Assignment_1_Kitchenware

Our group name is H2O international, team 10. In our team, two boys are from high-tech electronic area, and the girl is from OM. It is combination of liberal art and science, which is why we can stand on an international, compatible position to solve problems, to achieve high performance collaboration. Further more, H2O is the most essential source in the world. There would not be human civilization without water. It means we H2O team can generate ideas all the time as long as we can put effort together.

Scenario A

In this scenario, the supervisor is the one who controls the whole process, who gives assignments, gives comments and decides in which way the new product will be designed. Here is what happened in Scenario A.

Supervisor (S): Our performance in last season was really bad. We need a solution to increase the profits. Each of you should hand in one solution two days later. Any questions?

Employee A (A): Do you have any detailed requirements?

S: I want a perfect product. We need to make more money. Figure it out by yourself. Use your imagination! This case is closely related to reputation of our department. See you!

Two days later.

S: Tell me about your solution, A.

A: My method is to cut costs by using cheaper materials. Here is the report.

S: Cost cutting is a good idea. However, cheaper materials will affect the appearance and will lower the grade of our products, and it will be hard to raise the price. Furthermore, cheaper materials will bring reliability problems. What do you think is our product, disposable chopstick?

A: Eh…We can do some research to find another material that is…..

S: Stop it! It is a waste of time to discuss about new materials. Next one!

Employee B (B): I’d like to add more functions to our old product, such as LED screen, WIFI control system…blabla.

S: It is an interesting idea. However, this will cost too much time and money during pre-design. Also, it is not user-friendly for housewives, too complicated. Do you think they are all electronic products master? Any questions?

B: Well….No.

Finally, the supervisor himself worked out a solution due to the lack of trust to the subordinate.

In Scenario A, we found that supervisor controlled all the process of the meeting. And the product is designed by the supervisor's personalization. If the supervisor is well-experienced, he can make the product wonderful, just like Steve Jobs. In this scenario, teammate can get order clearly and do feedback quickly. As soon as the supervisor decided, all the people only to obey it instead of wasting more time on discussing without any results. It save time and has high efficiency in carrying out the whole plan. But because of the high centralization, the innovation of teammates is limited, the advice maybe ignored and everyone desired to get power to control the team which led depressive atmosphere in office and office politics.

A pyramid organizational structure is a hierarchy with the executive level at the top and descending levels from middle management to the lower levels of the organization. The idea behind the structure is that each upper level is able to function because of support from the lower portions of the pyramid.

Pyramid-like organizational structures are commonplace (La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, and Shleifer, 1999; Claessens, Djankov, and Lang, 2000; Khanna and Yafeh, 2007). On the apex of a pyramid sits a controlling owner who controls a firm indirectly through layers of intermediate companies.

During the role play we found some interesting phenomenon. The supervisor wanted to control the whole project to move forward as he decided. Teammates only have rights to obey the order, though they could give ideas and advice. The atmosphere in the meeting is depressive and some people even feel hard to breathe. They are afraid to get blame from the supervisor.

After the role play we wanted to get more information about the reasons for the phenomenon. At last we realized that centralization should be the major reason which is the most dominant feature of this structure.  

Centralization is the degree to which the tip of the organizational pyramid is top-weighted. In highly centralized organizations, decision making tends to be highly concentrated at the top of the structure, leaving less autonomy for individual workers to make decisions. This often works hand-in-hand with formalization, which is the degree to which the rules about communication and decision making must be followed, and how complicated they are. Highly centralized and formalized organizations tend to have very rigid structures.

The higher a person is in this structure, the more authority he has, but also more responsibilities.

Because of the feature centralization of pyramid organization structure, the communication has some unique traits. 

In this structure employees receive their policy directions and day-to-day assignments from their direct manager, who interprets orders from the top, and employees send information about their work as well as their ideas up the hierarchical structure, reporting first to their direct manager.

This organization structure is like the structure of army, members know to whom they report and who reports to them. This means that communication gets channeled along defined and predictable paths, which allows those higher in the organization to direct questions to the appropriate parties. It also means that individuals tend to know who does and does not possess the authority to assign or change tasks. A clear chain of command also generates clearly defined sets of responsibilities. Military structures rely heavily on this division and assignment of responsibility and authority to maintain discipline.

As hierarchical organizational structures tend to channel communication vertically, interdepartmental or inter-agency communication suffers. Departmental specialization can lead to communication barriers when no shared jargon exists that allow members of different departments to communicate on the same level. In worst-case scenarios, departments purposefully withhold information from each other.

People are more likely to develop into cliques, which in turn compete for power. You don't just see this kind of competition at the departmental level. Managers might become territorial about their own department, and they might more often approach organizational-level issues from their own departmental perspective.

As we have mentioned before, the structure is rigid. Hierarchical organizations inhibit timely transformations, which are essential if a business is to survive in a rapidly changing environment. Organizations that cannot adapt to new market demands or advancing technologies in pace with or ahead of other organizations often end up marginalized.

Creative thinking refers to how people approach problems and solutions-their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations. The skill itself de-pends quite a bit on personality as well as on how a person thinks and works (Teresa M. Amabile. May 2009). Employees need flexibility to share ideas with you and with others in the company.

They are the people who interact directly with suppliers and customers. If you select a flexible structure, such as self-governing teams, you provide more ways for employees to be innovative. The top-down decision-making structure means that business units are unable to respond rapidly to competitive threats. Make this choice with the realization that the allocation of power is not the same; with teams, there is a democratic method of dividing up work, but this comes with joint responsibility. Hierarchical systems can stifle creativity and innovation.

Scenario B

In scenario B, the atmosphere was great. 3 people worked as a team in which everyone makes contribution to the result. We used mind-map to construct our solution as the picture below shows.

Structure of the organization

In this scenario, the organization was structured as a flat one. Although in this scenario the team still has a supervisor, the power distance between he and his subordinate was much less than it is in the scenario A. It is more like the picture shows, there is a key person (the supervisor) in the team, but he is on the same flat with the team members.

Because Power distance is one element of Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions model (Hofstede, Geert 1984), this model is used to analysis the culture differences, when the elements changed we can equally take it as culture changed. That means the organizational culture is changed.

Communication regulation

Based on the McKINSEY 7-S Framework (Robert H. Waterman, Jr. and Tom Peters 1982), we changed the communication regulations.

On the first stage, structure changed which impact the “shared value” (culture) of the organization. In order to maintain the alignment, we changed the communication regulation (style) accordingly.

The new communication regulation shows bellow:

1. Peers can communicate with each other freely.

2. It is not necessary to ask for an approval from supervisor unless for critical factors, such final decision.

3. Team members are encouraged to make mistakes.

Generally speaking, team members are delegated more authority and have more freedom to manage the creativity. A Peer Culture is applied in this scenario-“the way people at all levels support one another. Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it’s all for one and one for all. Nothing exemplifies this more than our creative brain trust and our daily review process.” (Ed Catmull, 2008)

Feeling analysis

Supervisor had to explain the task to everyone very clearly and be sure that everyone was on the same page of what to do and when to complete. This part took time, because everyone held different perspectives and always tried to discuss instead of listening.

After the kick off meeting, supervisor had been released from the meaning less administration tasks and good delegation practice made sure that everyone had his own responsibility and know what to do.

During the discussion, supervisor only did process checking twice to make sure every thing would be completed on time and to see wether there were any challengers need his support.

Team members were more enthusiastic in this task. Because of the freedom of communication with peers, the team members generate more ideas than it in the scenario A.

What makes them feel frustrated was that when there was a person who was to tough and dominant， the discussion was very hard to continue. This dominant person will automatically took the leader role. In this situation, team members had to start a negotiation process. It also took time and very easy to drive the discussion beside the point.

General comments of Scenario B

Generally speaking the open culture is more effective and workable for creative tasks, since the knowledge transformation process is a good approach to turning creative ideas into innovations in organizations. Team members can stimulate each other and help each other to generate more ideas.

The premises of a good collaboration under this scenario are these as bellow:

1. Supervisor gives a good instruction and guideline of what to achieve

2. Team members have good communication skills and build up trust quickly. The ability to quickly establish and build trust is becoming even more important in today, where partnerships and strategic alliances are common practice.

3. Team members share the team role(R Meredith Belbin 2010) efficiently.

There are different roles in a team, sometime one person takes one role, but some time one person takes more than one role or more than one person who take one roles. If there is a role conflict, the collaboration will be very likely to fail.

4. The risks are put ahead of the collaboration started.

Since the team is more self-organized, the collaboration risks are put ahead of the beginning of collaboration. Supervisor need to have a sense of team members characters which will impact what kind of role they are going to take in the team. And this kind of understanding will be very helpful in the group forming stage(Gina Abudi, 2010 )

In Scenario B, all the people join in the passionate discussion. Everyone knows each other’s ideas, more plans have been posted. The atmosphere is harmony and active. Every participant made his efforts to optimize the product. Everyone is the designer, everyone is the supervisor. Before we made the final decision, we have made nearly 2 hours on discussing and preparing which is as 2 times as scenario A. When we get difficulties we need to have a meeting, when we have a idea we need to have a meeting and every meeting cost too much time. Maybe when we make the final decision, the dead line will meets. It has low efficiency in executing but high collaboration.

Reference   

La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F., Shleifer, A., 1999. Corporate Ownership around the World. The Journal of Finance 54, 471-518.

John Kotter. Hierarchy and Network: Two Structures, One Organization. May 2011.Havard Business Review.

Teresa M. Amabile. How to kill creativity. May 2009.Harvard Business Review Notice of Use Restrictions.       

Hofstede, Geert. Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related

Values (2nd ed.). Beverly Hills CA: SAGE Publications.

Robert H. Waterman, Jr. and Tom Peters (1982). In Search of Excellence.

Ed Catmull,  hbr.org | September 2008 | Harvard Business Review 69

R Meredith Belbin, Team Roles at Work, (Butterworth Heinemann, 2nd ed., 2010)

Gina Abudi The Five Stages of Project Team Development, 2010