Exam 12: Teams: Processes and Communication

Burt, Ryan, and Heather are members of the marketing team at Model Industries, Inc. (MII), responsible for generating ideas for new marketing strategies. Burt has done a phenomenal job in gathering information necessary to help the team understand the desires and needs of the client. All things being equal, Heather has the best record of making good recommendations to Jeremy, vice president of marketing. Ryan can make some good recommendations, but sometimes his recommendations are completely off base. Usually, Jeremy pays careful attention to what Heather has to say, but generally does not pay much attention to what Ryan proposes. In addition to Jeremy, Heather has been meeting with the vice president of operations and other members of the executive team to gain support for their request to increase the marketing budget. Heather is engaging in which of the boundary-spanning processes?

A special surveillance and rescue team is being deployed to counter the menace of pirates in the Indian Ocean. Nick, Sid, Leah, and Kevin are the core members of the team. Nick was elected as the leader of the team. Sid is responsible for monitoring the team's progress toward its goals. Kevin took on the role of motivator and confidence builder for the team. This team has worked together before and has developed a high level of common understanding regarding the team and its mission. Members also strongly believe that the team can be effective across a variety of situations and tasks. As a standard practice, before deployment, the team members observe how other members perform their roles by shadowing and going through simulations. The team's high level of common understanding refers to which of the following?

In a network structure, where more communication flows through fewer members, the degree of centralization is higher.

Training that provides students or employees with the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to be a high performing team member are considered ______ because they can be used in many different situations rather than in just one or two specific situations.

When members of a team develop strong emotional bonds to other members of the team and to the team itself, it refers to _____, which tends to foster high levels of motivation and commitment to the team.

Which of the following refers to the degree to which members of the team make useful recommendations to the leader?

Getting more from the team than you would expect according to the capabilities of its individual members is called:

It is easy to keep an accurate account of the contribution of each member in a team.

Noise increases the effort that the communicators need to exert to make the communication process work.

Five students from the KLM School have been selected to form the team that would represent the school in the National Science contest. They must come up with a creative project. These students' first meeting was face-to-face and involved each of them suggesting as many ideas as they could think of without analyzing or critiquing them at that time. The activity that the students engaged in is referred to as ______.

Mark, David, Tia, and Ashley are team members in a computer programming class. They have been assigned the task of creating a computerized payroll system involving multiple programs. Mark and Tia worked very hard and created programs that worked well. David and Ashley, however, did not work as hard as they could and created programs with numerous errors. This resulted in a payroll system that could not be implemented. The team's poor performance that was a result of David and Ashley not doing their best can be termed as:

Process gain is often driven by production blocking.

Leaders do a better job considering recommendations and making final decisions when they do it together with team members.

_____ is normally conducted by a consultant and intended to facilitate the development of team processes related to goal setting, interpersonal relations, problem solving, and role clarification.

Define team process, and differentiate between process gain and process loss.

Team potency is higher in teams that have found success in the past.

Cohesiveness tends to promote higher levels of team performance.

Team process training helps a team function and perform more effectively as an intact unit.

Briefly describe creative behavior and decision-making taskwork processes.

Tran needs to increase his team's creativity. He calls them in to a meeting and tells them they are to shout out as many ideas as they can think of for a new project. No one is to analyze or criticize any ideas while this exercise is going on. Tran is using the brainstorming technique.