal is to increase group productivity by making their virtual meetings more productive.
Vignette Five: In one company, a work team is located in the headquarters. But, due to personal issues, the team leader must work from home. Every Monday morning the team comes together virtually for a meeting to discuss issues associated with the numerous projects on which the team is working.
The team leader makes a phone call to a conference room where other team members are gathered together. The team leader cannot see participants because the meeting is always conducted by teleconference. The team leader sends a meeting agenda to all team members before the meeting begins, and she leads the team through the agenda item-by-item. As she does so, other team members play videogames on their cell phones or tablets, throw paper airplanes, shoot rubber bands at each other, douse each other with water guns, play basketball with wads of paper thrown at waste baskets, and engage in many other juvenile activities they would never dream of doing if their team leader could see them. Periodically the team leaders will say something like, “Is everything all right there?” When she says that, the other team member roll their eyes dramatically, silently laugh into their hands, look at the ceiling like the team leader is walking on the moon, shake their heads, and then chant in polite unison, “Everything is okay here!”
How can the team dynamic be improved?
Vignette Six: A work group consists of seven people working from their homes. Every morning the work groups come together in a video conference of one hour or less to discuss their work progress. While the work moves smoothly for the group, the meetings do not move so smoothly. The reason: several team members face distractions during virtual meetings. One group member has an elderly parent living at home, and the parent often interrupts the team to ask for things in an obvious bid to get attention. A second group member has a small child at home, and the child wants to participate in the meeting but grows noisy and disruptive. A third group member has a cat that jumps on the group member’s laptop keyboard at random times during the meeting—and that sometimes leads to disconnection.
How can the team dynamic be improved?
