Applied Assignment: Self-Managed Work Teams

Identify and discuss the four most common forms of work teams. Give an example of each and what they do Problem solving teams: This type of team is composed of five to twelve employees. They meet weekly to focus on improvement, whether it is in quality, efficiency, or the work environment. An example of this could be all department heads in a firm that meet on a weekly basis to exchange ideas on how to improve productivity.However, they only make suggestions to the higher-ups, who will then be the one to implement their ideas. Self-Managed work teams: A self-managed team is a group of employees that take the responsibility of a supervisor. Different from the problem solving teams, In that they are the ones that come up with the ideas and are also the ones to Implement them into the work place. They often chose their own members and evaluate each other with in the group.This type of group has not always shown to be positive. In one study It showed higher absenteeism and higher turnove r rates. They have also shown to lack In conflict resolution with in the work place. An example of this type of group could be, student workers in an apartment complex that are hired without a â€Å"manager in place to maintain their schedules and the way they organize their office. They are given a goal or an objective and together they decide how to reach that goal or objective.Cross- Functional teams: This team is composed of employees at a similar hierarchical level that come together to come up with innovative ideas. A cross-functional team is good to come up with new products or new ideas, because having employees from different apartments allows many points of view to be expressed about the success or Implementation of the Idea or product. An example might be the coordination of the marketing department, the accounting department, and the production department, meeting to come up with a new marketing campaign.This way the accounting department can express monetary restrictio n, the marketing department can show its ideas, and the production department can provided input on how much increase in production it can handle. Virtual teams: These teams are comprised of members that are not geographically close but use genealogy to communicate and achieve a common goal. These teams sometimes suffer from lack of social rapport and direct interaction among members. They also tend to share less information, because of that, low levels of virtually in teams results In higher levels of information sharing, but high levels of virtually hinder It.For these teams to work they need to be monitor to make sure that; trust Is established among members, team progress Is monitored closely, and the efforts and products are publicized throughout the organization. An example of this could be, an international company that has members work together to create a universal What are defensive behaviors? Provide three examples of defensive behaviors and explain why an employee would engage in the behavior. Defensive behaviors are reactive and protective behaviors to avoid action, blame, and change.The defensive behaviors of avoiding action include, over conforming, buck passing, playing dumb, stretching, and stalling, The defensive behaviors avoiding blame include, buffing, playing safe, Justifying, scapegoat, and misrepresenting. The defensive behaviors to avoid change are, prevention and self-protection. Defensive behaviors seem to employees to be the way to protect their self-interests, however over time it wears them down. Eventually they know this as the only way to behave and begin to lose trust in other employees, bosses, and even clients.An example of behavior to avoid action, stretching, includes prolonging the progress or the start of an assignment. For example an employee is given the task of creating a proposal that would normally only take a couple of days, they appear to be occupied n other things and take a week to complete. An employee might do this if they do not agree with the idea or process they are producing the proposal for, or if they do not agree with the supervisor's way of asking for the task to be completed.One of the ways a defensive behavior is displayed to avoid blame is scapegoat. This is blaming a negative result on external factors that re not entirely blameworthy. They might take the icy weather for not being able to complete a report. While the weather may have hinder their productivity, most likely one day of bad weather should not eve been the reason that more work was not put into it prior to the bad weather or after the bad weather to still insure that the project was completed on time.To avoid change some employees will act in a way to prevent the action from happening. Maybe the boss is implementing a new computing system that could replace one of the employees. In order prevent it, an employee may act defensively and provide reason after reason why this will not work. They may also act as if they are having a lot of difficulty with the new program to make it seem that the program is hard to use.