A Reflection upon the Project for Empowerment within an Organization - Essay Example

number Powerless: A Reflection upon the Project for Empowerment within an Organization That first word is how I felt much of the time during this project. Other words would be frustrated, lost and even desperate. I guess that last one prompted me to action, since I realized that my grade was about to go down the tubes. So I sent out an email and asked everybody what they wanted to do about the problems of non-attendance and the inability of organizing a meeting of the whole team. I guess I just had the lowest tolerance level, because the response was fast and good. Communication was the first thing I thought of as important to our presentation and it is interesting that this was a problem for us from the beginning. We lacked the very thing which is a large part of what we would be presenting. How does that work? Seems like it is a sort of Catch-22. We needed to have good communication in order to present the theme of Empowerment in the Organization which is very closely ties to communication. Several members of our mythical team were not present in classes. I did not feel empowered! After beginning to research the topic of Empowerment, I discovered that team communication was considered a key element, and that was the major thing missing from our team. So I looked at team communication research. I was hoping to find a magic something to make it all work. That did not happen either. "Grosse (2002) defined a virtual team as one that conducts its work almost entirely through electronic technology." (Roebuck, Brock & Moodie, 2004) However, it was frustrating, because it is really hard to communicate with people who never show up. "Because communication is often seen as the most important factor in coordinating work among team members (1992; Dougherty, 1992; Ebadi & Utterback, 1984; Pinto, Pinto, & Prescot, 1993), effective communication is vital for virtual teams (Baker, 2002). " (Roebuck, Brock & Moodie, 2004) After researching this question we came up with the idea of a virtual team, since it seemed impossible to get people together. There was some cooperation on this score, as four of the other five responded well in email. So we became a virtual team. As soon as this was accepted yhings began to work better. The fifth member was a special problem as this person’s level of English is so low that it made communication very difficult. I did not really know what to do, since I have never taken any courses on how to communicate with second language speakers whose comprehension level was really low. I tried to find something on this too, but was not successful. Perhaps I used the wrong search strings. When meeting in person, team members can depend upon voice levels, smiles, and raised eyebrows to determine whether they are being understood; however, virtual teams do not have these nonverbal cues and can fail without communication strategies to manage the lack of face-to-face communication or silence (Wilson, 2003). We could provide none of these, but a suggestion to use emoticons seems actually to help, even though I had had my doubts from the beginning, since I thought that one needed a good understanding of English to understand the emoticons. I was wrong. They seem to be rather universal. One article I found by Roebuck, Brock and Moodie (2004) had a lot of really interesting and helpful information. It listed three main challenges to the virtual team. I shared this article with the rest of the team. The three challenges are: Compensating for face to face communication, mentioned above, building relationships (This never really happened: no time was available.) and taking advantage of the talents and knowledge of each team member. “A third challenge is accessing and leveraging the unique knowledge of each member to successfully achieve the teams goal,” according to Anderson and Shane (2002), "While a team is working on a project, usually the project is like a puzzle, and each team member is responsible to work on an assigned piece of the project" (p. 6). The team must develop a system for sharing information so that nothing relevant to solving the problem is lost. (Roebuck, Brock & Moodie, 2004) In order to do this we put together a list of things we must do and asked other team members to add to them, Then we asked people to volunteer for tasks. This worked well, except that there were several tasks left with no owners. So all members were asked to select one more of those which were left and take it off the list and email it out again. There was one crash of selection times and we gave preference to the earliest email sending time. Email could work, but this problem of duplication of effort is better resolved otherwise. We never really elected a leader, and nobody wanted the responsibility. Things might have run more smoothly if we had. At least we could agree upon something. Two team members rather took the lead, so that helped. We still had the problem of the team member who did not speak English very well. She did not understand at all what I was expecting from her for the presentation, so I made a list of the parts of her tasks and I put my name next to the parts involved in this slide which was totally irrelevant, and I noted that I would send an email explaining this task and talk to her on the phone if necessary. I suggested that other team member do the same for one of her tasks. It was a sensitive topic to ask a young woman for her phone number, so I suggested that other team member simply offer theirs in the initial email and say she could call them to discuss anything she did not understand, adding the best times to call. This actually worked quite well. I found an article on small learning communities as teams. I thought some of this was really relevant in our situation, but we seemed to be getting none of the benefits noted in the article. I think this is due to lack of organization. I suspect that this assignment of teams without first learning about team management is rather like throwing people into the deep end of a pool and then trying to teach them to swim. Our team barely dog paddled until quite near the end. The article by Janusik and Wolvin (2007) talked about all kinds of learning team, and none seemd to really describe our team, since we were too small, but it seems that these strategies mentioned in the article would work even on a very small scale. "Two basic premises of learning communities are that they enable faculty and students interaction (NIE, 1984) and that they are student-centered (Shapiro" (Janusik & Wolvin, 2007) Our communication with the instructor could have been better with better organization of the team. "A learning community brings together individuals who have a curiosity for learning about a given subject (Gabelnick, et al., 1990; Shapiro" (Janusik & Wolvin, 2007) Even though this was an assigned subject we were mostly all still curious what we would learn about it. We decided to research our tasks and then share the research via email. We agreed that we would need to have one meeting face to face with all members present in order to work out how this project would be presented and finally create the presentation. We finally decided to share on Facebook in order to make this work better. "Virtual environments enable collaboration and interactivity to a degree that radio, television or even two-way communication technologies like fax, telephone and primitive uses of e-mail do not" (Hoag, Jayakar & Erickson, 2003) We sis manage a final meeting, buit it ran over and some had to leave. However we did finish the project, but I cannot help but think it might have baan much better if we had been organized with a plan from the beginning. Perhaps teams should only include members who are present when the team is created. Overall it was a rather frustrating experience, but I did learn, painfully. I guess if nobody takes leadership and it is not assigned, I will step up after this. I suspect that doing this would be better than waiting for someone else. I really did not want to do that, but I guess that nobody else did either. I think that the group expected it to be a much easier task. Interestingly, it connected very well to the empowerment theme, because communication seems to be a key element in this also. In fact, I am beginning to think that communication is a key to everything, like the “Theory of Everything” for business. There must be plenty of universals which operate across the entire organization. References Anderson, F. F., & Shane, H. M. (2002). The impact of netcentricity on virtual teams: The new performance challenge. Team Performance Management, 8(1/2), 5-7. Dougherty, D. (1992). Interpretative barriers to successful product innovation in large firms. Organization Science, 3(2), 179-202 Ebadi, Y. M., & Utterback, J. M. (1984). The effects of communication on technological innovation. Management Science, 30(5), 572-586. Gabelnick, F., MacGregor, J., Matthews, R.S., Smith, B.L. (1990). Learning communities: Creating connections among students, faculty. and disciplines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Grosse, C. U. (2002). Managing communication within virtual intercultural teams. Business Communication Quarterly, 65(4), 22-38. National Institute of Education (NIE). (1984). Involvement in learning: Realizing the potential of American higher education: Study group on the conditions of excellence in American higher education. Washington, DC: National Institute of Education, Department of Education. Pinto, M. R., Pinto, J. K., & Prescot, J. E. (1993). Antecedents and consequences of pro- ject cross-functional cooperation. Management Science, 39(10), 1281-1296. Hoag, A. M., Jayakar, K. P., & Erickson, K. (2003). The Role of Trust in Virtual and Interpersonal Environments: Implications for Team Learning & Case Method Pedagogies. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 57(4), 370+. Janusik, L. A., & Wolvin, A. D. (2007). The Communication Research Team as Learning Community. Education, 128(2), 169+. Roebuck, D. B., Brock, S. J., & Moodie, D. R. (2004). Using a Simulation to Explore the Challenges of Communicating in a Virtual Team. Business Communication Quarterly, 67(3), 359+. Read More