Sharing Information in Groups

   In the Wisdom of Crowds, a social psychology experiment performed by Garold Stasser is mentioned. In his experiment, small groups are formed to determine the performance of psychology students. Two members of the group would be given information such as the student's grades and test scores, one member would be given two additional pieces of information, and another member would be given two different pieces of information. Even though the additional information may have been a better indicator of a student's performance, the groups would typically base their decisions on grades and test scores, the information that was given to more people. The other information was often disregarded or viewed as unusual since it was not made readily available to all members of the group. 

  When I consider the article Those Low Grades in College May Haunt Your Job Search, I wonder if the same issue occurs as in Stasser's experiment. Essentially, this article states that many employers will not hire an applicant with a GPA below 3.0, even though the applicant may have noble reasons for having lower grades, such as astounding extra-curricular activities or working through college. Could it be that more people in groups responsible for hiring are informed of the applicants' GPAs whereas only one or two members of the group are informed of the applicants' extra-curricular activities, but does not share the information with other people involved in the hiring process? 

Wisdom of Crowds & Carter Racing

The Wisdom of Crowds details a number of ways in which small groups can reach disastrous decisions. The article focuses on the failure of the Columbia mission as a result of the Mission Management Team. One issue is that people make uninformed decisions, assuming that they know best without looking at actual information. Another major issue is that group members stop regarding each other as individuals and instead define themselves by the work they do. In the case of the Columbia mission, the people working on the MMT and DAT may have disregarded important information that showed how dangerous the mission would be because their job is focused on launching space shuttles. The Carter Racing article posed this a little more clearly by stating that the group is together for the purpose of racing. They do not exist as a group to not race, therefore, they should race regardless of whatever information they have, because racing is what they do. They let one aspect of their job define what they do, and disregard reasoning as to why that task should not be performed. Perhaps they view it as a failure to not complete that job, even when the consequences of performing with error are significantly worse.

Making the Leap From a Potential Team to a Real Team

   I've spent the last few days contemplating how I would define the group of staff members that I work with for WSYC. For those who may not know, it is the campus radio station which operates out of the CUB. For the last few years, we have had really ineffective leaders, who mostly coasted through their jobs and did not attempt to work with other staff members. The station did not fall apart completely, but we lost most listeners and failed to establish or maintain a presence among campus organizations. Currently, we are working together to improve our programming, get all of our staff members to work together efficiently, and draw in new members.
   In "The Wisdom Of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization," Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith define a potential team as "a group for which there is a significant, incremental performance need, and that really is trying to improve its performance impact" (91). I think this is where we fit in as a group, but I am not certain. We have all agreed that we need to improve what we are doing at the station, whether that is supplying more information on the music we have available, sitting in on shows with new DJs to make sure they are comfortable with the equipment and trained correctly, supplying DJs with a copy of our radio charts, strictly enforcing rules, and reporting/appearing at more campus and community events. For the most part, we are all really trying. We have one or two staff members who have not shown a significant dedication to making improvements, but we are trying to communicate with them to find the best ways to motivate them. We are setting attainable goals, making short term and long term plans, making real changes, and improving our group communication, and hopefully we will be able to make the big improvement from a potential team to a real team (and maybe even a high-performing team).

We want to be a station that people want to listen to. 

  I think we can make this happen, but there is one glaring issue. Our membership changes constantly, and our executive staff positions are only held for two semesters before we have new elections. How can we maintain consistency in the long term when we will all eventually leave? How can we ensure that all of our hard work and plans are followed through by our successors? I am hoping that by increasing communication between staff members, and also with our general members, that we can get the majority of the group on the same page, so that when new people take on staff positions, they have a better idea what we are working toward and how much work they need to put in to make that happen. We have been discussing who we would prefer to fill staff positions when we leave so that we can hopefully help these people gain more experience before we leave, but we cannot guarantee that they will be elected. 

Model of Team Effectiveness

This week has been full of group work between most of my classes and my extracurricular activities, so I made an attempt at applying some ideas from this week's reading to those situations to see if I could make any improvements. So far, it actually seems fairly successful. However, it has been less than a week, and that's hardly enough time to tell.

First off, in my Managerial Finance class, I am working in a group with three other people, and we are currently trying to put together a financial analysis comparing Netflix to two competitors and the overall industry. When we met up last week, one group member offered to get the financial statements, we agreed that I would put together an excel file for the ratios when we turn in the project, and assumed that we could find all of the ratios online. When we met up today, we had no work to compare because we had not actually set any real plans. We agreed on how we would work, but not what we would work on in the short term.

We are being evaluated as a group by the professor for 80% of our grade, and the other 20% is based on peer evaluations from our group members. We meet up on Thursdays in a study lounge, and have no defined team leader. The majority of our communication is in person, but we also communicate through email as necessary. This is our organizational environment.

Our team design is that we are four people. We have two accounting majors, one finance major, and one MIS major. The task that is bringing us together is the financial analysis.

So far, we have no real roles and are working mostly as individuals. No one person was really willing to step up and offer to lead, and this may have been since we are not familiar with one another yet. As for task development, one member gathered the financial statements. Another member decided to work on his own at gathering ratios, without communicating this with the rest of the group. Those are our team processes thus far.

As for our team effectiveness at this stage, we have accomplished next to nothing. Our team survival is assured only due to the fact that we must work together on the project. We have not reached our goal yet of completing the financial analysis, so our organizational goal has not yet been satisfied. It is difficult to say whether or not team member needs have been met since two members have not communicated that to me. I know that one member is worried since one member has not contributed yet, and he wants the work load evenly distributed. I know that I am dissatisfied for the same reason, and also because we have not delegated any short term tasks, and as a result, it does not seem like we have done any work.

So, at today's meeting, I realized that we really had no work to show, other than our financial statements, and a ratio analysis that only one group member was informed on and that no other members could immediately verify. Here are some tasks I tried to establish today to bring about some more positive change:

• We established who would work on specific short term work. Since we have four ratio analyses to perform, have agreed to have two people working on each analysis, and each person would work on two different analyses. 
• We established that we shall each have our analyses prepared for our next meeting. 
• We established when and where we will have our next meeting. 
• We outlined the work that we want to complete during our next meeting. 

By doing this, we established who will do what (team roles), set specific plans for the tasks that we need to accomplish (task development), and set the ground work to improve our team cohesiveness by having two people working together, so that we have all information run through multiple people. This way, if anything goes wrong, there is less room to be upset with a specific individual for not doing their work (at least in theory).