Everest Essay Wendy

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MGMT1001

Assignment 2 –

Everest Report

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Executive Summary

The Everest Simulation is an online simulation that mirrors the dynamic team environment in an organisation. This simulation aims to symbolise the integration and use of different strategies in group structure, leadership and communication to effectively evaluate key learning experiences. The simulation arbitrarily delegates roles to different members of the group, a leader,

environmentalist, photographer, marathoner, and observer, where individual and team goals and responsibilities are thrust upon them depending on their role. The ability to fulfil each role and score a high team performance through goal attainment is determined through the strength of a team’s collaborative and analytical process in decision making, allocating medical and oxygen supplies, solving weather conditions and resolving conflict resolution in prioritising personal and team goals. The Goals on Track (seen in Appendix) portrays our team’s personal and goal achievement of 74% in first simulation to a significant improvement to 94% in the second simulation. Thus the report analyses the reasons of these results and reflects on individual insights and team experiences directly linked to the key aspects of group structure, communication and leadership.

In the personal reflection of my experience through the lens of Groups & Teams, an analysis is provided in regards to the group structure of goals and norms, effect of conflict, conformity and our team learning process. Furthermore, these learning outcomes are supported by theories of Mendzela’s (1997) theories of group cohesion and productivity, Peterson & Harvey’s (2009) theory of conflict resolution, the argument of Postmes & Speare’s (2001) theory of consensus norms and value of information, McCauly’s (1989) theory of group consensus and cohesion and Burke & C.S’s (2006) strategy of effective team learning. My key findings include the prominent importance of cohesion in team performance developed from a strong identity in group norms and goals, the effect of this cohesion in conformity and groupthink, the unparallel relationship between group consensus norms and value of “unshared” information, the ability of a group to facilitate cohesion through discussion of conflict and our ability to improve significantly when errors are recognised. Aspects that I would take into my next team experience include improvements that I would have made upon

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3 these findings is enforcing a group norm of disagreement to reduce conformity in conjunction with the aspects that worked.

In the reflection of Communication, mediums of communication and their effect are compared. Key aspects include the advantages and disadvantages of face-to-face compared to computer mediated communication. It was found that face-to-face provided an enriching communication experience with non-verbal cues as compared to computer mediated method. Furthermore, face-to-face was more efficient. However, it was found that the effectiveness of each medium was not influenced due to the cohesion of the group which could only be established through an initial experience of face-to-face creation of interpersonal relationships. Thus my learning outcome allowed me to realise and choose face-to-face as the best form of communication which I would take into future experiences.

In leadership styles, the reflection of my democratic leadership style and participative and supportive leadership alluding to the Path-Goal theory, enriched my understanding of why these were effective in our team, as it promoted team member’s well being and participation. Furthermore, I analyse my legitimate use of power and why coercive power was not enforced, to promote team cohesion and the comfort of our team members. Thus, I learnt the amalgamation of correct leadership in valuing member’s emotions and welfare in conjunction with the right leadership style for our member’s internal locus of control elucidated our high team performance from the ability to nourish team cohesion and unity.

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Introduction

Management is a process of dynamic change as organisations constantly strive to improve and learn. In MGMT1001 students were randomly placed in groups of six to collaborate and complete the Everest Simulation. This experience emulated a team in an organisation, where the amalgamation of different strategies and values each team employed across key areas of understanding groups and teams, communication and leadership would influence their outcome and team experience. Through this reiterative process of developing the best strategies, interrelationships across these concepts are established, and the positive and negative impacts of each aspect surfaces. Although conflicts were inevitable, through collaboration, discussion and decision making, our group adapted and overcame these teamwork challenges, resulting in a development of a cohesive group structure. Furthermore, the right combination of communication mediums and leadership styles, and our reflexive learning process elucidates our overall high group performance, improving significantly from 74% to 94% in the second simulation.

This report aims to critically analyse and compares the experiences of our team both individually and as a whole, employing theories and concepts in ‘Understanding Groups & Teams, Communication and Leadership’ for the intent of reflecting on successful practices and their reasons in conjunction with improvements that could have aided our experience.

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Group Structure & Conflict Resolution

The analysis of our group structure is crucial in reflecting upon the result of our performance, where our commitment to clear goals and formation of certain norms facilitated our group cohesion and thus group productivity. Furthermore, our ability to cohesively solve conflicts improved this

facilitation of group unity. However, group cohesion assisted in the development of conformity and groupthink

Before the meeting started, a group discussion was raised to create a team goal to achieve higher than 80% in our team performance, thus establishing our objective to maximise team points rather than individual. Consequently, through our unified commitment to these goals and strong group identity, an effective team was formed which later would serve as an advantage to conflict resolution and decision making. (Mendzela 1997 pp.67)

Immediately, task conflict was evident through the contrasting individual goals in the simulation and it was apparent that not every member would achieve their personal goals. However, this conflict provided beneficial elements of cohesion to the team through our ability to collaborate and establish an overarching team goal (Peterson and Harvey 2009). The team effectively cooperated, communicated and shared individual goals to compare each alternative in maximising points.

Consequently, all members effectively agreed upon a collective orientation, where members focused on achieving the leader’s main goal as it incurred the most points towards team performance, even if it conflicted with some member’s individual objectives. Through the group’s ability to efficiently adapt to this conflict and provide input, member commitment was raised and the nourishment of our team cohesion was highlighted due to the proactive creation of a shared goal that each member was motivated to achieve.

The norm of our group’s decision making process was established through group consensus. This was manifested through our method of firstly analysing individual information, sharing this information with the group, then discussing options for a supported group decision. Furthermore, our commitment and loyalty in taking as much time needed to carefully analyse each alternative underlined our unified commitment, strong group identity and our ongoing group cohesion (Mendzela 1997). Additionally before the simulation started, I established a value of openness and honesty by stating “if an individual’s health is deteriorating or they hold individual unshared

information, then they should not be afraid to bring this to the group’s attention”. Thus the value of openness and group consensus established a trusting culture in our interpersonal relationship and further influenced our team effectiveness (Burke 2006 as cited in Fransen 2011).

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7 Moreover, through each round, individuals were given “shared information” provided to every group member and “unshared” information, given to certain individuals only. Postmes & Speares (2001) argued that consensus norms valued shared information rather than unshared, negatively affecting the quality of a decision. However, in our group experience, through our united

commitment in carefully analysing each decision, simultaneously with our value for openness and honesty we appreciated unshared information even through our consensus norm. This was evident in the oxygen tank allocations, where our group encouraged the effective sharing of all individual information. As a result, the discussion of the Marathoner’s unshared information of needing more oxygen than expected, allowed us to effectively make a quality decision. Thus, I learnt that it is not only the group consensus norms that determines the value of shared or unshared information but the integrated combination of other factors such as a trusting culture, unified goals and openness in collaboration.

Although group cohesion provided strong interpersonal relationship, this created my personal experience of conformity in a group decision. In our final decision of allocating oxygen tanks I felt the extra tank should be allocated to Kevin (Environmentalist) as we had already over compensated for Sneha (Marathoner). However, due to the strong group identity and cohesion, amalgamated with my personality in lacking courage and confidence, I conformed to the decision and did not offer this opinion, providing the illusion of a consensus (McCauly 1989 pp.260). My ability to conform was further underlined through their increased effective persuasion by “influencing my opinion

collectively rather than individually” (Raven 1993, pp. 229), further highlighting the strong effect of group cohesion and consensus. However, in our final round reaching the summit, we lost our environmentalist due to lack of oxygen and I felt responsible to a degree. From this experience, I learnt that deviated opinions may affect group cohesion but can encourage new perspectives and furthermore reduced poor decision making (McCauly 1989). Thus, our group could have reduced the likelihood of conformity and groupthink by establishing a norm for critical disagreement to

encourage new opinions and strengthen our decision making.

Nevertheless, in the second simulation, team learning was enabled through our ability to reflect and understand our processes in our previous situation, allowing the recognition of a miscalculation in oxygen allocation. Our ability to engage in these reflexive practices, evaluate and improve them allowed us to promote team performance and efficiency through a collective understanding of our errors (Argote & Olivera 1999 as cited in Burke & C.S 2006). Our adaptive learning in conjunction with our aptitude to carry previous elements in our team effectiveness, including our united goal to

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8 improve, team cohesion and a trusting culture proves as a success with our final team performance of 94% from 74%, being the only team in the class to improve our score. (See Appendix A).

Communication Mediums

Our primary medium for team discussion in the first simulation was face-to-face, whilst our medium for the second simulation was using Skype.

From experience, I felt that the face-to-face approach was more effective due to our ability to attain immediate attention and prompt communication through non verbal cues and display of emotions, thus allowing an efficient completion of the simulation. This was highlighted in our ability to engage in active listening in group discussions by allowing each member to discuss their opinions and shared information to enable the interpretation of each other’s perspective. Communication richness was further highlighted through the capability of perceiving non verbal cues such as eye contact and body language to allow each listener to “produce accurate and effective communication” (Kang & Watt, 2013). Furthermore, the importance of these nonverbal cues allows each speaker to feel the acknowledgement of opinions from indications of active listening in eye contact and body language such as nodding. Ultimately, the efficiency of communication in face to face allowed us to share information and promptly complete our simulation within an hour.

In the second simulation, Harvard’s delay of resetting the second database impeded our ability to perform the simulation face-to-face. Nevertheless, through our team’s adaptive behaviour, we turned to Facebook posts in our group as a medium to establish a new meeting time. Instantly, our communication pace through this medium was evidently slower than face-to-face, taking over a day to establish a new meeting time due to the lack of simultaneous online presence (Lebie et al. 1995 as cited in Lantz. 2010). Consequently, Skype was utilised as our form of communication during

simulation. Due to the immediate communication in a call, the use of voice to voice was more effective than text based chat as it overcame the inefficiency of waiting for replies. Furthermore, our communication process was enriched due to the ability to hear verbal intonation to elucidate message, contrasting to Facebook chat, where the tone of each message could not be clarified, serving as an impediment in effectively interpreting the meaning.

However, I felt this was still inefficient due to communication hindrances that arose from absence of non-verbal cues, resulting in the inefficient need to organise our interpretations (Lantz 2010). This was apparent in my confusion in who was speaking to whom on Skype, whereas in face-to-face, simple eye contact could indicate this, consequently obstructing our efficiency of sharing

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9 information and thus decision making. This is further supported by Adriansson and Hjelmquist’s (1991) findings where “decisions were more three times more rapidly face-to-face than when an electronic medium was used” (Lantz 2010). Simultaneously, the lack of body language cues hindered the indication of attention to speakers, where I did not know if my message was delivered and understood as usual face-to-face body language cues such as eye contact or subtle nods, signifying understanding and active listening were missing, thus further underlining the deterioration of this communication richness. However, we learnt to ameliorate these problems through the use of constant feedback, where reassuring questions were asked to ensure effective understanding. Furthermore, the barrier of communication due to information overload was experienced, due to our team’s need to collaborate incongruent information. In the previous experience of face-to-face, my inability to constantly sustain new information through only verbal exchange overwhelmed my rational process. However, the use of Skype in conjunction with the chat box proved as an advantage as each member was able to paste disparate information relating to our decision making, thus providing a centralised information bank. This provided us with the ability to effectively make decisions and remedied our process outcome.

Although both face-to-face and Skype proves to have their own advantages and disadvantages, I believe face-to-face was a better method used to improve group efficiency and communication richness. This is further reinforced through our ability to complete the first simulation an hour faster than the second simulation, despite our ability to learn from situational process errors.

Even though our online mode of communication did affect coordination and efficiency, it did not affect our decision making process and process outcome. This is evident through our ability to gain a higher team performance of 94% in our second round, despite our inefficient communication as compared to the first round. From observation, I learnt that the order we experienced face-to-face communication and online communication impacted our team effectiveness and thus process outcomes, further supported by Lantz (2010). Our employment of face-to-face in the first simulation allowed us to “establish rapports, build trust and get off to a good start” (Hambley et al. 2007 as cited in Triana et al. 2011). This is evident through our aptitude to nourish the formation of consensus norms in group decisions, create strong team cohesion and interpersonal relationships, which we were able to bring into the second simulation despite the change of medium.

Contrastingly, if the online medium was used first, there could have been an inability to form team cohesion and interpersonal relationship due to ineffective communication, thus resulting in a lower team performance (Lantz 2010). Ultimately, this further supports my belief of face-to-face being

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10 more effective, where our ability to establish team cohesion and interpersonal relationships in conjunction with our efficiency directed us towards a high team performance in both rounds.

Leadership Styles

As the leader of the group, I valued the use of a democratic style in decision making, involving all member’s views and opinions in arriving to a consensus. I felt this strategy helped develop the trusting culture and cohesiveness in our team, in being able to intake each other’s perspective which consequently resulted in our high productivity throughout both simulations. There were only two instances where I utilised legitimate power, firstly to ensure that moving into the next camp involved the consensus and confirmation from each member, and secondly in the group’s agreement

whereas if conflict arose and there was equal disparity on both sides , the final decision would be determined by me. Both times highlighted my valued priority in group consensus and thus ensuring cohesion. This was a valuable strategy evident in our ability to build interpersonal relationships and a comfortable, trusting environment for our team. Furthermore, this strategy is supported by Raven (1993, p.243) where emphasise of communality consequently maintained “less distancing, less distrust, greater cooperation, and de-escalation of conflict”. Thus, the democratic style of group inclusion was experienced to be the best approach, further reinforced through Raven’s (1993 p.231) agreement where full participation would be “more effective than simply telling workers the

changes to be implemented”.

However, in situations of conflict and disagreement, this may have been a disadvantage where a directive leader in conjunction with coercive power could have created a stronger system for conflict resolution. This was experienced in our second simulation, when Sneha was initially indecisive and reluctant to join the rest of the group in employing Skype as the communication medium, delaying the start of our simulation and evoking frustration. In this situation I could have utilised my

legitimate leadership tactics such as pressure and control in coercive power to force her to comply with the group, and increase our efficiency. Although effective, I chose not employ this method to due to the costs of my values in ensuring the comfort and wellbeing of each team member in conjunction with maintaining interpersonal relationships. This is supported by Raven (1993 pp.242) where this coercive power would have “devalued” Sneha and caused “a loss of respect” in my leadership, consequently threatening our team solidity. Thus, in understanding the effects of different powers, I have learnt that different powers have different effects. Furthermore, I have

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11 learnt the importance of democratic leadership in encouraging group participation and developing a trusting culture of cohesion to generate higher productivity.

Moreover, I employed the leadership style of a supportive and participative leader. This was

manifested in my ability to show concern for followers by constantly asking the health status of each member, in conjunction with assuring each individual that “if any member suffered health problems in the simulation, they should not be afraid to speak up”, thus ensuring a trusting and comforting environment. This supportive leadership is further reinforced through my value of each member’s welfare as aforementioned. My participative leadership is evident in my utilisation of group consensus for decision making and democratic leadership. This strategy was effective in providing satisfaction for each member and facilitating productivity through their team participation and involvement, reflected in our strong group identity and high performance. Moreover, as our team agreed that each of us have an internal locus of control where we strongly believe we “control our own destiny”, a satisfaction with the participatory management style was achieved (House, R.J. 1971). Thus, I believe that the amalgamation of the correct leadership dependent on our member’s contingency factors propelled our ability to succeed and nourish our team development, reflected in our high performance of 94% compared to other groups. (See Appendix A)

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Conclusion

Ultimately, our team experiences in the Everest Simulation lead to the reflective learning of intertwining connections between a cohesive group structure, order of use in communication mediums which affect group cohesion and leadership styles dependent on its member’s contingency factors. These experiences nourished my understanding of how teams perform the best in a unified and cohesive structure, accompanied by strong team goals and group norms to perform decision making. Insightful understanding was further elucidated as the group cohesion facilitated effectiveness in a team regardless of communication medium, however could only be easily generated through face-to-face communication. Ultimately, the recognition of these elements and our ability to adapt from mistakes enriched my understanding of core strategies and values that influenced our high team performance.

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Appendix

A. Group performance compared to class (Group 62)

B. Goals on Track

i) Round 1 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 61 62 63 64 Climb 1 Climb 2 Goals Points Reach Summit 2

Complete climb without needing to be rescued 3

All climbers reach summit 4

All climbers complete climb without needing to be rescued 4

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14 ii) Round 2

All climbers stay together through summit 1

Your Points for Personal Goals 15

Round 2: Medical Challenge Points 1

Round 3: Weather Challenge Points 1

Round 4: Oxygen Tank Allocation Points 0

Your Total Points 17/20

Percent of Your Goals Achieved 85%

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C. Team Contract

TEAM CONTRACT Everest 2

Team Name: SKW

Name Role Contact

1 Kevin Zheng Medic Facebook

2 Wendy Li Leader Facebook

3 Shelia Zhong Observer Facebook

4 Sneha Vankadara Environmentalist Facebook

5 Wade Pedersen Marathoner Facebook

6 Scott Mays Photographer Facebook

Team Procedures

1. Day, time, and location of team members for Everest 2: Monday, 29th May 2013 7:00pm, Face-to-face

Changed to -

Thursday, 2 May, 2013 10:30am, At home via a synchronous chat mediated software: Skype.

2. Preferred method of communication before and during Everest 2 (i.e., e-mail, mobile, chat function, face-to-face in a specified location).

A. Before the climb

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16 B. During the climb

Synchronous chat mediated software: Face-to-face C. After the climb

Facebook

3. Team goal for Everest 2:

 To collectively do better than Everest 1

 To prevent anyone being rescued

 To have everyone reach the summit

4. Decision-making policy (By consensus? By majority vote? By team leader?):

 Consensus

Team Participation

1. How will we resolve conflict?

 Through validated, reason and consensus

 If group is split evenly in half, leader makes final decision

2. Strategies for encouraging/including ideas and debate from all team members :

 Openly share all information, in order to successfully make the right choices to proceed 3. Strategies for achieving our goal:

 Stating the team goals before the simulation to reinforce unified commitment

 Carefully analysing each option and its effects

 Learn from errors

4. Preferences for leadership (team leader only, shared leadership):

 Shared Leadership

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17 1. Expected individual attendance, punctuality, and participation at Everest 2:

 Expected everyone to attend on time and openly participate as this task requires all members to collaborative.

2. What are the consequences for lack of engagement in Everest 2?

 Any issues can be openly discussed however if any further issues arise, the tutor in charge will be contacted.

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