Critical Reflection – Team Process & Decision Making

Brent Fisher

BSM 442

3/14/15

Critical Reflection – Team Process & Decision Making

Being formed into teams that have never worked together was a perfect case study into the process and decision making that goes into forming teams.  I feel that we dealt with many common dynamics and issues that were easily relatable to the course material.   What I found unique about this experience is that there were two levels of team process occurring simultaneously as the groups were brought together. First there was the merging of the cohorts.  Each cohort has been with and become familiar with the other members of their cohort over the span of more than a year.   With this happening we were also formed into groups to work on a project for the entirety of the class.  

The group that I was assigned to consisted of two people that I had never worked with previously because they were in the other cohort.  This group, which we unoriginally named Team 5, was comprised of Robert Townsend (RT), Dora Azevedo (DA), and myself Brent Fisher (BF).  The reason or reasons behind how the teams were formed for this class remain a mystery to all of us.  All members accepted the inclusion into this team that was designed for us.  Ideally in a team design process one would choose the other members of their team based on the skill sets they possess and their interest in being part of the team.  Now our team may have been chosen in that context, but we did not know this is was true. We really had no idea what the context of our team design was.  With that being the case our team culture or what the text call, “the personality of the team” did not preexist.  The personality of the team took form with each class session and each team meeting.  All of us have worked in teams like this before but it was important for me to identify the other members’ norms from the inception.  There was agreement within the team that we wanted to be successful.  But I made the point of having each member define what success meant to them.  For me success is A level work, I had to make sure that all the other members were defining success in this project as A level work.  Within team culture the text describes this as goal contagion.  “Goal contagion is a form of norm setting in which people adopt a goal held by others”.  In this example of goal contagion it was not important for me to understand the others’ definition of success, I needed them to adopt my definition of success for this project.  Which I expressed and was relieved that the other members accepted A level work as our goal.  

One we had a clear goal set for our team we took on the process of choosing roles for the team.  It was understood that we needed roles and the first role to be selected, because it was on the student log and the contract, was that of a leader.  This is was our first experience in communication breakdown.  The text describes the type of communication breakdown that occurred as message distortion, “message senders present information that they believe will be favorably received by the recipient and there, distort messages”.  In the instance with our group RT asked who wanted to record the meetings for the group.  I volunteered for this role and upon my acceptance of the role RT commented that the recorder should be the leader as well.  It appeared that RT distorted his message at the time so that someone else would volunteer to fill that role which he perceived that of the leader.  While I did not feel favorably about this interaction I accepted the role as leader because I know that I was up to the task.  But I also reflected that a team leader should not participate in message distortion.  I believe this was a mistake by the other members to accept a potential leader that they had little information on. DA and RT were known to each other so it would have made more sense for them to choose between the two of them for someone to be the leader because their skillsets were known and they could have made a rational decision of who was the better leader between the two of them. Instead they chose someone (myself) that skills and accomplishments were unknown.  But, I like to believe that I had demonstrated enough leadership qualities in the beginning of our initial meeting for them to choose me.