Friendly Bank - Compassion, Integrity, and Teamwork - Case Study Example

Friendly Bank Aston Friendly Bank Introduction Working in teams is the first step that an organisation can use to make its employees work towards achieving its goals. In this case, the team members must work in a cohesive manner to be able to achieve the organisational goals. Organisational tasks are better performed when individuals combine their efforts to work together. To give direction to the team members, a team leader is usually selected to head the team (Zent, 2004). The leader must possess leadership skills that will help him make the team auger well within itself and with other teams to help the whole task force work together in a highly competitive environment to achieve the organisational goals. The case scenario involving the Friendly Bank gives a situation whereby the task force at the bank is organised in teams. The teams are made up of 14 team members with a team leader and an assistant team leader. The bank came into existence as an online arm of Parkers PLC that had undergone poor management that almost made it go bankrupt. Packers PLC had a kind of non-aggressive kind of organisational culture among its workers. This was expressed, by the way, its workers worked with a lot of reluctance without bothering anything. Several problems set in when most of the former workers at Parkers PLC are again employed at Friendly Bank as the Long Stays to head the customer advisor teams. The problems that set in include the different groups working at the bank not working well together, teams also not working as teams, members of teams have no common motivational factors and wants, a lot of tension between individuals and groups leading to absenteeism, poor performance and informal power games, and lack of proper leadership decision making. This paper it, therefore, aimed at providing an analysis of the case and at the same time addressing the problems faced by the bank by providing possible solutions that the management can apply. Organisation design/organisation Culture and Teamwork Problems Friendly Bank is adversely affected by organisation design/culture problem. To begin with, most of the employees who were previous employees at the branches of Parkers PLC that were closed down, were eventually transferred to Friendly Bank. Such employees, like Sheila, display a particular culture that has been implanted in them since they were workers at Parkers PLC. This is quite evident as the so-called "Long stays" are depicted to have a particular character of not being bothered about meeting the weekly Sales Against Targets. Sheila, for instance, says, she feels the team members are doing enough given that they are always busy. This makes different groups be formed in the organisation, whereby, one group, led by Carl Evans, is very aggressive and working towards meeting the sales target to increase their salaries. On the other hand, the group led by Sheila is not bothered about being aggressive to meet the weekly Sales Against Target. In fact, she feels that these figures create a lot of paperwork for no good reason. In an organisation, the most important thing, which people need to be working to achieve, is the organisational goal (Rousseau, et al., 2006). However, to achieve this, it is important for the individuals to work together coherently. Friendly Bank, especially the team led by Sheila, has people who are divided into two groups and do not work together. They are even driven by different goals that they want to achieve. It is, therefore, very hard for the Bank to achieve its predetermined or set goals. To solve this issue, Friendly Bank was not supposed to employ the previous employees from Parkers PLC. Such employees, when brought into a new organisation, such as Friendly Bank, they tend to carry with them the culture of doing things that they used to have the previous organisation. Now that they are working at this Bank, they are not supposed to be team leaders as they can influence those working under them to take up the culture. The Bank can, therefore, put the likes of Carl to be the team leaders so that they can make their team members to be as aggressive in meeting the sales target. At least, by this, the teams will be working together to achieve the same goals as it is a requirement in forming a team (Morley & Heraty, 1995). The team work problem is coming up because of the difference in the goals that are pursued by the two groups coming up within the team. Carl is regarded as not being a team player as he is workaholic but do not involve the whole team in what he does. He even formed a group, called ‘Satbusters with which he was able to go past their set targets, allowing them to earn extra income. According to Sheila, she believes that this is not right as a bank is not all about competition. It is because of these divergent opinions in the team that result to problems in the team and make them not work together as a team (Granger, 2008). To be able to solve such problems, the team members should operate in a coherent manner. To encourage cohesion in the team, the team members should first be reduced. By making the team smaller, it becomes easy to control and to oversee all the teams activities (Fritzsche, 2011). Cases like part of the team having divergent goals can be minimised when the team is smaller. The team can also increase agreement with the group goals. This can be done through letting the team leader know exactly the importance of having a common goal. The team leader will then be in the forefront to ensure that all the team members are devoted towards the same goal (Hoerr, 2009). Stress and Power, and Leadership/Decision-Making Problems After realising that the work at Friendlys is not as stimulating as they expected, individuals begun playing games to compensate. Such games include competing with each other to make the most sales and redesigning the system to make them more efficient (Hamilton, 1992). Some games that included playing tricks on others were majorly aimed at achieving power by individuals in the organisation, but they were not positively endorsed by all workers. Carl is waiting for the downfall of Sheila so that he can replace her. This is not appropriate since he is supposed to work with Sheila together as a team and make her understand that their team requires aggressiveness to achieve its goals. A team should work together in all situations to accomplish its tasks (Teman, 2012). Therefore, by Carl working on his own, he might be trying to make Sheila look incompetent so that he could replace her. Paul also made thought that he could advice Sheila to retrain for her job as she looked incompetent, instead of confronting her, which could have risked a scene that could have stood a good chance to alienate all the Long stays. He thought that Sheila could take that as an insult and resign. After resigning, maybe he could take the chance to become the team leader. Such power problems can be solved by engaging Friendlys top management in providing leadership in the organisation. First, the top management is not bothered by the way Sheila is leading her team incompetently without a sense of motivation. They are very okay with her ways of doing things and do not see any problem with it. However, the top management should ensure that leadership in each team entails providing morale to the team members to accomplish the tasks well. They should also ensure that the teams focus is on production and should expect targets to be met (Martindale, 1996). This way, the teams will formulate realistic objectives that they will strive to achieve. To be able to implement this, they will find people such as Sheila, who call themselves as the Long stays, to have no business being the team leaders in their groups. This is because they do not aid their team members to focus on production since they are already satisfied with the bare minimum that they contribute to the organisation. Conclusion In a nutshell, Friendly Bank has a lot of problems concerning the teams and individuals in the organisation. The problems concerning the team members can be addressed by applying the requirement of good team management skills. The leaders and supervisors also seem to be reluctant in the organisation such that they cannot rectify the condition by providing good leadership. Such should be retained on issues of decision-making, and the systems should also be redesigned to allow change to take place in the organisational culture. Bibliography Fritzsche, S., 2011. Compassion, Integrity and Teamwork. Plastic Surgical Nursing, 31(1), p. 2. Granger, R. H., 2008. Beat the Competition with Teamwork. Rough Notes, 13(9), p. 32. Hamilton, R., 1992. Teamwork Ley to Workgroup Suceed. Computerworld, 26(32), p. 1. Hoerr, J., 2009. The Payoff from Teamwork. Business Week, 31(14), p. 56. Martindale, R., 1996. Teamswork is the Game plan for New Creek Nation. Tulsa World, 13(2), p. 11. Morley, M. & Heraty, N., 1995. The high performance organization: Developing Teamwork. Management Decision, 33(2), p. 56. Rousseau, V., Aube, C. & Savoie, A., 2006. Teamwork Behavior: A Review of an Integration of Frameworks. Small Group Research, 37(5), pp. 540-570. Teman, R., 2012. From Teamwork o Collaboration. Management Science, 12(2), p. 7. Zent, J., 2004. Teamwork. 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