Name: Stephanie Rendón de la Torre

Course: Managerial Psychology

Professor: Mario Martínez Córcoles

University: Tallinn University of Technology

Assignment: "Groups and collaborative working"

Deliver date: December 9, 2014.

This video is about groups, teams and collaborative working and how to encourage effective working and creativity within an organization. The teacher starts the class making a point about how humans use to work in groups and that in general people usually work in groups and only a few people work alone, in fact.

Then she mentions the difference between individuals and pairs. She mentioned some advantages of working individually, for example: Maybe one person is the best person to do the job, or the individual is flexible and can respond quickly to certain circumstances.

However, there are some negative aspects between working individually and working pairs; working in pairs has some advantages, for example, two people can bring a richer and a closer communication, individual bias and uncertainty could be reduced and the old saying might be true: "two heads think better than one", because it is usually easier to find a solution for a problem if two people work together and organized someway.

About groups and working groups: A group is a collection of individuals who have relations to one another and make them interdependent to some significant degree. A work team could be composed of social entities embedded in organizations performing tasks which contribute to achieving organizational goals, their work affects others and members are dependent on each other in the performance of their work to a significant extent.

According to previous research works, the perfect number for a team is: five people. The teacher Angela, made her PhD years before and she found these facts related with teams: There are some things that are essential to form a team: a) Appreciate shared objectives, b) Individuals have own roles to perform, c) Must need to work together to be in the team(interdependence) and d) known identity. The last aspect is really important and also interesting because the identity could be in one's mind or in other people's mind. All these aspects are essential needed.

About complex systems: Systems are made up of individuals, pairs, work groups and teams that interact within an organization and with others outside the organization, just like a supply chain. Examples: the people of the government or a company. An important characteristic of complex systems is that they are dynamic (because people come and go from the organizations, they quit, they die, etcetera) and that tasks or projects have starting and end dates (a start and an end).

When are teams effective and working well? Gersick's model explains this. Teams could be not motivated or motivated depending on the milestones given. The important concept and the thing that triggers change are deadlines. According to Tuckman's model, the first stage is the group's and this formation is not always done with the best people, probably is just a formation and the team has to know each other. The second stage for this model is storming, this is when some discussions could arise because not all the people think the same, then the third stage comes: norming, then performing and finally, adjourning. This

last stage refers to the end of the team, because they have to end at some point, for example: the end of a project. Sometimes this stage makes people of organizations upset, not because the goals were not achieved, but because is the end, and in fact, the end of a project must be celebrated (if the goals were achieved, of course) but is common that people sometimes gets upset; according to the teacher this has to do with our very nature, depending on the country or region the teams and workgroups are from.

About support for teams and the three C's: These are: Context, Culture and Climate. Those three aspects are needed for giving support to teams. Context: In general teams want very few rules and this enhances innovation and if the team needs anything from outside, the team needs that this need is easy to find, this means, the chain of command cannot be to request a resource to ten different people in the organization, usually the area manager has this role of facilitating things for the team. The team needs cooperation across organizational boundaries (this sounds to me as anti-bureaucracy, which is always good).

About culture: The team needs good communication; the team needs to be encouraged to trust colleagues when there are errors in work; it also involves high participation and support of team development. People needs to feel important in the team that is why feedback is so important; when the feedback is not given, problems could arise.

About climate: There should be a team level reward for achieving little objectives across the path. People need a good environment: enough challenging but not impossible to achieve for them. Also, the performance team needs to be assessed somehow and team members need to know these metrics. How are they supposed to achieve the goals if they do not know how is that they are going to be evaluated?

There are some processes that influence effective working relationships within organizations, such as:

-Mutual understanding of roles, and this means: "put yourself in someone else's shoes".

-Measurement of performance: The team needs to be assessed and measured properly. An effective way to do it in organizations is when the team organizes its own way of evaluation system, depending on the processes and not only based on the number of tasks performed.

-Reflection on performance and adaptation: This is related to the word reflexivity and this means "looking back". Usually organizations spend a lot of money looking ahead but not looking back and this is important: find how the performance was better in the past and worse now and find out why something like this happened, What changed in the process? What changed within the team? And this learning from the past could be the agent of change for the team's performance in the future.

- Planning for growth or contraction: This means to have a vision and strategy and this is important for the change agent. The purpose and planning are of the utmost importance.

- Appropriate leadership: It would depend, it could be loose or tight but a good leader is key.

- Creative problem solving.

In general people work together in many different ways and styles. Work systems may not support people working together, for example: an individual performance appraisal rather than group or team reward. Understanding how people work together and mapping these relationships can help to achieve a positive change within an organization.

References:

Website: http://www.enop.ee/carter/angela2.htm