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).