10 Jan President and Senior Partner

Module 3 – Case

GROUPS AND TEAMS

Assignment Overview

A rapidly growing trend in the business world is the growth of virtual teams. Some companies are allowing teleworking, which means that more and more workers have to coordinate their activities with other team members through the phone or Internet. Even among workers who are working from their office, more and more companies are having employees work in teams with employees who work at other locations who they may or may not have ever met in person. New technologies have been developed to help facilitate virtual teamwork, but challenges still remain.

Review the background materials and also do some research on virtual teams. Here are a few articles on virtual teams to get you started:

Garfoot, A. (May 2003). The reality of virtual teams. IT Training, 32-34. [ProQuest]

Sadri, G., &Condia, J. (2012). Managing the virtual world. Industrial Management, 54(1), 21-25. [ProQuest]

Rigby, R. (2013). How best to manage a virtual team. The Financial Times [ProQuest]

Case Assignment

When you are finished with your research, integrate what you learned in general about group dynamics in the background materials with more specific information you learned about virtual teams. Write a 4- to 5-page paper addressing the following issues:

How do you think the five stages of group development (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning) will be different for virtual teams as compared to traditional teams? Discuss in regard to all five stages of group development as covered in Nair (2010) and Aswathappa (2010).

Do you think virtual teams will be more or less cohesive than traditional teams? Include a discussion of the issue of groupthink in your discussion, and use Nair (2010) and Aswathappa (2010) as your guide to the concepts of group cohesiveness and groupthink.

Overall, do you think virtual teams will perform better or worse than traditional teams? Explain your answer with references to the background readings.

Assignment Expectations

Answer the assignment questions directly

Stay focused on the precise assignment questions, don’t go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials

Make sure to use reliable and credible sources as your references. Articles published in established newspapers or business journals/magazines are preferred. If you find articles on the internet, make sure it is from a credible source.

Reference your sources of information with both a bibliography and in-text citations. See the Student Guide to Writing a High-Quality Academic Paper, including pages 13-14 on in-text citations. Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide”, which is found under “My Resources” in the TLC portal.

Module 3 – SLP

GROUPS AND TEAMS

This SLP has two functions. First, it helps you review the topics in Module 3. Second, it measures the continuing development of your written communications skills. The SLP will be graded using a special Written Communications rubric, which you should review at this time.

Background: You work for a management consulting firm, Capital Consultants (CC). Your firm has been hired to advise Fast Forward Fashions, a small high-end house with a celebrity clientele. You have received the following memo from the head of the company.

Dear ,

I am assigning you to our newest client, Fast Forward Fashions (F3). As you may know, this well-known fashion house has experienced problems since the death of its chief designer, Sir Francis Cutwell.

In the two years since Sir Francis’s death, the CEO of F3, M. Etienne Roget, has delegated artistic control to a committee of experienced designers chosen from within the company. The results have been catastrophic. In the first year, the committee could not decide on a theme for Spring. As a result, that season’s collection was a confused mess that one critic referred to as “the remnants of a Hollywood garage sale.” In the second year, the committee tried to avoid making the same mistake and settled on a theme after meeting for only one hour. The “Game of Thrones” collection was another disaster, with such memorable items as a bronze helmet and a bearskin cape.

Roget has been searching the world for a chief designer to fill the void created with Sir Francis’s death. He has been unsuccessful to date. Further, he fears that disbanding the committee would be seen by its members as a vote of no confidence and would lead to mass resignations.

Your job is to join the committee as a co-chair and advise it on organizational matters. Obviously, you should not try to advise it on fashion—CC has no expertise in that area. Your task will be to guide it in its deliberations and help a small group of experienced, opinionated designers achieve good results on the Winter 2017 collection.

Before you join the committee, M. Roget would like to have some idea of what you will be looking for and what you may be able to accomplish. To that end, you should prepare a paper briefly discussing what may have happened to the committee in the past two years and what you could do to keep it from happening again.

The paper should be between 3 and 4 double-spaced pages. While not downplaying your or your company’s expertise, you should be appropriately respectful toward M. Roget, who is a world fashion leader. Furthermore, you should write in clear, concise, grammatically correct English, bearing in mind that English is M. Roget’s fourth language (after French, Italian, and Spanish).

I have discussed this assignment with CC’s chief technical adviser, Dr. Manfred Paradigm. Manfred would like to make sure your paper is theoretically sound before we send it to F3. For that reason, I am asking you to include a list of references at the end, and citations in the body of the paper showing us where and how you used those references. (To make sure you include all the information we need, you should use some standard style. APA would be a good choice.) Manfred and I will edit out the citations and references before sending the paper to M. Roget.

Congratulations on being selected for this important project. I am looking forward to seeing the final draft of your paper within two weeks.

Cordially

Vladimir I. Lobachevski

President and Senior Partner

Capital Consultants PLL

SLP Assignment Expectations

Prepare the requested paper. You may interpret the “within two weeks” deadline as meaning “before the end of this module.”

Study the Written Communications rubric. Review it before, during, and after writing your paper.

Demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of the materials cited on the Background page. Supplement these with relevant sources you locate on the Web. Provide complete references on the last page of your paper and citations in the body of your paper showing where you used the sources. See the Student Guide to Writing a High-Quality Academic Paper, including pages 13-14 on in-text citations. Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide” which is found under “My Resources” in the TLC portal.