Building Effective Teams

MGMT 520

Building Effective Teams – Assignment 2

The Lumen and Absorb Teams at Crutchfield Chemical Engineering

Q1. Analyse both the Lumen and Absorb teams in terms of both:

1. The stages of team development model; and

2. The six-step teambuilding model

Lumen Team – the stages of team development model

The Lumen team is predominantly in Stage 4 of the Orming Model – Performing. They are well past Stage 1 Forming and Stage 2 Storming and although there are elements of Stage 3 Norming (they have established most ground rules to help members work together and certainly social relations have developed e.g. Melinda helping and Max offering to help when Pierre had a packed schedule and an increase in personal responsibilities, together they handled the stress of making the deadline. I believe they have found themselves at the Performing stage of the model at a fairly quick rate.

Although there had been some areas of conflict with achieving their task, Lumen had completed it by supplying Cyrenea the improved sample from their own testing and consequently Cyrenea found the product superior. As a result Lumen took time to have a team lunch and reward themselves. Their objective exceeded the expectations of those they served and the concept of “team learning” was reached, with all team members discovering new and better ways of working together interdependently (MGMT 520 notes, Stage 4 Performing, Ian Brooks).

Lumen team members achieved a reasonable amount of personal and professional development (MGMT 520 notes as above). The team had agreed expectations on goals (clear and concise) and were thoroughly supported by their leader Max. The team had high levels of openness and focused on performance through collective decision making and cooperation (Group Dynamics for Teams, Daniel Levi, 2001).

Lumen enjoyed working together and this increased the amount of social and emotional support they received from each other (Group Dynamics for Teams, Daniel Levi,...