Mgmt 507 week 3

Three topics Team Management/Leadership

• Performance Evaluation

• Decision making

• Group Roles (end of last class not covered).

• Two presentations

Issues in performance Evaluation

• 360 degree performance appraisal. Multi-rater feedback.

• Traditonal supervisor. But in teams who is the supervisor? Even if a Supervisor, who knows the performance of others best

Who can rate

• External stakeholders--suppliers, customers.

• Self

• Team members

• Supervisor

• Subordinates.

• Should subordinates rate Supervisors

• Gore (Gore tex) relies on anonymous peer ratings.

• Why?

Rater Bias

• Inflation bias (nice person).• Attribution error tendency to make personality

assumptions, when its more complex. We make inferences with limited information. Employee comes late twice to work. Poor attitude. Maybe maybe not. But that is the bias. Someone is successful. Luck, or work traits. Assume work traits. Maybe maybe not.Supervisors often fail to see their own contributions.

To assess performance we need information

• Limited information, why?

• Think of your own performance appraisals you have had. Accurate or some Biases?

Issue Class assignment assess performance of team members.

• This should be a part of your team self-assessment.

• Both individual performance on tasks and contributions to team performance.

• Think about roles which we discussed earlier.

• How to collect it.

Know your purpose of Appraisal

• Developmental.

• Qualitative is just fine.

• Suggest variation of what I did after first class. Self appraisal and peer appraisal.

Then the art of giving informal feedback

• Book offers nothing on this largely looking at incentives.

• Some suggestions for informal feedback.

• Keep things positive as often as possible.

• Maintenance role and support.

• When annoyed by negative things, need to mention. Focus on behaviors, specifics not personality (attribution bias).

• Problem solve. Something needs to change. Does only the target person need to change?

• Avoid personal attacks. Emphasize your frustrations.

• Non-verbal communication.

• Action plan.

Summary

• Relevant for teams, supervision

• Need to emphasize problem solving approach. Helps to gather more information to make better decisions

• Avoid the errors of assumption.

Mini case

• Manager of a bread factory in urban environment. Mixture of locals and some recent immigrants mostly from Mexico. Near Minimum wage work. Working conditions are hot. Pretty boring work. On any given day 10% absenteeism and another 10% tardy up to 30 minutes. Difficult to get assembly line in operation unless fully staffed. What would you do to change operations of this system?

Group decision Making

• Group and individual decision should follow specific stages.

Orientation

• Defining the problem and setting goals.

Discussion

• Gather information, identify alternatives, evaluate alternatives against goals

Decision Making

• Pick option

Implementation

• Action plan to adhere to decision

• Evaluate consequence

• Seek Feedback to modify, continue, or discontinue.

Individual Barriers

• Why do individual skip steps?

Groups can help to correct many of these problems.

Were any of these problems in your discussion?

• Groupthink

• Abilene paradox

• Pressure to conform

• Pluralistic ignorance

Need to structure group Decisions.

• First, Group decisions take time.

• Second, monitor group dynamics. Participation needs to be high.

• Engage in brainstorming to generate alternatives. More on that in a later class.

• Managing conflict. See conflict in a positive manner. Devils advocacy.

Group Roles

• Task/Functional roles—Keeps the group on task

• People/Maintenance roles—Keeps harmonious relationships among group members.

• You will see these again in leadership discussions.

Suggestion

• Agenda setter every meeting.

• Harmonizer every meeting. Focus on encouraging, listening, conflict. More facilitator of good group discussion

• Summarizer at the end of meeting review notes, what was agreed not agreed, who is going to do what before the end of the next meeting.

Task roles

• Agenda Setter, recorder, progress monitor, critic, information provider, summarizer

Maintenance Roles

• Humorist, conflict manager, encourager, listener, sympathizer.

Role management

• People need to do both in small groups.

• Debate how to manage the different roles.

• Problem teams, no task functional roles. Leaderless groups.

• Somewhat problematic no people maintenance roles. Job gets done, but the advantages of teams are not utilized. Often no cohesion.

Papers

• Discuss roles in terms of conducting meetings. How is it emerging on your team. Are you content with the quality of task orientation, maintenance orientation.

• List the roles provided and ask everyone how satisfied they are with the performance of the team on these roles. If not satisfied, what are you going to do about it?

Summary

• Today’s topic was actions that promote effective team processes.

• Feedback

• Role and project management

• Even conductive effective meetings.