Greg, your team is having an issue with Separation Diversity (Edmondson & Roloff, 2008, p. 49) where team members create in-group and out-group categories due to their differences in location. The company protocol wasn’t met, largely due to significant time differences. When Praveen, from the Mumbai team, encountered a problem and tried to reach the US team, he failed to realize it was the weekend in California and followed the wrong contact protocol (Neely & Delong, 2009, p. 4). Due to this mistake, the system outage was not able to be resolved and frustration spread throughout teams. Our suggestion would be to relocate all team members to one location, avoiding further miscommunication and customer dissatisfaction.
Shared context between your team members would also benefit the overall success of the company. It can be beneficial to generate mutual understanding and establish shared behavioral norms. This change will mediate the relationship between geographic distribution and task conflict (Hinds & Mortensen, 2005, p. 293). Your team is not working as a collaborative whole, but rather working as individuals and not communicating with one another. When the system went down, the US team did not receive any of the pages the Mumbai team posted because they were placed in the wrong queue (Neely & Delong, 2009, p. 2). You need to provide your company team members one standard protocol manual so this issue doesn’t happen again. This shared communication will be best achieved by having one set standard time with all operations set to the same time zone.
Very concise and well written! I like how you spoke directly about the relationship between the Mumbai team and Greg and how it can be fixed. You gave great evidence for what is happening, why it’s bad and how to fox it. Overall fantastic essay!
I think you guys bring up one of the most important parts of a functioning group. The aspect that you need to work as a unit instead of individually doing your own thing. Simply splitting up the work and letting individuals do parts of the work is not the best way to achieve synergy. Instead a group should focus on communication during these work periods in order to maximize results.
-Ben Rakestraw
Good essay. To me, what stood out the most was you explaining that the team is working as individuals rather than as a whole. This helps confine the exact problem along with quickly being able to start looking for a solution.