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Anil Surendra Modi School of Commerce

FYBCom (Hons.) (A and B)
Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management, Semester-I
Assignment: M-III and IV

Instructions
o Students are required to prepare their answers in the word document or PDF and upload the
assignment in the MS Teams platform.
o Clearly mention your name, roll number, division, and the questions you are attempting.
o Formatting should be taken care, i.e. fonts should be Times New Roman, 12 size for running
texts, 14 for title and sub-tiles, and justified aligned, page numbers to be mentioned in each page.
o All answers should be original in nature and should be prepared by students in their own
words. The submitted assignment will be run for plagiarism test and the content exceeding
10% will be scored zero.
o Each answer should be completed in 200 words.

Answer any four from the following questions: (5x4=20 Points)

Module-III Attitudes, Emotions and Job Satisfaction
1. Read the case on Happiness Coaches for Employees (available in reading material) and answer
the questions mentioned in the case study.
2. Read the case on Frank the Efficient but the Flawed Manager (available in reading material) and
answer the questions mentioned in the case study.
3. Read the Case Incident - Is It Okay to Cry at Work? (available in textbook Organization Behavior
by Stephen Robbins, pdf, pg no.124) and answer the questions mentioned in the case study.
4. “We’ve long known that panic spreads, but experts more recently have come to understand
emotional contagion, the mechanism by which people’s emotions (positive or negative) “go viral”
within groups, influencing our thoughts and actions”. Discuss this taking reflection from the role
social media has played in spreading fake news/rumors/information during current COVID-19
pandemic. (For better understanding read additional reading material uploaded in the teams
platform)
5. What is the difference between emotions and moods? What are the basic emotions and moods?
Discuss the impact emotional labour have on employees working into various profiles. Explain
with examples.
6. Discuss in brief with examples of the theory of Hackman and Oldham’s Model of Job
Characteristics.
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Module-IV Working in Teams

Case - Working with Diverse Teams – A Transcript

The content of this document is a part of a working book chapter and that is why it has been written in a
very simple language. This document should be used for classroom discussion only.

READ THIS SECTION AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS GIVEN BELOW

A. Introduction team and its importance
First let us understand what a team and a key aspect of the organizational behavior – team composition
and teamwork. How can we understand whether the one team is so much more successful than the other
team? We're going to be looking at various aspects of the team. Team composition, who is in the team,
what are their characteristics, how can you compose teams to achieve that performance? Second, team
processes, how are these people working? How are the undefeatable combining their work in order to
achieve great performance? And then finally, we’re going to be looking at outcomes that teams achieve
and how we can understand why the one team does that so much better than the other team.
So, if you have worked on a team maybe you also remember that working in a team can at the same time
be very nice, inspiring, leaning to some kind of synergy and magic coming out. When people work
together to achieve common goals, but it wouldn't surprise if you also have an experience where you
found teamwork frustrating. Where you found it a waste of your time and your energy and your resources.
So, how can we explain that? Why is the one team so much more effective and pleasant to be in than the
other team? So we're going to be see this question from various perspectives. First of all, we're going to
be looking at the design of the team. How do you put together your team in the first place? Second, Team
composition. Who should be on the team? What difference does it make? Do you want people who are
very similar or people who are very different from each other? Then Team processes. This is basically
everything that happens when people work together in achieving their common objective. Then comes
about teams over time because teams are not really stable, they happen in time. A team in which you start
functioning is not the same on the first day as it is when you've been together for a month. And then when
you've been together for a year. Or when you've worked together with the same people for five years.
Things happen over time.
B. Team Design
Before thinking about team, the question arises around the design of the team. A good leader can make
every team to perform well. Do you agree? Think for a moment and reflect upon whether you agree or
disagree with this statement and also, try to formulate or maybe even to write down some arguments of
why you think so. How you have come to your opinion. A very famous professor late Richard Hackman
in teamwork said that “…no leader can make a team perform well. But all leaders can create conditions
that increase the likelihood that it will...”
So, this relates to the prior question that do you think a team leader can always make a team perform
well? Is this always possible? Probably many experts disagree with this statement because a team is a
very complex setting. There are people with their opinions, ideas, background, experiences. Then there’s
relationships with one person to every one of the other persons in the team. And if you just think for a
moment, what can happen in a relationship in the cooperation with only one person. And then multiply it
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by the number of people that are working together in a team. So, a team as you see is very complex. And
what we see here if you think back all the way to when reflecting on people have this tendency to behave
as people. Well, if we think about the implication of this for teams, it means people maybe sometimes
irrational. They may be over emotional. They may have different interest. People may want to achieve
very different things in a team. If you add up all of these, a team is really a very complex set of relations
to manage. And even when you have a very good team leader, it's going to be hard to have a direct
influence at every moment. But does that mean that there's nothing we can do as team leaders? No, of
course. On the contrary, there's many things that person can do as a team leader, especially with regards
to the design of the team. And this is something that happens before the team even exists.
So, Richard Hackman formulated a set of conditions where he says this is what you should you take into
account. If you do that, you have no guarantee whatsoever, but at least you will increase the chances that
your team will work well. First of all, create a real team. Doesn't this sound obvious? Aren't teams’ real
teams automatically? No, for sure not. Especially here we should consider who is on the team and who is
not on the team. What Richard Hackman calls clarifying the team boundaries. This sounds obvious or
doesn't it. For some teams, yes. If you're put together in a study group where there are five members, you
know exactly who is there. Your team maybe perfectly bounded. And may have the qualities of being a
real team in that respect. But sometimes in our organizations, the boundaries are blurrier. Because
sometimes a person comes in every now and then as some sort of external adviser. Then there may be the
team leader but there may also be a more informal team leaders, so all of these aspects make it not
necessarily clear that people know exactly who is on the team and who is not. Second, articulate a
compelling direction. Why is the team there? What are these people trying to achieve together? What is
the vision? What do you want to achieve? As a team leader, you need to make it very clear and explicit
what it is, where are you heading to, what is your direction, what is your vision, what do you want to
achieve together?
Third, you want to establish an enabling structure. So, this means that's basically, you have everything in
your team that you need. You will want to make sure that the tasks or the different activities that people
do in fact align, that they all achieve to the same thing, that you have the right team members, that you
have the capabilities, the skills, the knowledge, the experience. Everything that you need basically on the
team. Fourth, you will want to make sure you provide contextual support. The team basically functions
within a larger setting. Typically, our teams are embedded in organizations, in clubs in study directions.
You will want to make sure that that context outside of the team in fact helps the team achieve its
purpose. So, if as a team leader you emphasize very much a collective goal, a collective vision. But the
reward system of your organization is designed around individual performance this may make it hard for
your team to really engage in that collective effort. Because people will be at the same time thinking
about their individual bonuses, their individual outcomes. Whereas what you want is having them think
about the team outcome and the team achievements. Fifth, have some expert team coaching. It's not
impossible for a team to do everything by themselves. For sure if you have very mature members. If
people are really used to working together, things may run automatically. But for many teams, in fact,
having a team coach every now and then is really helping. Of course, our cricket/football teams, if we
think back on the role of the coach is very prominent. We see it very clearly, we see them being there,
maybe outside of the field but on the line being part of the team, making key strategic decisions. But this
is not always the case. If you think about the teams that you have worked in, in an organization, in your
studies, in your sports, do you have a coach? Do you have someone who helps you every now and then to
keep things in the right perspective? And Richard Hackman suggests that, in fact, there are particular
moments in the life of a team where team coaching may be even more helpful than others. Which is the
beginning, when your team comes together, and you're settling, you're trying to arrange everything. The
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mid-point which is often when your team tries to make key strategic decisions and may change things.
And also, at the end when in fact the team may have accomplished a certain project, times up, the team
may continue working on other projects but maybe the team is abandoning. And this is a moment in
which a team coach can have the role to establish learning. To reflect on what has been going on and to
make sure that the individual team members save the learning and reflections for their future teamwork.
So, with these five conditions as a team leader you can increase your chances that your team will work
well, and even it considerably increase the chances. So, you don't leave it up to magic, to automatic
synergy or anything that you hope just happens. This is a very structured way in which you can start
thinking about the design of your team.
C. Team composition
Who should be in my team? This is a key question both for people in practice, but also for scientists. And
one of that key concerns here is diversity. Should the people in my team be more similar, have similar
characteristics, be the same in terms of, for example, demographic characteristics, be it gender, age,
nationality or do I want my people to be more different from each other? So again, we can think about the
demographic characteristics, but we can also think maybe about more underlying personality
characteristics. Are these people working in the same way? Do they have the same style of working? How
do they relate to each other? And this is a question for which there is really no one best answer. But first
of all, reflect on this question – what do you believe? Again, do you agree, or do you disagree with this
statement? A team that is more diverse will perform better than a team that is more homogenous. What do
you think? Basically, this is the key concern about teams. Because often we put together a team of people
because we hope, we believe that something in the diversity of the people in the different perspectives, in
the different personalities, the different experiences, that people bring to the team, we hope that that group
of people will in fact outperform either a single individual or a group of people that is more homogenous.
However, as mentioned above, the answer to this question is really not so straightforward. And in fact,
there's two perspectives on team diversity.
Let’s see different perspectives. This is called the perspective of information elaboration. This
perspective says that If you put together a group of people that have more different experiences, insights,
personalities, they will have a broader base of information from which to work in the team from which to
take decisions. Positive outcomes will happen for the team. Including for example, better problem solving
if you have more diversity of perspectives you can do more to solve your complex problems. More
creative solutions can be arrived because people think from different perspectives. Better customer
understanding can come as one of the outcomes. If you can relate to people from a variety of perspectives,
for sure this increases collective, overall understanding of your customers or the people that you work
with. Mutual learning and respect are yet another one. If you work together in a team in which people are
equal, you all went to the same school, we did the same study, you work on the same organization. And
now think about a team of people coming from different countries, different study backgrounds the
learning that you can get in this second type of team is much greater. Because people have such a variety
of perspectives. And with that, in fact, respect can also grow if people acknowledge that the diversity and
different experiences members carry and contribute to the team.
Another is team diversity. We like to work with people who are similar to us. In terms of our
demographic characteristics, in terms of our personality because we find it easier. We know what to
expect, people confirm in a way implicitly or explicitly that the way in which we are doing things is good,
which is a pleasant feeling. It's always nice to get confirmation that the way we are and the way we do
things, in fact, is a good thing, is a good choice. And by working with similar others, this is what
implicitly happens. So, this is in a way the negative perspective on diversity, because it implies that
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working with people who are different, working in a team of people that is more diverse creates friction,
conflicts, frustration, waste of time and effort. And yes, this is what we see. Researchers says that there
are empirical evidence exactly confirming this hypothesis that diversity may have negative outcomes. So,
teams in which members are more diverse may have more difficulties understanding each other. They
may have more difficulties in their communication because how do you align? How do you respect each
other? As a result, of course there may be a loss of productivity because in our diverse teams in which
people are so busy getting to know each other, understanding each other, solving their conflicts, aligning
their communication, this may all come at the expense of the work that the team is actually supposed to
do. So, we see a loss of productivity in the end. Also, it may lead to sub-groups in the team. So that is,
within your team, people may still seek to work more, affiliate more, relate more, to that small group of
people within the team that is more similar in the end. As a result, you may have a dividing line between
different subgroups in the team, which in general doesn't really help the productivity or even the cohesion
or the sense of being a real team altogether. So, all these phenomena really add up to the more negative
perspective on team diversity.
So, what to do now? There is positive perspective, and there is a negative perspective. We know, in fact,
that these two forces operate at the same time. So, it may be hard to avoid either one or the other. So, let's
look at some recommendations of how you can overcome, of how you can work around this tension as we
see it in the diversity literature. So first of all, you will want to analyze very carefully the task of the team.
What is it that this team needs to do? Because, in fact, what we see, the more complex, the more
uncertain, the more new, the more diffused the task, so that things that the team needs to achieve, the
higher the benefits of diversity. So, if you have a team performing very complex work, think about a
high-level management team, think about a research and development team thinking about new
medicines, trying new ways of thinking and creating new knowledge. For example, in these types of
teams probably the benefits of diversity will, in fact, outweigh the cost. If you have a very simple task,
well, do you really need the diversity? Do you really need those differences in perspective and
information? With very simple tasks, maybe you're even better off to establish a team in which people are
more similar, because in that way they avoid the costs of diversity.
Second, carefully analyze which diversity dimensions in fact are relevant. Because diversity in terms of
gender or age may not be the same as diversity in terms of personality or study backgrounds. So if you
know exactly what it is that your teammates to do and what you want from your team members, you can
analyze very carefully on which dimensions you may want diversity and on which dimensions maybe you
want similarity. Three, make sure you align the team towards a common vision. Again, we have the
importance that we saw in the design of the team to establish a compelling direction. We see again the
leadership tier is coming in which also we saw the importance of having a common vision, we see it again
here. If, as a team leader you are able for people to overcome their differences because they see such a
clear vision, such a clear and compelling common purpose and direction, this is a way, let's say, in which
you can be able to overcome the costs, the difficulties that may happen with diversity. And with that, you
can benefit from the advantages and the positive effects that are there. Also, very important, develop a
diversity mind set. Because the thing with diversity is also that it's not only about what is true, it's also
about what people believe is true. So, if you have a very diverse team, and as a team leader or as team
member, you can install in your team the perspective where you say, diversity is good. We can benefit
from it. This is something positive that can help all of us. This is a very different approach then if you
imagine people thinking about, well you know diversity, it's so difficult. It is such a hard thing to
overcome. So, what is the mindset, what is the belief system that you have about diversity? And also, we
can relate to the McGregor's theory of motivation. And we said sometimes the expectancies of a leader
about the behavior of the people can become true through a process of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have
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the same thing here. If people believe diversity is good, they will spend extra time and effort
understanding each other. As a result, they will be able to get the benefits of the diversity which also
again confirms their initial belief that diversity is good.
D. Team Processes and Conflict
Again, think about a question, does a diverse team always perform better than a team that is more
homogenous? Now, after having seen these different perspectives, probably you can see that the answer is
no, a diverse team will not always perform better than a more homogenous team. Rather take into account
the recommendations and think about what it is that the team is doing and where or not, you want your
team to be more diverse, or you want your team members to be more similar to each other. Now, let's
continue discussing about what do people actually do when they work together? We've discussed about
design of the team, about composing the team, so making decisions who is on the team and who is not.
Now the question comes is what happens when these people come together to do actually the work. This
is the topic that we call team processes. How are members working together? This, of course, as you
probably have a hunch already, this is a very broad topic. We can talk about communication, cooperation,
task execution, reflecting. Many, many different things that are happening here in people performing the
work. Few key processes are highlighted here, the first is going to be conflict. Team conflict can be very
helpful for team performance. What do you think about that? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Can you
think about examples from teams that you worked in the past for which maybe conflict was helpful or
maybe it was not? How do you see that? Let us continue talking about conflict and the thing with conflict
is that the one conflict is really not the other type of conflict. In fact, researchers have distinguished
between three different types of conflict.
The first is relationship conflict. This is the type of conflict that maybe you would most intuitively relate
to when thinking about conflict. This is where team members have disagreement, things get emotional.
Things may get personal. So really something is happening within the relationship between the people
working together. This type of conflict, in fact, is harmful. There's a lot of research showing that this
relationship, this personal emotional type of conflict, basically, it takes away time, energy and efforts that
team members otherwise would have spent on the work, on actually completing the task, and direct it
towards conflict. This is a type of conflict that is never helpful and that is in fact very harmful for team
performance.
The second type of conflict is task conflict. This is really more like when people are debating, when
people are arguing, when team members are trying to find the best solution. They may not necessarily
agree, they may have a lot of discussions and intense debates about what needs to be done but it's not yet
personal. This, in fact, is a type of conflict which can be very helpful for team performance because it is
through this type of debates, discussions, disagreements that opinions get sharpened, that more
information gets to the table. The creative solutions are being thought out in order to do justice to all the
arguments that have been on the table that have been discussed. This, in fact, is a type of conflict which
can be very helpful for team performance. However, as you maybe can relate to already, these types of
conflicts even though when in theory we can nicely separate them, in practice they tend to be intertwined.
What starts as maybe a task conflict, as a work-related discussion, may easily spill over into a more
personal thing, interrelationship conflict. This, in the end, is the thing to avoid and to manage. It's
important for a team leader to take responsibility for that but basically, it's also something for all the team
members. If you feel that your task-related discussions, your debates, are spilling over, are getting
personal, this is what you should stop in an early stage because relationship conflict, you don't want that
in your team. It's bad and it's hurting for performance.
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There's a third type of conflict, which is called process conflict. This is if you would want to see it that
way, let's say, a specific type of task conflict. Because we're still discussing about the work, but we're
discussing now about how to go about the work. How do we accomplish a task? When are we going to
start working? When are we going to deliver our first milestone? When are we bringing in the first
results? This is all those discussions and disagreements and debates that you have about how you should
go about doing the work. Same as with task conflict, this type of conflict tends to be very helpful because
it is something good when, in fact, as a team you discuss, and you explicitly reflect on what needs to be
done. How are we going to do it? What is the best approach to achieve it? It is though, something that you
want to make sure that it's especially helpful in the beginning of a project when you start working. If you
continue having this very high level of process conflict all the way through your project, through your
team, it may, in fact, also start to be hurting the collective output of your team. You see three different
types of conflicts. Relationship conflicts, avoid. Task conflict, stimulate. But make sure you manage it
very well so that it doesn't spill over to relationship conflict. Process conflicts allow it and stimulate it,
especially in the early stages of teamwork. So, with that, we can see that for our statement, team conflict
can be helpful. In fact, we would have to agree it can be helpful. But it's a tricky business, so you need to
make sure that you manage it quite well in order to stay on the good side of conflict.
Conflict is not the only team process of course that we can talk about. So, we need to understand how our
team members are working together. And how is that helping or hurting the performance of the team as a
whole? The first is communication. In fact, there's been a very interesting recent study that was done by
Google in which the main conclusion of the researchers was for teams to work well. For these Google
teams to work well on their task, was that in the team discussions, every team member should participate
about equally in the discussions. It's very easy, it's very basic. But the underlying assumption again is
that, if you have properly designed your team, so it's important for every team member to be there. With
his or her specific capabilities, insights, experiences. You will want to make sure that every person in fact
contributes to what is happening within the team. And teams in which team members have a roughly
equal part in the communication of the team as a whole in fact do much better. Then teams in which one
or few members dominate the discussion and others are hardly participating in it.
The second is the importance of reflecting and feedback. This is, you could say, the maintenance work of
the team. Because things do not happen automatically. Everything that involves human relationship
require some conscious reflecting on what is happening, giving and receiving feedback and make sure
that as a team you grow your capabilities to work together in the future. Third, in order to make all of this
work an underlining dimension of what researchers have called, psychological safety is very important.
What type of safety are we talking about here? Well, safety to speak up your minds. If in a team you don't
feel that your team members will respect what you have to contribute to the team. If you feel that a
different opinion is not valued but is rather answered with a very negative comment or even with really
negative actions with the team, by the team leader. Are you going to be talking your mind next time?
Chances are, you are not. So, just a mention of psychological safety really describes do team members
feel safe in the team to express what they are really thinking? Even when that may go against what the
team has been discussing? Until this moment, even when they run the risk of making themselves
unpopular in the team. And this if think back on team conflict this the dimension that we need for exactly
this type of task conflict and debate to happen. Because, if people are silencing themselves in the team,
well whatever smart ideas or opinions or insights they have is not likely to happen or to come across or to
help the team to achieve its purpose. So, with conflict, communication reflecting on feedback and
psychological safety, we have discussed four key aspects that have to do with how team members are
working together. And what happens if people start combining their individual inputs in creating outputs.
Then next thing is about how teams change over time and what we should take into account there.
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E. Teams over time – Types of Teams

As already mentioned earlier, teams are not the same when they begin than when they have worked for a
while. People are getting to know each other. People are maybe engaging in conflicts. So, a key thing
when considering teamwork is, how will my team change and develop over time? What happens? Can I,
one way or the other, maybe predict it? And, as a team leader, make sure that I act upon it properly? So,
to answer this question, here are two models for discussion. And the first is a very classic model
discussing team development, which was developed by Tuckman a while ago already.
Tuckman says that in order for a team to get into the stage of performance, high performance supposedly,
a team gets through different stages. Forming, storming, norming, and performing. Sometimes even a
fifth stage is added which is adjourning, when the team is ending, it's dissolving, and team members are
getting ready to start functioning in other teams again. So let's look, in detail, through the different phases
that this model proposes because Tuckman in the end really says that it's a necessity for teams to go
through these different stages in order to get to where they are, in fact, a high performing team. Starting
with forming. This is the phase in which team members are coming together. People are not really
knowing each other yet. People are not really comfortable yet with what it is that they're going to be
doing. There's not really processes, procedures all of this is happening and needs to start to get
established. This is also the phase where team members are typically nice and polite to each other. People
typically don't start off right away making trouble, engaging in conflict. No, they want to get to know
each other. They want to get to familiar with the job. And this is really the function of that first stage of
forming the team. The second stage, according to this model, is a phase of storming. So, this is where the
first disagreements, the first conflicts may start to arise. Because people are in fact discussing and
negotiating what it is that the team needs to do and how they are going to be discussing it. So, this is
where you can imagine a lot of process conflict taking place about how the team is working, how are we
going to be achieving what it is that we need to do. After that the team should enter a third phase called
norming. And this is a phase in which things get more stabilized. So, people know each other. They've
tested each other out a little bit in the storming phase. And they're establishing rules and procedures and
ways of working together. They can be very explicit in terms of agreeing about work, about processes.
But they can also be more implicit. This is when we call them norms, which are implicit guidelines about
how we're going to do things together. And it is after that, according to Tuckman's model, that a team can
enter in a stage of high performance. Things have been talked through, people know what to expect from
each other, how each member is going to be contributing to the overall goal and overall task of the team.
They have established their guidelines for how to do things together, and then with all of that out of the
way, a team can get into a stage of performing.
So, what we see in the literature, as already mentioned, this model has been around for a while. So, we do
see that indeed these phases tend to be happening in teams. But there are primarily true for those types of
process that we call relation-oriented processes. So indeed, team members need to get to know each other,
there may be initial disagreements, they establish rules and procedures to relate and this in the end helps
to perform. But this doesn't count so much for what's researchers call task-related processes or work
processes. Those processes or those series of activities that say something about actually the work that is
being done and how people approach that. Because, imagine there may be teams that need to perform and
that need to work right away. That need to put up with some sort of solution or some sort of action right
from the start. And this is also what we see happening. And this is why we need a second model to
understand it.
Tuckman's model helps us understand what is happening on the relational dimension of team
effectiveness. And we're going to be looking at a second model, which is Connie Gersick's mid-point
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transition, or the Dynamic Equilibrium Model (or mid-point transition model). And this model is
based on the observation that in fact teams have many different types of teams. They start working right
away. One way or the other, the output may not be perfect from the start but right away, team members
start doing together. And what Gersick observed in many of the teams that at the midpoint of the
teamwork teams change something halfway in their life. Interestingly enough, Gersick in fact bases her
initial theory on her observations of changes in other type of fields. For example, where people in the
middle of their lives may have midlife crisis or something like that. Also, she sees it in many different
settings on the individual and then also on the team level that the experience of being halfway through
something, it does something to ourselves and also to the teams. So, if you see that halfway through the
time there's typically some reconsideration in the team happens. Here again team leader tries to change
the formation of team if required, thinking about new strategies, new approach develops to tackle the
issues that team goes through. This is termed as giving a second thought about team formation and team
activities. This may be better than the first one. So, these are two models of team formation and
development which changes over time with the relationship members start developing with each other.
Answer any two questions from below in 200 words. Clearly type the question along with the
answer: (10x2=20 Points)
1. How do you explain the growing popularity of teams in organizations? Discuss team design?
What conditions or context factors determine whether teams are effective? Discuss team
composition?
2. How can organizations create team players? Discuss how diversity can be both beneficial and
misfortune for organization? Discuss different types of conflict and what are different ways for
management to overcome these conflicts?
3. Discuss the different stages of Tuckman’s model of team development. What impact these stages
have when we talk about modern virtual global team formation? Give any example(s).
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