Reflection Paper. Orginazational Behavior

REFLECTION PAPER (10%)

The Team project reflection is an individual paper due via email by 3PM on March 19th. In this 7-8 page paper you will reflect on your Team, its development, and how the Team experience impacted you as a person.  This assignment requires you to describe what happened in your Team throughout the quarter, as well as why these things occurred.  You will apply concepts covered in class to analyze your Team’s processes, your role in the Team, as well as strengths and weaknesses of the Team.

To do well on this paper you need to show me that you can use the Organizational Behavior concepts and theories to describe your team experience and explain why it turned out the way it did.  I do not want you to explain the theories or OB models (i.e., repeat the textbook or lectures), but to use them to discuss specific examples from the experience of the Team which will demonstrate to me that you understand why your team functioned the way it did.

This assignment is really a structured reflection paper.  You will be asked to write four sections of approximately 2 pages each.  The sections correspond to the issues below:

1. Process: Describe the stages your team went through during the quarter. What decision making process did you adopt (consensus, majority, deference to strongest opinion, etc.)? How did you divide responsibilities within the team? Did everyone participate fully, or did some loaf or dominate? How do you feel about the teammates’ ratings of your contribution (your TeamHelper “Individual Contribution Score”)? In your answer, discuss how your team either did or did not conform to the norms you established early in the quarter. Were there additional unspoken norms that emerged during the quarter? If so, why? Were there norms that you established, but which you did not follow? If so, why? In retrospect, were there norms you wish you had established at the beginning of the quarter?  

1. Personal differences: What personality or individual differences did you have among your members (use the results of the personality tests and “Me in a team” presentations here)?  How did these impact the team’s interactions and processes (use specific examples)?  How did these differences impact perceptions, attributions, communication and/or roles within the team?  Who emerged as the leader and how did that occur?  How much conflict did you experience?  Was the conflict (if any) functional or dysfunctional for the team? How accurate were people’s User’s Manuals?  What feedback did you receive about your User’s Manual?

1. Perceptions: Based on your data from the TeamHelper “Team Feedback Survey,” to what extent did your teammates’ ratings of you agree with your self-ratings in the categories assessed? Discuss the items where there were the biggest differences in ratings (either higher or lower). Make sure that you provide the scores themselves in your paper so that I can follow what you’re referring to. How do you account for these different perceptions? Was there agreement among your teammates, or were they all over the map? Are there any ways you need to modify your self-perceptions? How will this feedback inform your behavior in future groups?  Using these ratings, how would you classify your leadership style?

1. Performance: What went well in your Team?  Why?  Apply at least one theory or concept that we covered in class to explain the positive elements of your Team. What could have gone better in your Team?  Apply at least one theory or concept that we covered in class to explain the negative element(s) of your Team.  How did working as a team affect the products you produced?  Looking back, what would you have done differently?  Looking forward, what “lessons” are you going to take with you into your next team project?  What advice would you give to a team that was just forming?  Finally, how successful were you in accomplishing the 2 goals you set for yourself after taking the personality tests?

*HINT* The easier you make it for me to SEE your application of OB topics, the better off you will be! Some people put the actual topic/theory name in italics, or in parentheses after they describe their example.

Papers lose points for poor grammar, bad writing and spelling mistakes (remember to proofread your paper and pay attention to organization/structure as well) or for not showing a very deep understanding of the OB topics, or hiding them in the text so well that I can’t see that they are there.