MGT 248 Study Guide - Final Guide: Situational Leadership Theory, Cognitive Dissonance, Virtual Team
21 May 2018
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Thoughts for exam ll Spring 2018 MGT 248 (Chapters 10-15)
Teams, motivation, and control~
• What should you consider when forming a team?
• Work group: Groups whose members work intensely on specific, common goals using their positive
synergy, individual and mutual accountability, and complementary skills.
• Picking the right people for a team: (who composes the team)
o Representative method: pick people from different departments (marketing, sales, finance,
accounting)
▪ The reps might not be skilled in what needs to get done
o Skill method:
• How many people can be on the team: Smaller groups are better (5-7), teams more than 12 are good
for finding facts. Too many people on a team can lead to social loafing. Too few people on a team they
might not know the direction they are going in and being under resourced.
o Relationship building is important- clarify the roles *****
• Task conflict and relational conflict: task conflict helps because it leads to optimal solutions, relational
is pesoal ad does’t add athig to the solutio.
• What type of team: (not as important)
o Problem-solving teams: A tea fo the sae depatet o futioal aea that’s ioled i
efforts to improve work activities or to solve specific problems.
o Self-managed work team: A type of work team that operates without a manager and is
responsible for a complete work process or segment.
o Cross-functional team: A work team composed of individuals from various specialties.
o Virtual team: A type of work team that uses technology to link physically dispersed members in
order to achieve a common goal.
• Define the criteria to get to the answer: do we have the goals, roles, and criteria set to get to the
solution.
• Leadership: formal/informal
• What should you consider for good team performance?
• Adequate resources, climate of trust, performance of trust, and effective leadership
• As we look at this model we must keep two things in mind: (1) Teams differ in form and structure. This
model attempts to generalize across all teams, so you should use it as a guide. (2) The model assumes
that managers have already determined that teamwork is preferable to individual work. Creating
effetie teas i situatios i hich individuals can do the job better would be wasted effort.
• Team effectiveness model:
o Context: Adequate resources; Leadership and structure; Climate of trust; Performance
evaluation and reward systems
o Composition: Abilities of members; Personality; Allocating roles; Diversity; Size of teams;
Member flexibility; Member preferences
o Work design: Autonomy; Skill variety; Task identity; Task significance
o Process: Common purpose; Specific goals; Team efficiency; Conflict levels; Social loafing
• Roles needed for an effective team:
o Controller-Inspector: Examines details and enforces rules
o Upholder-Maintainer: Fights external battles
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o Report-Adviser: Encourages the search for more information
o Linker: Coordinates and integrates
o Creator-Innovator: Initiates creative ideas
o Explorer-Promoter: Champions ideas after they have been initiated
o Assessor-Developer: Offers insightful analysis of options
o Thruster-Organizer: Provides structure
o Concluder-Producer: Provides direction and follow-through
• What is meant by span of control?
The number of employees a manager can efficiently and effectively supervise.
• Do you know the difference between a Type A vs Type B personality?
• Type A personality: Chronic sense of time urgency, excessive competitive drive, and difficulty
accepting and enjoying leisure time; more likely to shows symptoms of stress.
• Type B personality: Little to no sense of time urgency or impatience.
o Stress comes from the hostility and anger associated with Type A behavior. Surprisingly, Type
Bs are just as susceptible.
• How does the process of Creativity produe ioatio… hat are soe steps? ie pereptio…
• Creativity: The ability to produce novel and useful ideas
• To help make this kind of thinking happen, team members embarked on such activities such as
imagination exercises, group crying, and stuffed bunny throwing. Creativity is learning to let go,
eatiit itself is’t eough, though.
• Innovation: The process of taking a creative idea and turning it into a useful product, service, or
method of operation.
o Innovative organization: Characterized by its ability to channel creativity into useful outcomes.
• The creative steps:
o (1) Perception: involves the way you see things. Being creative means seeing things from a
unique perspective.
o (2) Incubation: ideas go through this process. During this incubation period, employees should
collect massive amounts of data that are stored, retrieved, studied, reshaped, and finally
molded into something new.
o (3) Inspiration: the moment when all of your efforts successfully come together, but the
creative process is not done yet.
o (4) Innovation: involves taking inspiration and turning it into a useful product, service, or way of
doing things. It’s usuall at this stage that a idiidual ioles othes more in what he or she
has been working on. Such involvement is critical because even the greatest invention may be
delayed, or lost, if an individual cannot effectively deal with others in communicating and
achieving what the creative idea is supposed to do.
• Can you distinguish cognitive from affect from behavior…?
• Cognitive: The part of an attitude made up of the beliefs, opinions, knowledge, and information held
by a person. What you know- technical skills, expertise, personal aspects.
• Affect: The part of a attitude that’s the eotioal o feelig pat. What you feel- intuition, general
likes and dislikes, stress, how you express yourself.
• Behavior: The part of an attitude that refers to an intention to behave in a certain way toward
someone or something. What you do.
• What is cognitive dissonance?
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Any incompatibility or inconsistency between attitudes or between behavior and attitudes. When you see
something and you conform it with your beliefs (sees someone who you thought was lazy and you assume
that the did’t do thei ok just eause the ee laz. Inconsistencies in the above.
Ex: a manager has to do something illegal and everyone knows it is, but it has to be done.
• Can you describe attribution theory?
• A theory used to explain how we judge people differently, based on what meaning we attribute to a
given behavior
o Internally caused behavior is believed to be under the control of the individual. Externally
caused behavior results from outside causes; that is, the person seen as having been forced into
the behavior by the situation.
o The determination depends on three factors
▪ (1) Distinctiveness: Refers to whether an individual displays a behavior in many
situations or whether it is particular to one situation. We want to know if this behavior
is unusual. If it is, the observer is likely to give the behavior an external attribution. If
this action is not unique, it will probably be judged as internal.
• Low distinctiveness-internal attribution
• High distinctiveness-external attribution
▪ (2) Consensus: If everyone who is faced with a similar situation responds in the same
way, we can say the behavior shows consensus. If there is consensus it is expected to be
seen as an external attribution, if there is no consensus it is likely assigned an internal
attribution.
• Low consensus-internal attribution
• High consensus-external attribution
▪ (3) Consistency: Does the individual engage in behaviors regularly and consistently?
Does the employee respond the same way over time? The more consistent the
behavior, the more the observer is inclined to attribute it to internal causes.
• Low consistency-external attribution
• High consistency-internal attribution
• Can you give examples of distinctiveness vs consensus vs consistency in explaining behavior?
How we interact with each other in teams
• Why can perception be very different from reality?
There are biases, self-serving bias
Our view of reality is skewed by the external factors/internal experiences.
• Ca ou idetif priar persoalit tests…Myers-Briggs, Big 5?
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI): A personality assessment that uses four dimensions of personality
to identify different personality types. The 16 personality types are based on four dimensions:
o Extraversion versus Introversion (EI): The EI diesio desies a idiidual’s oietatio
toward the external world of the environment (E) or the inner world of ideas and experiences
(I).
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Thoughts for exam ll spring 2018 mgt 248 (chapters 10-15) Too many people on a team can lead to social loafing. This model attempts to generalize across all teams, so you should use it as a guide. (2) the model assumes that managers have already determined that teamwork is preferable to individual work. Creativity is learning to let go, (cid:272)(cid:396)eati(cid:448)it(cid:455) (cid:271)(cid:455) itself is(cid:374)"t e(cid:374)ough, though. Innovation: the process of taking a creative idea and turning it into a useful product, service, or method of operation. Innovative organization: characterized by its ability to channel creativity into useful outcomes: the creative steps, (1) perception: involves the way you see things. Being creative means seeing things from a unique perspective: (2) incubation: ideas go through this process. It"s usuall(cid:455) at this stage that a(cid:374) i(cid:374)di(cid:448)idual i(cid:374)(cid:448)ol(cid:448)es othe(cid:396)s more in what he or she has been working on. Any incompatibility or inconsistency between attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.
