8. Managing Relationships Flashcards
What is a group?
Any collection of individuals who perceive themselves as a group. It thus has a sense of identity.
What are the attributes of groups?
- Sense of identity
- Loyalty and acceptance
- Purpose and leadership
What are the four types of groups?
- Formal - created by managers to meet specific objectives
- Informal - developed out of individual relationships and based on shared interests
- Reference - those that person wants to join but is not a member of
- Autonomous - used to improve productivity, working in small cells or teams
What are the problems of operating as a team?
- Conformity: pressure to agree
- The Abilene Paradox: accept an idea they dont like believing everybody else supports it
- Risky shift: recommend higher risk strategies that they normally would because accountability is diluted
- Groupthink: ideas are not being critically evaluated
What are the five characteristics that effective teams may possess:
- Specialist skills
- Power
- Access to resources
- The personalities and goals
- Blend of individual skills and balance the abilities of the team
What are Belbin’s (1981) team roles?
- Coordinator: clarifies group objectives
- Shaper: strong drive to get things done
- Plant: high-IQ idea generator
- Monitor-evaluator: analyses plant suggestions
- Implementer: converts decisions into tasks
- Resource-investigator: gets resources from outside the group
- Team worker: keeps the team together
- Completer-finisher: concerned with meeting deadlines
- Specialist: solves technical problems
What are the four ways in which groups function?
- Additive: all members contribute; skills are output are pooled
- Conjunctive: dependence on other members’ contributions
- Disjunctive: members contribute different skills and abilities
- Complementary: tasks divided with skills needed for each
What are Tuckman’s (1965; 1977) four stages in group development?
- Forming: team is just coming together, tying to find out things about each other
- Storming: involves open conflict, may be a fruitful phase
- Norming: period of settling down
- Performing: team sets to work to execute tasks
- Dorming: group gets complacent
- Mourning / adjourning: either disband or return to forming
What is the difference between a reward and an incentive?
A reward is a token given in recognition of some contribution or success.
An incentive is the offer or promise of a reward for contribution or success designed to motivate them to behave in such a way to earn it.
What is the process of communication?
- Sender
- Encoding the message
- Message is transmitted
- Receiver
- Decoding the message
- Feedback
What are the influences of selecting a method of communication?
- Urgency
- Permanency
- Complexity
- Sensitivity
- Ease of dissemination
- Cost effectiveness
What are the common communication problems?
- Distortion (lost in translation)
- Noise (physical or physiological)
- Non-verbal signs
- Overload
- Perceptual selection (people hear what they want to)
- Poor communication skills
- Status
- Priorities
- Poor timing
- Conflict
