Methods2

CHAPTER8
Meetings and Teams:
Conﬂicts and Interventions
Grifﬁn Harris
Erica Howard
Rachel Jermansky
Thomas Jackson

Monday, October 24, 2011

Case Study: Gerald Sweeney

• Senior Managing Director, likes efﬁciency and punctuality

• Meetings are a waste – skips one of the weekly Wednesday meetings

• New procedure introduced

• Subordinates left in dark; therefore, punished by Sweeney’s superiors


“Meetings, Bloody Meetings” (182)

• “...cul-de-sac where ideas are lured and quietly strangled” (181)
– Sir Barnett Cocks

• Most Problems: Waste of time and/or inconvenient interruption


Values of Meetings

• To announce organizational changes and keep employees up to date

• To produce solutions and to increase the number of different solutions to
organizational problems

• To gain “buy-in” or acceptance of a decision through participation

• To “cultivate members as individuals” and create group cohesion.


Teams
“Twice the work, half the credit.”


Primary Tension

• “normal jitters and feelings of uneasiness experienced when groups ﬁrst
congregate”

• First days of classes

• Anxiety over

• workload/work topic,

• ability to perform, or

• communication apprehension: anxiety about communicating, in general,

• unpreparedness

• team/individual past negative experience


Secondary Tension

• “the stress and strain that occurs in a group later in its development.”

• Working in a group for a project

• Procedural: process of interacting with group is unproductive. Still hopeful.

• Equity: perception of inequality

• Disproportionate share of responsibilities or ignored by power holders

• Affective: personal dislike among individuals

• Clouds mental vision

• Substantive: “positive” legitimate conﬂict

• promote creativity, sharing of ideas, tests group strength

• should try to create disagreement to spur creativity and reach best product


Counterproductive Group Tendencies

• Conformity

• Ethnocentrism

• Inadequate and Hidden Agendas

• Competition vs Cooperation

• Tolerating High-Level Team Abstraction


Conformity

• Group Think

• The Asch Effect

• Goal Lining

• All three are threats to team success

• All Create an illusion of group support

• Collaborative interaction is diminished


Groupthink

• Irving Janis popularized the term

• Tendency for groups to make a decision without considering
alternatives

• Reduces creativity and spontaneity in meetings, resulting in
shortsighted solutions


The Asch Effect

• Solomon Asch Experiment

• 4 out of 5 yielded to the pressures at least 1 time out of the 12


Goal Lining

• Reach the goal is the only objective

• What is wrong with this?


Cultural Elitism

• Ethnocentrism: “Tendency to think that our own culture is
superior to other cultures”

• Affective and Equity Tensions


Inadequate Agendas

• Problems with Agendas

• Created to provide an illusion of structure and order instead of actually
facilitating structure and order

• Ignored

• Disregarded


Hidden Agendas

• Personal/Political meeting objectives that are not shared with the entire group

• EXAMPLE: Goalof department is to ﬁnd out what resources can be cut and
employees share things or hide things that may beneﬁt them personally


Competition vs Cooperation

• Cooperation facilitates effective communication

• High ego-involved individuals create competitio

• Cooperation differs from conformity


Tolerating High-Level Team Abstraction

• Vague Vocabulary

• EXAMPLE: Beneﬁts, success & love

• Each member of the group may deﬁne “success” differently


Intervention

• Tool of technique used to alter behavior that would likely not be altered had
there been no intervention


Types of Interventions


Buzz Groups

• Used to increase participation and decrease potential for problems to equity
conﬂict


Brainstorming and Brainwriting

• Idea generating intervention that involves indentiﬁcation and recording of
ideas relevant to topic being discussed

• Adam and Golanes say groups should take a break after brainstorming polling
brainstorming – Leader polls group members.

• This technique is good because it makes everyone participate

• Brainwriting: individual writes down ideas and draw from list during
brainstorming session


Normal Group Technique (NGT)

• Developed by Delbecq and Van de Van

• Participants write down their solutions to a problem

• Ideas are expressed, which are then written on a board

• Leader reviews ideas

• After clariﬁcations, participants rank top ﬁve ideas

• The votes are then tallied, and the ideas with more votes are discussed


Problem Census

• Members are polled initially regarding their individual perspective and
perceptions of problem

• Able to derive (before beginning) a better sense of task at hand and clearer
method of how group intends to meet project goals


Risk Technique

• Requires participants to play the role of devils advocate

• After team decided on solution, each member plays devil’s advocate and
identiﬁes a risk with that solution.

• The risks are recorded and proposal reevaluated.

• Most times reevaluation doesn’t result in elimination of proposal.


General Procedural Model (GPM)

• Combines many of the techniques

• Steps:

• 1) Identify the problem: clariﬁes the objective for meeting (good idea to
use problem census)

• 2) Brainstorm

• 3) Evaluation

• 4) Selection of best idea: tries to come up with best solution (should
consider risk technique)

• 5) Put solution into effect: decide when and how this happens


Making Interventions Work

• Interventions are only as good as the people who attempt to use them.
Intelligence, knowledge and communication skills do not always guarantee
effective teamwork

• In order for an intervention to work group members need to become
participant-observers

• Participant-observers are those in the group who concurrently participates
and observes the provess of participation. They will comment on items on the
agenda and also ensure that the agenda is followed


Leadership Responsibilities

• Plan for the meeting. Is the meeting necessary and what will be discussed,

• Get the meeting started. Don’t waste too much time at the beginning with
small talk.

• Keep the discussion on track. Stay on topic, meetings usually have time limits
and you don’t want to have to rush at the end.

• Summarize periodically

• Solicit comments from taciturn members. Just because a member of the
group isn’t talking doesn’t mean that they have nothing to share.


Leadership Responsibilities (Cont.)

• Curtail verbose members. Don’t let one member of the group monopolize the
discussion.

• Employ Interventions. The leader should reduce negative group tensions.

• Conclude the meeting. Summarize what you have discussed and make other
important announcements regarding the next meeting.

• Plan for the next session. Figure out what will be discussed and handle any
logistics.


Leadership Styles

• Authoritarian leaders are non-democratic and dictorial. They would determine
a meeting agenda.

• Laissez-faire leaders have a “hands off” approach and believe that the group
can guide itself. They assume that if an agenda is needed, the group would
decide to create one.

• Democractic leaders seek input and advice from the other group members.
Decisions that they make are done after considering concerns of the group.
They would seek input for the agenda and then create it themselves.


Collective Presentations

• Team presentation have to appear as one presentation rather than disjointed
parts that donʼt ﬂow

• There are 3 categories of collective presentations

• Panel Discussions

• Symposia

• Team Presentations


Panel Discussions

• A group of individuals discussing a topic and are concurrently observed by an
audience.

• Members can begin with a prepared statement, but most comments are
impromptu and reactions to what others have said

• Usually have moderators to keep the conversation moving.


Symposia

• A collection of individual presentations

• There is no collective work by the participants

• Participants will usually have differing perspectives on the same topic, in
order to help increase discussion.


Team Presentations

• A collective effort to a single presentation

• The difference from other forms of presentation is the members will have
worked together prior to the presentation in order to present a cohesive
message.


Characteristics of a Quality Presentation

• The introduction is clear, descriptive, inclusive, and engaging

• The presentation content comprehensively addresses the charge and
describes the response.In an oral presentation, each person knows what
others will be saying.

• Transitional statements have been considered and created that link one
section to another.

• The conclusion will summarize the entirety of the report and not simply the
last segment.


Familiarity with All Material

• There will be no undesired content repetition.

• There will be no unexpected contradictory statements.

• There will be no surprising omissions.

• Members will be able to make intelligent references to other person’s
segments.

• There will be no sections that are clearly superﬁcial when juxtaposed with
others of signiﬁcant depth.

• Individual members and the group as a whole will adhere to time limits.


Steps to Achieving Quality Presentation

• Use a modiﬁcation of the general procedural model technique.

• Divide responsibilities and prepare individual outlines.

• Review Outlines.

• Discuss sequence and transitions.

• Identify message style.

• Plan the introduction and the conclusion.

• Practice individually.

• Practice the team presentation.

• Evaluation.

•

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