Teams, Ethics, Culture, and Diversity

Individual Assignment (Optional Zoom Discussion Sessions)

OvervieW

Provide answers to ONE of  the following:

1. Describe a team that you have been on recently. Assess what made it effective or ineffective. Support your views with material on Teams from the textbook.
2. Evaluate an ethical or unethical situation involving a business leader in the past few years. Explain what made this situation either ethical or unethical. Relate if you would have moved in a different direction.
3. Recommend steps to expand diversity in your workplace. Justify and support your views with information from the textbook.

Post and Engage

Your response should be a minimum of 300 words with two (2) external non-textbook references. Be sure to respond to at least two (2) of your classmates, offering quality scholarly replies. You can upload any documents to support your position if you wish.

Posting Date: Post your response by Module Day Four (4) to allow time for your peers to view and post replies.

In your reply to your classmate’s post, evaluate the relationship of the post’s content compared to module concepts and materials, and other relevant sources deemed meaningful.

The overall goal for your discussion engagement is to push each discussion forward through professional argument, gentle yet valuable critique, and effective opinion. 

Replies to two

=> 1. RiCrod

Describe a team that you have been on recently. Assess what made it effective or ineffective. Support your views with material on Teams from the textbook.

I’m currently participating in another class that is heavily focused on group projects and working as a team to develop weekly deliverables. There is no assigned leader with defined authority or power over the group; instead, these are self-managed teams. The lack of a defined leader and heavy focus on individual empowerment closely aligns with the concept outlined by our textbook. Interestingly, as our textbook mentions, team members with strong problem-solving skills can contribute to the team effectively and efficiently. In contrast, the weaker members in this area seem to struggle (Lussier & Achua, 2016). I’ve found that to make the team function effectively; I have had to take a minor leadership role and delegate discrete tasks to people that are not as self-motivated as other team members. I’ve also found that sharing reminders and insight into our assignments has helped keep the team focused on the assignments that we’ve been given.

Evaluate an ethical or unethical situation involving a business leader in the past few years. Explain what made this situation either ethical or unethical. Relate if you would have moved in a different direction.

One of the leaders I have been researching for this class is Scott Thompson, the former CEO of Yahoo that lied on his resume claiming to have a degree that he didn’t earn. This type of deceit violates the trust between the leader and his followers that do not foster an ethical work environment. Once dishonesty is normalized in the workplace, not only is the reputation of the company in jeopardy, but it increases the risk of employees lying to inflate their image or to cover mistakes (Shaw, 2021).

Recommend steps to expand diversity in your workplace. Justify and support your views with information from the textbook.

Our textbook outlines several steps that leaders can take to help encourage diversity, but the two I think are the most valuable are Heightened Awareness and Removing Obstacles (Lussier & Achua, 2016). I think it’s important for companies to remind employees of the importance of diversity, especially for hiring managers who are ultimately responsible for the company’s cultural makeup. Keeping diversity at the forefront of everyone’s mind does a great job of making sure that it’s considered regularly and in day-to-day activities. I also think that companies should take an honest look at themselves to look for any obstacles that might be in the way of maintaining a diverse employee pool. Things like office locations and benefits packages can significantly impact the diversity of candidates attracted to job openings, and companies need to consider diversity when making these choices.

Lussier, R. N., & Achua, C. F. (2016). Leadership: Theory, application & skill development. Cengage Learning.

Shaw, L. (2021, August 4). What dishonesty does to your brain and why it’s bad for business. theHRDIRECTOR. Retrieved March 14, 2022, from https://www.thehrdirector.com/features/health-and-…

=> 2. Hello Class,

Describe a team that you have been on recently. Assess what made it effective or ineffective. Support your views with material on Teams from the textbook.

Per Lussier and Achua (2016), a team is defined as a unit of interdependent individuals with complimentary skills who are committed to a common purpose and set of a performance outcomes and to common expectations, for which they hold themselves accountable (p. 271). However, I could argue that my coworkers and I are not a team give the lack of accountability I have noticed within some of my peers and especially in management. However for the sake of this week’s concepts, I will consider my store team as a ‘team’, as that is what we should operate as….in theory anyways.

The team I have been on recently and will be referring to in this week’s discussion is my current work team with my employer within the mobile retail industry. Unfortunately, I would say it is ineffective due to several reasons I myself have addressed to management and even tried to fix but still no improvement. For example, there are only certain employees who are allowed to have keys to the store in addition to alarm codes for the security system. There have been multiple times I have noticed management overlook the company policies with regard to keys and codes (along with various others) and they will allow employees who do NOT have keys or codes close together on some shifts. This results in those employees having to wait for another coworker to make it to the store just to close up or them using another employees codes and keys to close the store due to management not catching the fact that there needs to be at least one employee with keys and codes opening and closing at all times. This, along with many other things like a lack in communication, is something I notice my retail store location peers (some, not all) have with regard to the job. With regard to my management team, I notice there seems to be social loafing, which is when individuals do not meet their potential with regard to the maximum output of each individual acting alone(Hoffman, 2020). This has led to the few who do their part in the job to have little to no motivation to do anything, let alone have trust in management. With regard to communication aspect in leadership, improved work communication has been linked to better job satisfaction, improved company performance, increased productivity, and more empowered employees (Morgan, 2021), which is another contributing factor to the lack of our team’s performance and effectiveness. Overall, the store could use improvement with its employees working more cohesively and helping increase the work drive in myself and others who try to keep things in order while management does relatively little to establish and maintain an effective team.

References

Hoffman, R. (2020, June 22). Social Loafing: Definition, examples and theory. Social Loafing: Definition, Examples & Theory | Simply Psychology. Retrieved March 14, 2022, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/social-loafing.ht…

Lussier, R. N., & Achua, C. F. (2016). Leadership: Theory, application & skill development. Cengage Learning.

Morgan, B. (2021, December 10). Why every employee at your company should have communications training. Forbes. Retrieved March 14, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2018/01/2.
Lastly, I am sharing this not to complain or bad talk my place of employment rather to discuss about something I can directly correlate to this week’s course concepts. If anything, I am choosing to share this to show a real-world example of ineffective leadership/teams and to share the effects it has as a result of this.

Edrick

3.

What do you want to talk about?

Topic Submission

Research shows many students taking online courses would like input on discussion assignments. To that end, use this discussion to submit a leadership-related topic that interests you.