Monday, October 24, 2011

Chapter 4: Group Project - Organizational Behavior

Problem summary:
Your company is growing to 150 employees.  Being an international company, you have excellent employees from many culture background.  However, since about 1 year ago, they naturally break into ethnic groups A, B and C.  The groups started to develop conflicts and hurt company communications and collaboration.  e.g. group A believes group B are too aggressive, group B thinks group C are too selfish, group C talks about how lazy group A is.

As the leadership, your group need to solve the problem.  Apply the theory and the practices in the textbook to design a brief solution (200-500 words).  Insert the solution to your learning journal.

Solution outline:
Problem definition: Want Got Gaps
- Ethnic conflicts among three groups (A, B, C)
Level of Problem: individual, group, whole organization
- It shows the problems are on a group level but might be organizational
Action planning:
- As leaders it is important to take the information gained from reflection on the parameters above and construct a detailed action plan.
APCFB Model (Assumptions, Perceptions, Conclusions, Feelings, Behaviors)
- The multi-layered perspective of the APCFB model allows us to dig deeper to diagnose the source of the problem.
Engage goal congruence
- Rally employees to a common goal to realign their efforts.
Motivation: expectancy theory, job design
- Motivate a change.
Leadership VCM Model (Vision, Commitment, Management skills)
Performance appraisal: coaching and development, reprimands, leveraging power structures (referent, legitimate, expert), MBO/MBWA

-Try solving this problem by redistributing group members into inter-ethnic teams, or cross-functional teams that include members from each group.
- Redefine affiliations along non-ethnic boundaries.
- Highlight organizational core values or principles that emphasize embracing diversity and set a standard for how employees and group communication.
-MBO: everyone here for a common goal, emphasize that to minimize ethnic conflict.
- Employee perception survey to guide remedial action.
- Use performance appraisal process to coach employees into better collaborative habits.
-Assertiveness is not necessarily a negative thing. Apply job design to best match the needs of the business with motivating work in a way the diminishes ethnic conflict (interethnic teams, systems-based performance evaluation - rather than individual or team)
- Use employee evaluation to address other groups’ perceptions of each other to optimize employee deployment and job design.
- Tie employee performance to compensations to give more incentives compensation can be monetary and non-monetary.
- Understand cultural context for each group.
- Apply active listening techniques to understand root causes of inter-group misunderstandings.
- Can bring them all together to enhance communication once the manager understands what’s going on to cause conflict between the groups.
-Tie discussion back to time when the group were integrated and working together well.

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