CHAPTER 3
1. Be familiar with the four natural stages to reach high performance and the hallmarks of
each stage (pp. 74-75).
1) Forming (month 1&2): team members focus on gaining acceptance and avoiding conflict.
a) A honeymoon period → team members get to know each other
2) Storming (month 2&3): open up with competing ideas about how the team should
approach work.
a) The least productive, since team members are attempting to make sense of
uncertain roles, goals, and accountabilities.
3) Norming (month 4&5): arrives at a work plan (roles, goals, and accountabilities)
4) Performing (month 6&7): operate efficiently toward accomplishing goals.
a) Evolved to a level where they can transform disagreement and conflict into
consensus for future action.
2. Be familiar with each of the principles of effective team communication (pp. 74-81).
There is more than one question from this section.
1) Team should focus first and foremost on performance
a) Signal: often talk directly about work priorities
b) Way to stay focuses on performance:
i) Solution-oriented primary statements
(1)Trigger a mindset that affects subsequent behavior
2) Teams go through four natural stages to reach high performance
a) Forming, storming, norming, performing
3) Effective teams build a work culture around values, norms, and goals
a) Team culture: a set of shared perceptions and commitment to collective values,
norms, roles, responsibilities, and goals.
b) Developed (norming) → high productivities (performing)
c) Way: create a team charter
1
,4) Effective teams meet often
a) Establish shared perceptions of roles, goals, and accountabilities
b) Force team members to meet deadlines
c) Prioritize first meeting and actions
5) Effective teams focus on psychological safety and ensure all voices are heard
a) Psychological safety: team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in
front of one another
b) 2 norms contribute to psychological safety:
i) All team members spend roughly the same amount of time speaking
during their conversations
ii) Team members are empathetic and understanding one another’s feelings
6) Effective teams recognize and actively seek to avoid groupthink
a) Groupthink: when groups verbally or nonverbally agree to ideas without
gathering enough information and exhaustively evaluating their options → poor
decision making
b) Symptoms of groupthink:
i) Collective rationalization: when group members convince themselves a
solution is the best even when faced with conflicting information.
ii) Moral high ground: when group members assume they’re morally correct
and as a result dismiss competing ideas or alternate solutions
iii) Self-censorship: when group members don’t voice their opinions for the
sake of harmony
iv) Illusion of unanimity: when no one speaks out against the majority view,
as a result, everyone assumes there is agreement
v) Peer pressure: when the majority of group members pressure or even
penalize a member with dissenting views
vi) Illusion of invulnerability: when team members are overly optimistic in
their ideas and don’t consider the risks or drawbacks of their ideas
(1)Complacency: when experienced a few successes and begin to
assume it will automatically make good decisions
vii) Mindguards: team members who purposely filter information so there is
not dissent or threat to the team leader
viii) Stereotyping: when group members see outsiders as morally inferior or
less competent.
c) *these patterns can be amplified through cascades (when the initial ideas in a
discussion excessively influence the ultimate decisions)
7) Effective teams embrace diversity
a) 2 forms of diversity:
i) Inherent diversity: involves traits such as age, gender, ethnicity, and sexual
orientation
2
, ii) Acquired diversity: involves traits you acquire through experience
b) Having both types of diversity is 2-D diversity
i) 45% more likely: growth in market share
ii) 70% more likely: have captured a new market
8) Effective teams solve problems and generate creative solutions by going through cycles
of divergence and convergence
a) Divergence: considering as many solutions as possible
b) Convergence: evaluating the proposed ideas and solutions and narrowing them to
a small set of feasible solutions to address the problem
9) Effective teams provide a lot of positive feedback and evaluate their performance often
10)Effective teams feel a common sense of purpose and bond socially
3. Review the best practices for planning and running effective meetings. Given a
description of an ineffective meeting, be able to identify a solution for improving
performance (p. 82-84). There is more than one question from this section.
Planning Meeting Best Practices:
● Routine meetings - spend 30-60min preparing
● Important & nonroutine meetings - spend several hours or days planning
● Questions to answer when preparing for meetings:
○ What is the purpose of the meeting? What outcomes do I expect?
○ Who should attend?
○ When should the meeting be scheduled?
○ What roles and responsibilities should people at the meeting have?
○ What will be the agenda?
○ What materials should I distribute prior to the meeting?
○ When and how should I invite others?
○ What logistical issues do I need to take care of (reserving rooms, getting
equipment, printing materials)?
● Think about how scheduling will impact productivity
○ Morning - the most productive
○ Tuesday - the most productive
○ Friday - the least productive
● Think about the materials you should send ahead of time
● Consider the type of meeting you want
○ Coordination meetings: focus on discussing roles, goals, and accountabilities
○ Problem-solving meetings: brainstorming about how to address and solve a
particular work problem
● Creating and distributing an agenda ahead of time
○ Items include in agendas:
3
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