Appendix C

Responses and Outcomes for Team Video 1: Mark, Natalie, and Keith

The following information is based on individual interviews conducted with Mark, Natalie, and Keith at the end of their team project. In addition to commenting on the project in general, each of them viewed this video. This video was also viewed by several managers with at least 10 years of professional experience supervising teams.

What did the students think about their team?

Keith was the most positive about the project and the group. He described himself as the group’s leader and the “creative impetus” behind the project, Mark as the most hardworking and responsible group member, and Natalie as a “tertiary” group member who was too busy to contribute much to the project. Keith’s perceptions contradict those of his teammates, largely because Keith valued in-class contributions more than work done outside the class. In fact, Keith did not produce any material outside of class, and his contributions were limited to the types of in-class exchanges you see in the video. This tendency to inflate the importance of face-to-face discussions over work that is contributed independently is a common problem of student teams.

Mark was also fairly positive about the project. Although he was occasionally frustrated with Keith, he generally enjoyed arguing with him and felt that he and Keith shared a leadership role in the group. Mark described Natalie as a reliable group member who, although she frequently missed class, completed a substantial amount of work outside of class and ultimately contributed more than Keith did to the project. He observed that sometimes Natalie may have felt “run over” by himself and Keith. However, when he watched this video at the end of the project, he expressed surprise at how much he and Keith were shutting Natalie out.

Natalie, unlike her teammates, described the group project as a very negative experience. She felt that the group spent too much time focusing on small details and as a consequence ended up rushing through and shortchanging parts of the project that she felt were the most important and most interesting to her personally. Although she enjoyed working with Mark, whom she described as reliable and the clear leader of the group, she found Keith impossible to work with because she felt he did not respect her. She commented:

I try to talk to people like that, but when I sense that I’m not being listened to or it’s just being passed over, I’d rather just not waste my breath so I usually just kept to myself a lot of times. . . . I just didn’t, I didn’t think that my judgment was respected by Keith at all. . . . I just didn’t think that he saw me as a person in the group.

Because she found working with Keith so difficult, Natalie eventually stopped attending class and instead e-mailed her contributions directly to Mark. When Natalie viewed this video clip at the end of the project, she commented:

That’s what they’re saying. I mean, you heard the man, that’s what they were saying, and that’s not what they were saying. Keith was trying to say that, I don’t know, I never knew what he was trying to change. I don’t, there were things that he would always try to change, and it did not need to be changed. . . . I was so mad there I stopped even listening to what he was saying.

What did managers have to say about this team interaction?

Ken West, Operations Research Manager: What I saw there is they were all trying to do the same thing together. . . . It looked like Keith was a “this is how you do it” type, while they had Mark doing it, and they might have been better off to split out and have everybody go off and write things separately, then get back together and review the intermediate sections. . . . It looked like they were trying to write together, and in the environment that they were in, it was not really conducive to having all three of them participate in the project, and as a result I think Natalie was being left out.

Rene Stone, Computer Systems Manager: Keith and Mark are acting like they’re racing to some finish line. They’re focusing on editing and writing text and producing it. They don’t have time for the big picture. . . . I would counsel them to slow down, sit at a table, and come up with a strategy — not go over it with one person at the screen, the other two behind them. It’s hard to have a civilized conversation like that.

Given how upset Natalie was with her team, what would you advise her to do?

Stone: She’s going to have to do something to get their attention. I would try to get the computer seat because they both want to be controlling the machine. That would get her inside of their circle for a starter. And then I would try to slow it down so when they say something, I would repeat it back to take the urgency out of it.

Interviewer: If that didn’t work, what would you recommend?

Stone: Go to the instructor and say, “I don’t see that I have a role in this. There might be something else I should work on.” Or, “Is there something else you want me to do on this project because they don’t appear to need me?”