Thursday, April 3, 2014

Research Project Update

Diving deeper into research has been a great experience for me. The topics behind team disruptions and lean production have helped me to understand leadership and the inter-workings of companies much better.

Throughout the project I have read up on various articles encompassing the social aspect of team disruptions and have recently made a shift towards the lean production concepts. Both of these have given me so much valuable information that I have been applying to my everyday studies. Such as the continuous innovation that makes 'lean' so useful and efficient in the work place.

As the project progresses we will be conducting more interview as well as exploring further into team disruptions on all levels. This has been such a great opportunity for learning, honing my research skills, and bettering my team work skills.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

a brief summary of what I have done and what I am going to do

As our research moves forward, my research team decided to investigate how complexity and team learning contribute to our understanding of disruptions. I am interested in how teams perform when disruptions occur, and the concept of team learning firmly ties to teams' performance. As a result, I picked up the concept of team learning as my focus. One definition of organizational learning come from Dr. Kennedy that is "ongoing process of reflection and action, characterized by asking questions, seeking feedback, experimenting, reflecting on results and discussing errors or unexpected outcomes of actions. "

During the break, I have read several articles about organizational learning from Journal of Operation Management. One of them deeply interests me. It is called "How to learn new tasks: shop floor performance effects of knowledge transfer and performance feedback." In this article, the authors argue that organizational learning involves in knowledge transfer and skills development. In order to achieve the optimal learning outcome, people should learn explicit knowledge (the knowledge that can be expressed by words) by mimicking  the people who have understood the explicit knowledge other than self observation.

Now, I am starting to code the data that my team collected from interviews and surveys for understanding inputs, modification behaviors, performance and disruptions attributes.