Exam 8: Team Dynamics

Brooks's law is also called the "mythical man-month."

The norming stage of team development is marked by interpersonal conflict as team members compete for leadership and other positions on the team.

One of the rules of brainstorming is that no one is allowed to piggyback or build on the ideas of other team members.

Constructive conflict encourages participants to re-examine their assumptions and logic.

Informal groups exist primarily to complete tasks for the organization that management doesn't know about.

In most self-directed work teams,the supervisor assigns tasks that individual team members perform.

A large bank wanted to develop a more team-focused culture,so it put all departments and branches through a series of three-day team building sessions.These expensive sessions represented a combination of wilderness-based trust-building (such as trust falls and leaderless problem solving)and sessions in which employees revealed their personal experiences and problems.Six months after the workforce had completed this training,the bank discovered that most departments and branches operated very much as they had before the team building program.There was little team culture and employees worked together with varying degrees of proficiency.Moreover,several employees had left the firm because they were upset about revealing their personal lives to colleagues.Identify two types of team building problems that would explain the general failure of this team building intervention.

Conforming,performing,and reforming are all:

Many potentially valuable ideas never get presented to the group because individuals think they are silly and would make them look equally silly to the team.

In team dynamics,process losses are best described as:

Describe three (3)reasons why employees join informal groups in organizational settings.

Organizational behaviour scholars have concluded that employees always work better in teams than alone.

Employees in a department are considered a team only when they directly interact and coordinate work activities with each other.

You have just been appointed as leader of a new shipping and receiving unit in your organization.You have been given considerable latitude to select team members from among the existing workforce throughout the organization.However,you are aware of a deeply embedded practice in many areas of the organization where employees engage in horseplay by racing the forklifts.This practice is costly (some forklifts and shipped goods have been damaged).Moreover,there is a safety risk where the forklifts could overturn or run over another employee.Based on your knowledge of managing team norms,describe four (4)actions to minimize the likelihood that this practice would occur in your new team.Your answer will also explain why each action might be effective.

An important rule in brainstorming is that no one is allowed to evaluate or criticize another team member's ideas.

The three main foundations of trust are:

Groupthink is less likely to occur when the team leader is not too opinionated.

One problem with electronic brainstorming is that it:

Self-directed work teams:

The higher the level of task interdependence,the greater the need for individuals working alone than together in teams.