Greg,
From the Edmondson & Roloff article, one possible solution to your problem would be to provide the group with a more psychological safe environment. In order to achieve this, you will need to make sure that every location feels valued in their work environment. Recently, Nick was overheard slandering his coworkers of Indian descent, this caused Praveen to deal with a problem by himself rather than calling Nick on his home phone, which opened the gates for an interpersonal conflict.
From the Hinds & Mortensen article, another possible solution would be to make sure that there is more spontaneous communication between locations. There have been instances where the team fell short because of very minimal communication. In order to make sure that more communication between locations happens, you need to put an emphasis on this and that members shouldn’t be afraid to contact another. Effective collaboration is necessary for team learning, and team performance.
To ensure a more psychologically safe environment you could send all team members to Cornell’s Sensitivity Training in New York. After completing this training, the team will understand and value the differences in the team, and hopefully see them as resources (Edmondson & Roloff, 2019). Our suggestion for increasing the amount of spontaneous communication would be to institute a 24 hour decision rule, meaning no decision will be made without giving the team 24 hours to provide input on the topic of discussion. This would allow for the members not in America to feel heard and respected.
Sensitivity training is an interesting solution to the lack of psychological safety the teams are experiencing. I think it could work to increase the teams’ shared context, so that they are more understanding towards one another and more receptive to other teams’ unique issues. On the other hand, I think it might contribute to conflict and decrease psychological safety if team members are still holding negative beliefs or animosity towards other team members, only no longer saying anything about it. So, integrating your second key element of spontaneous communication into the sensitivity training solution is important. As a result, teams would engage in open and respectful communication.
The issue that I think would occur with the 24-hour decision rule is that things happen quickly at Sun, and people don’t always have time to consult others on their team before making a big decision. The distribution of the teams makes it even more difficult because they are working in different time zones. However, I agree that something needs to be done about the disparity in the treatment of the teams, and the privileging of the Santa Clara team over the others.
Really great idea to send them to a specific workshop to help them manage the team! Overall the essay is very clear cut and concise. Fantastic job!
Hello Group 2! I really like how you structured your post. I agree with most of the points in each paragraph, and how you gave specific examples with a source for each solution. I especially like your idea of having a 24-hour window where people have time to give input before making decisions. However, it may be a bit extreme to send the team to a sensitivity training (unless the situation gets worse). I think it might be better to have the team get to know each other on a more personal level, so that they can understand each other’s backgrounds. To elaborate, research by Hinds & Mortensen showed a reduction in conflict through shared identities and contexts. Though the members of this team differ in both cases, a better mutual understanding of each others’ backgrounds might promote increased empathy between the members, which would help with conflict resolution (while allowing them to feel more comfortable around each other).
While the 24 hour decision rule might be beneficial to the team, we must consider the productivity ramifications for the client. This business relies on 24 hour support in order to serve clientele instantaneously. With that being said, maybe a similar policy would work to increase group cohesion that doesn’t allow policy changes until every region has expressed a vote/opinion. They might also make all company/client info and correspondence records available 24/7 so that each region knows what’s going on the company/client relation.