The Lumen and Absorb Teams
Subject: The Lumen and Absorb teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering
Case Analysis
Organizational Behavior
Reporter: Mei, Qiaobing
Introduction
CCE was an U.S. subsidiary of PPQ Worldwide Industries. Lumen team and Absorb team were two project teams in Burke’s Polymers Department, which was one of three in CTD of CCE. Both Lumen and Absorb teams were under the same business situation, being confronted with companywide downsizing, and having similar responsibility, uniform size and form of the team. However, after two months of operation, results for the two teams turned out to be totally different in terms of the creativity, motivation level and performance.
Burke, the department manager, was really worried about this phenomenon and tried to figure it out so as to secure smoother operation and better performance in the future. Therefore, he consulted Mckinty, an organizational psychologist, who adopted unique approaches to get a deep research into the organizations based on two weeks quantitative and qualitative dairy data collection.
Analysis
As we all know, in general, most teams will go through four stages when coming together for the first time. The four stages are forming, storming, norming and performing. In this case, Lumen team appeared to be in the “norming” stage while Absorb team was still in the “storming” stage.
It is apparent that members in Lumen team understood (that they need to work together to accomplish team goals) the necessity of teamwork for accomplishing team goals and they did work in close collaboration. In the case we find that when members in Lumen team worked together, every member knew exactly what she/he should do throughout the process, and the procedure run efficiently and smoothly.
On the contrary, if we take a look at the Absorb team, we discover many conflicts within the team. The members were reluctant to take Chip’s leadership, thinking it is a waste of time to
Case Analysis
Organizational Behavior
Reporter: Mei, Qiaobing
Introduction
CCE was an U.S. subsidiary of PPQ Worldwide Industries. Lumen team and Absorb team were two project teams in Burke’s Polymers Department, which was one of three in CTD of CCE. Both Lumen and Absorb teams were under the same business situation, being confronted with companywide downsizing, and having similar responsibility, uniform size and form of the team. However, after two months of operation, results for the two teams turned out to be totally different in terms of the creativity, motivation level and performance.
Burke, the department manager, was really worried about this phenomenon and tried to figure it out so as to secure smoother operation and better performance in the future. Therefore, he consulted Mckinty, an organizational psychologist, who adopted unique approaches to get a deep research into the organizations based on two weeks quantitative and qualitative dairy data collection.
Analysis
As we all know, in general, most teams will go through four stages when coming together for the first time. The four stages are forming, storming, norming and performing. In this case, Lumen team appeared to be in the “norming” stage while Absorb team was still in the “storming” stage.
It is apparent that members in Lumen team understood (that they need to work together to accomplish team goals) the necessity of teamwork for accomplishing team goals and they did work in close collaboration. In the case we find that when members in Lumen team worked together, every member knew exactly what she/he should do throughout the process, and the procedure run efficiently and smoothly.
On the contrary, if we take a look at the Absorb team, we discover many conflicts within the team. The members were reluctant to take Chip’s leadership, thinking it is a waste of time to