Week 6 Team Dysfunction Tutorial

In this week you will learn about

1. Practicing and reflecting about the roles you play within a team.
2. Reinforcing the knowledge of team dysfunction issues and mitigation strategies.

Overview

This tutorial is inspired from CMU’s tutorial with the same name [1]

All teams are inherently dysfunctional in some sense. This is inevitable as they are made up of fallible, imperfect human beings, each with different goals and intentions. Thankfully, the causes of dysfunction are both identifiable and curable, but definitely not easy to resolve. Making a team functional and cohesive requires courage, good communication, and a strong resolve to making the team better.

Activity 1: Trade-off and Tasking Planning Meeting (15 mins)

Before starting the activity, you need to decide on the role that you are going to take.

Use a random number generator to get a random number from 1-7. Next, check Appendix A for a detailed description of the role associated with your generated number. Keep your role secret from the other people in your group!

Your group has been hired as software developers to work on ANU ISIS (where students can view/manage their administrative records). For your first assignment, you’ve been asked to develop a better system for handling online payments for various types of fees.

As a team, research and find tools that can be used to improve the payment system. This can be anything from supporting better payment methods, storing payment information, etc. Compare the strengths and weaknesses of the tools. At the end of this activity, your group should have agreed on a tool to use.
Be sure to also assign each member a task in order to integrate the tool into the payment system.

As part of the preparation, each team member should have a role assigned. Each member should keep their role secret and try to act accordingly during the meeting. Try to identify the roles played by your team members and, if possible, fix the dysfunction.

Activity 2: Group Discussion (10 mins)

As a group, discuss the following questions:

1. What dysfunctional characteristic did your teammates display?
2. How would you handle those dysfunctional characteristics in future situations?
3. Then, as a group, prepare some responses to the questions in Part 3 (Some of the questions will have already been addressed by the group discussion).

Activity 3: Reflection (20 mins)

As a class, discuss the following questions:

1. Was the meeting effective? Why or why not?
2. What team dysfunctions did you observe during the meeting?
3. Were there any instances where your role directly clashed with someone else in your group?
4. Were you able to identify the roles played by the other members? What problems were caused by their behavior?
5. Can you think of mitigation strategies and solutions to avoid these problems?

Appendix A

Roles / Personality Traits#

Here’s a description of the roles and the behavior each role has:

1. Contributor: Aim for general team success, discuss solutions with your team. Ask for their opinion and demonstrate engagement during the activity.
2. Know-it-all: You think you are extremely experienced and know how to solve the problem on your own. Act like you do not need help and just tell your team to watch while you search for the tool. Try to tell other members how to search for information about the tool. Be combative and shoot another member’s idea down if possible.
3. Act silent: pay attention to the meeting, but simply do not suggest anything. You assume your team members know everything and don’t feel you need to say much. Remain passive but friendly.
4. Agree with everything: do not question the decisions of your team. You are afraid of raising conflicts; so just agree with everything during the activity.
5. Hitchhiking: your goal is to do a little work as possible for. Be friendly but not productive. Try to get other people to step in for you, for example you can act confused with the task and say that you need someone else to do this for you. You may have to make a quick, bad attempt to make it look like you tried to figure out the task.
6. Commitment issue: Go along with the meeting, until when tasks are being assigned, say that you are busy with something (interview prep, midterm, other assignment). If asked if they could do something else, or if being pressed further continue giving excuses why you can’t contribute.
7. Perfectionist: You will perfect even minor details. Your role is to make sure the tool’s source code is readable and aesthetically perfect and that also includes perfect comments. You should argue for or against the tool based on these minor details.

References

[1] CMU Tutorial on Team Dysfunction: https://cmu-313.github.io/recitations/4-team-dysfunction