Summary: Team Informative Presentation

Initially, 4 P’s and a J was merely a group, just five people assembled together with a unifying relationship of being in the same Organizational Behavior discussion section. During the fourth week of the semester, a meeting to begin on the “Team Informative Presentation” began to change this environment into a more team-based feeling. An idea about performing a skit for our presentation excited us all and drove us towards interacting to achieve the common objective of giving our audience an original and funny presentation. This key aspect towards the development as a team also provided us with morale, a congruent motivation because of the desire to achieve a common goal.

Recently, more detailed and demanding assignments, such as the
“Performance & Project Plan,” required more team-based characteristics. Throughout our initial meetings to broadly discuss our projects and the styles in which we wanted to complete them, we all realized that from prior team experiences, every one of us agreed that division of labor was most appropriate. Having lunch together and meeting at the beginning of the semester not only was a great way for introducing ourselves, but also provided for feedback on what tasks each team member is better at. In preparing our team contract, roles were assigned according to these observations and the abilities each member has. We analyzed how the MBTA types are distributed among our team, which allowed us to determine who is, for example, prone to paying attention to minimal details in deliverables. So far, the team has done excellently by dividing the work and assigning roles, such as that of a Gatekeeper, Coordinator, and Mediator. Every team member’s very noticeable need for achievement (nACH) and need for affiliation (nAFF) also influences enormously the functioning of the team. Our team members are motivated to provide the best input yet at the same time, interact in a manner that trust is maintained between all of us.

It is essential that teams in general create some sort of written or verbal contract that prevents any misunderstandings or disruptions of the development and functioning of the team. Our team’s contract provides for very detailed guidelines that avoid problems such as that of the “Forgotten Group Member.” Also, seeing that our team is basically a network organization itself, we have no problems of communicating with each other. One of the key factors of effective team work is managing time. Our team, for example, communicates largely via e-mail and makes sure that everyone can make it to a meeting and that a team room is booked, no matter how many e-mails each of us has to send. For the future, it would be very important, for instance, that the team as whole visited our company for the final project. From this point on, it is crucial that we maintain this style of division of work and proper allocation of roles. To do so, all we basically have to do is to assure that every team member meets the team calendar deadlines. In the case that our team did face a downfall or make mistakes, it is most important, ultimately, that the team learns to reflect on experience. For example, initially our perceptions about certain team members might have been driven by stereotypes. But as members’ actions proved these stereotypes quite the contrary, new approaches and attitudes were taken. Thus once a group develops into a team, the key aspects of the functioning of the team are motivation, which pushes interaction and therefore gives rise to reflection and the learning of team dynamics.