Teamwork, Dynamics, and Google Team Effectiveness Research

• This module covers teamwork, team effectiveness, motivations, group formation, building a team, collaboration, and dealing with conflict.
• Understand the attributes of a successful team, core concepts in team dynamics, and how to manage expectations and conflict effectively.

Google's Team Effectiveness Research

• Google's research into team effectiveness involved multiple perspectives, studying 180 teams through interviews, and comparing results with annual employee surveys.
• Key factors in team effectiveness in Google's research are psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.
• Factors that research showed to not have a significant effect on team effectiveness are colocation, consensus, extroversion, individual performance, workload size, seniority, team size, and tenure.
• Professor Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School provides insights on how leaders can increase psychological safety within teams.

Motivation Theories

• Two motivation theories covered are Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and McClelland's Acquired-Needs Theory.
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: physiological, safety, social, self-esteem, and self-actualization.
• McClelland's Acquired-Needs Theory focuses on achievement, affiliation, and power.

Tuckman Stages of Group Development

• The Tuckman stages of group development are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.

Building a Team

• Key steps in building a team include ensuring the team is real, has clear direction, is enabled, supported, and coached.
• Airlines and NASA are examples of organizations that face challenges of newness in team dynamics.
• The Asch study (1951) involved participants where most were confederates that repeated the experiment and influenced a significant number of participants to conform to the majority.
• Groupthink can present a challenge to teams.

Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode

• The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode identifies different approaches to conflict which is competing, avoiding, compromising, accommodating, and collaborating.

Dealing with Conflict

• Shared goals are important in dealing with conflict.
• Challenges with conflict include isolating, hijacking, and hitchhiking.
• Strategies for dealing with conflict involve acknowledging diversity, strengths, and weaknesses, working as a united team, addressing issues quickly and directly, and not sweating the small stuff.
• Additional conflict-resolution strategies include focusing on the problem not the person, not dwelling on past issues, and focusing on the best interests of the team.

Upcoming Assignments

• A2 - Product Review: this is an individual assignment where a topic is assigned early the following week, requiring writing two sections of the final report: context and details/ product research.
• A3 - Report: This assignment requires additional report components that include an executive summary, conclusion, recommendations, illustrations, and attention to design.
• A4 - Group Presentation: This assignment is based on the accumulated reports of all team members, teams are assigned during Study Break, dates are set in the last two weeks of class, and an overview is made for the executives of HaliHali Halibut.

Module 2

• Module 2 focuses on building trust.
• Key aspects include finding reliable information, presenting information objectively, using citations and referencing(IEEE), and addressing mis-/dis-/mal-information.
• Tutorials for Summaries, Referencing, Team charters, and Group presentation practice are upcoming.
• The midterm is scheduled for February 13th and it will be in class (2:35-3:55) and lasts 1 hour, and it takes place in MacMechan Auditorium.

Explore teamwork, team effectiveness, motivation theories, and group formation. Understand team dynamics, collaboration, and conflict resolution. Includes Google's research on factors influencing team effectiveness and insights from Amy Edmondson on psychological safety.