Managing people

Tutorial 3: Chapter 3 (Week 4)

2. What mental models do you have about attending a university or college lecture? Are these mental models helpful? Could any of these mental models hold you back from achieving the full benefits of the lecture?
To achieve our goals with some degree of predictability and sanity, road maps are used.
Road maps (mental models): are internal representations of the external world.
Consist of visual or relational images in our mind, such as what the classroom looks like or
Conceptually what happens when we submit an assignment late.
Rely on it to make sense of our environment through perceptual grouping
Models fill in the missing pieces, including causal connection among events
Example:
mental model about attending a class lecture or seminar assumptions or expectations about where the instructor and students seat themselves in the room, how they ask and answer questions
Create a mental image of a class in progress
1st class of the semester: would expect that lecturers would go through the topic guide and what is expected outcome of this topic.
Expect that lecturer would start the discussion of the tutorials before going through the lecture.
An important role in sense making, yet they also make it difficult to see the world in different ways.
Example:
accounting professionals tend to see corporate problems in terms of accounting solutions marketing professionals see the same problem from a marketing perspective
Blocks our recognition of new opportunities
How do we change it?
Developed through several years of experience and reinforcement.
To constantly question them and ask ourselves about the assumption we make.
Working with people from diverse background, cultures and different area of expertise will make us realise our own assumption
These assumptions may hold me back.
If I presume that the first lecture would be on going through the topic guide when there is a tutorial and I did not prepare.
Or when I ought to have read the chapter before attending the first lesson so that I am able to participate.

3. Do you define yourself in terms of the university or college you attend? Why or why not? What are the implications of your answer for your university?

We define ourselves to a large extent by the groups to which we belong or have an emotional attachment.
Social identity theory explains the dynamics of social perception – how we perceive others.
Influenced by three activities in the process of forming and maintaining our social identity
Categorisation
Categorising people into distinct group
Remove that person’s individuality and instead see them as a prototypical representative of the group ‘Australians’.
Allows you to distinguish Australians from people who live in NZ, HK and other countries in that region
Homogenisation
Tend to think that people within each group are very similar to each other
Australians collectively have similar attitudes and characteristics
Every individual is unique but we tend to lose sight of this fact when thinking about our social identity and how we compare to people in other social groups
Differentiation
Fulfils our inherent need to have a distinct and positive self-convept.
We do more than categorise people and homogenise them
Differentiate groups by assigning more favourable characteristics to people in our groups than to people in other groups
It’s often subtle but can escalate into a ‘good-guy-bad-guy’ contrast when groups are in conflict with each other
“Hello-kitty” people

6. Describe a situation in which you used behaviour modification to influence someone’s behaviour. What specifically did you do? What was the result?

7. Why are organisations moving toward the use of experiential approaches to learning? What conditions are required for success?
Another way that employees learn is through direct experience
Most tacit knowledge and skills are acquired through experience as well as observation.
Begin when we engage with the environment; then reflect on the experience and form theories about how the world around us works
Most important ingredient is a strong learning orientation within the organisation and its employees.
People with a global mindset have a strong learning orientation that they welcome new learning opportunities, actively experiment with new ideas and practices, view reasonable mistakes as a natural part of the learning process and continuously question past practices.
Encourage employees to question long held assumptions or mental models and to actively ‘unlearn’ practices that are no longer ideal