COMR 329 - Teams and Organizational Culture

Composition

• Team size

• Member ability

• Member personality

• Member roles

• Member experiences/perspectives/knowledge

  • Diversity:Surface or Deep

Norms

• Acceptable standards of behaviours within a group that are shared by the group’s members

  • Performance, school, allocation of roles and resources

• Come from: explicit statements, critical events, initial patterns, carry-over

Team effectiveness

Facilitate the dynamic of the team, not dominate

• Composition and process > quality of decision

• Potential effectiveness (composition) - lost effectiveness (faulty process) > actual effectiveness

• Teams should better than the average of their members, but sometimes they do worse

Conflict

• Task conflict: teams need to argue about ideas

• Interpersonal conflict: avoid interpersonal conflict during discussion

  • Role of devil’s advocate

Accountability

Social loafing → the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working collectively than when working individually

Diffusion of responsibility

• Context in where everybody is working on the same thing

• “Bystander effect”

  • Thinking others will handle the situation

Team decision making

• Composition → knowledge, skills, perspective, experience

• Process → differentiation, integration

Pros and Cons of Teams

Pros

• More resources

• Potential for higher quality, more creative solutions

Cons

• More process issues

• Potential for inefficiency, poorer decision quality and more member dissatisfaction

What should you ask yourself before working with a team?

• Do you need one?

• What should it look like?

• Improve team process

Organizational culture

Shared social knowledge about rules, norms and values. Important for guiding members’ attitudes and behaviours

Person - organization fit

Where does the individual fit in?

Aspects of culture

Layers

• Observable artifacts → visible and measurable aspects of culture

• Espoused values and norms → rules of behaviours and values of what one believes in

• Underlying assumptions

Types: Very many (ones in book are just examples - don’t need to know them)

Strength: Degree to which its shared → how much do the ppl in a group agree on the norms?

NOTE: a strong culture does not equate to positive ones (eg: there are groups where ppl think its acceptable to commit crimes)

Strategic Alignment

Culture Creation & Maintenance

Attraction-selection Attrition

Socialization

Symbolic actions

Shared organization stories

Leader Modeling

Attraction-selection attrition

• Attracts certain ppl depending on a organization’s reputation

• Selection based on fit/qualifications

  • Measurable, expertise and selection based on the ppl you have

  • Choosing to stay or leave depending on if you fit in the culture/environment or not

Socialization

• Institutions/environments shaping one’s values

  • Socialized to adopt the norms/values of a company

Symbolic actions

Something that represents/communicates values

eg: logos, symbols and stories

Leader modeling

• Leaders impacting others’ behaviours'

• Influencing norms and values of your company