Title: Antecedents and consequences of team stability on new product development performance
Authors: Ali E. Akgünb and Gary S. Lynna,

In this article the things that contribute to a social aspects of what makes a successful team are research. These things include benefits and consequences of bringing in new people and taking out people from a new product team, goals and goals clarity, and team stability.

Various teams are observed in for this research project. It was found that for the most part when people in a team are taken out or replaced then there is negative disruption. Things that needed to get done are not done as quickly and efficiently as before and there is a certain amount of time needed in order to recoup. However, in some events replacing members in a team is a good thing. This is only the case when the person coming in provides something new and more efficient than the person that left, such as a new way to look at things that makes future things move smoother.

When a person leaves a team and is replaced by another often times that person is not readily accepted. This slows down all process within a team because that new person is having much of their work over scrutinized. In order for things to function normally again the new team member must be fully accepted through whatever right of passage the team sees as adequate.

It was also found that goal clarity does not directly impact the stability of a team. However, according to the research done in this article, it does have an indirect impact on the team support of the project. And team support of a project has direct correlation with team stability.

In order for companies to maximize their productivity they must ensure that the new team member is well received. Meaning they contribute something more to the team than the member who left did. It is also important to ensure that there are goals and that these goals are clear, while it does not directly effect team stability is effects support. These are all things that need to be ensured when disrupting a team.

Social Team Disruptions:

 

Title: Social disruption and psychological stress in an Alaskan fishing community: The impact of the Exxon Valdex Oil Spill

Author: J. Steven Picou, Duane A. Gill, Christopher L. Dyer, Evans W. Curry

 Many things disrupt the forward movement of a team. One of the big things is a technology accidents that have serious negative social impacts upon a team. In this article the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, which is one of the largest oil spill in United States history, is examined in an attempt to understand the social impacts that a community experiences when a major sources of income is destroyed.

            In order to understand why there was such a large social impact this article made a point of distinguishing between a natural disaster and a technological disaster. Natural disasters are caused by nature, for example hurricanes and earthquakes. There is little to no perceived control over natural disasters and they do not produce damage that cannot be fixed. However, with technological disasters research has shown that those who survive have a sense of control taken from them as well as more severe PTSD. Technological disasters also damage a community more extremely because of the great social impacts.

            The Exxon oil spill impacted the community of Cordova, Alaska most, since it is where the oil spill occurred. Much wildlife was killed and the ocean where the spill occurred has irreversible damage. When the spill occurred Cordova was predominately a fishing community. Their economy dependent upon commercial fishing, making the oil spill into the ocean that much more devastating.

The town of Petersburg was used a control for the research in this article. The towns are incredibly similar in all aspects. People from both towns were interviewed at random, there was a wide range of ages as well as an even number of males and females. It was found that a more extreme case of PTSD was present in those living in Cordova. Meaning a greater social impact of the technological disaster was found in Cordova. Fifty-one percent of people in Cordova had made changes in their future plans because of the uncertainty brought about by the Exxon oil spill.

 

This event had a huge impact upon this community, but the impact was centralized to the one small town in Alaska based on the information gathered from Petersburg. Making this a severe social disruption on a small scale.

article about how uncertainty impacts teams behavior

Becoming Aware of the Unknown: Decision Making During the Implementation of a Strategic Initiative

Ronald Klingebiel and Arnoud De Meyer

Organization Science 
Vol. 24, No. 1 (January-February 2013), pp. 133-153

Published by: INFORMS

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23362104

Strategic initiatives are projects that are crucial for organizations’ future success, and they are usually associated with organizational strategic goals. In order to execute those initiatives for organizational strategic goals, managers have to make decisions on how they should behave differently based on different situations. Prior researches suggest that decision makers usually have a set of preconceived behaviors that they prefer to follow when they have enough information that are related to their decisions. When they lack information, they will then change their preconceived behaviors to make the best decision based on the information they gathered, which is defined as adaptive decision-making. However, these researches did not address how managers decide to adapt and what impact them to choose to either stick to plans or learn by doing when they implement strategic initiatives. In the study of Klingebiel and Meyer, they want to find out why the managers decided to adapt and what impact them to adapt. They find out that when the future is uncertain, managers tend to be more selective, deliberate and diligent to change their behaviors. They also find out that analytical comprehensiveness in adaptive decision-making is higher than preconceived decision-making when the future is uncertain.

Article report on how communication disruption causes waste during surgeries.

(Title:) Communication Failures in the Operating room: an Observation Classification of  Recurrent Types and Effects.

(Authers:) L Lingard, S Espin, S Whyte, G Regehr, G R Baker, R Reznick, J Bohnen, B Orser, D Doran, E Grober.

(Source:) Quality Safe Health Care 2004; 13:330-334.

Disruptions come in many forms. In teams a prominent cast of disruption is miss communication. A stable dialog between team members creates efficient flow of information that promotes shared goals and coordinated action among the team members.  Shared goals and action make the team more efficient. A communication disruption can quickly derail a team’s ability to identify and share goals and actions. L. Lingard and ect., article talk about the types of communication disruption, how often they occur and their effects on surgical teams.

This article draws data from the observation of 48 surgical procedures.  Reviewing those observation revealed four types of communication disruptions or failures. These communication failures occurred in 30% of surgical procedure. The researchers also determined which type of disruption had the most visible effect on the surgical procedure. 36.4% of communication failure had visible negative effects on the surgical procedures efficiency and team members.

A communication disruption can have seven negative effects; they are as follows. Inefficiency is redoing a part of the procedure, thus wasting time and effort. Tension is emotional distress between team members that can lead to lowered ability to work efficiently with each other. Delay is the slowing down of the procedure.  Workaround is the team deviating from the standard procedure, this can endanger the patient.  Resource waste is using too many supplies to finish the procedure. Patient inconvenience is using up more patients time then required and putting the patients through more suffering. Procedural error is making a mistake during the procedure. All types of communication disruption cause these negative affects.

The most common and disruptive of the communication disruption is ‘Occasion failure’, which is a failure to make a communication at the right time. ‘Occasion failure’ mostly results in inefficiency, tension between team members, and delay off key parts of the surgical procedure.

‘Content failure’ is the second most common and least disruptive of communication disruption. ‘Content failure’ is miss communicated information between team members. It is liable to cause all the negative effects.

The third most common and second most disruptive of the communication disruptions is ‘Purpose failure’, which is a failure of the leader of the team to communicate a clear goal to the rest of the team. ‘Purpose failure’ mostly results in inefficiency and tension.

‘Audience failure’ is the least common and third most disruptive of the communication disruption. ‘Audience failure’ is team members’ failure to listen and understand each other. It is liable to cause all the negative effects.

36.4% of communication failures endanger the patient by causing disruptions. The causes of these disruptions should be addresses, because they result and will continue to result in human death and suffering. 

Article report on waste caused by lack of medical response planning to a disaster.

(Title:) Emergency Medical Assistance Team Response Following Taiwan Chi-Chi Earthquake.

(Authors:) Edbert B. Hsu, Matthew Ma, Fang Yue Lin, Michael J. VanRooyen and Frederick M. Burkle Jr.

(Source:) Prehospital and Disaster Medicine / Volume 17 / Issue 01 / March 2002, pg. 17-22. 

            This article focuses on the reaction of emergency medical assistance teams (EMATs) during the Chi-Chi, Taiwan earthquake that happened in 1999. The earthquake was measured as a 7.3 on the Richter scale and caused damages that cost $92 billion USD to repair. The repairs were an unavoidable cost, but there were also avoidable costs that happened after the earthquake. 

            The earthquake caused injuries that needed medical attention all over Chi-Chi. Not all available EMATs were sent out to deal with these injuries, even though they were needed. This is a form of Waiting Waste, all resources weren’t capitalized to help deal with the disaster. This waiting caused the most tragic form of waste, Human death and suffering. This avoidable waste could have been evaded if there was a preexisting disaster procedure for EMATs teams to follow after the earthquake.

            After the earthquake most of the communication systems and equipment were taken off-line. This slowed coordination, request for help and information flow. The lack of information and procedure cause the EMATs that did go into the disaster area to be ill prepared. Most of EMATs teams reported to have too much of certain supplies and not enough of others supply that could have been used to help people; this is a strange mix of Transport Waste (delivering unrequired resources) and Ill Equipped Waste (Not having right equipment). The Ill Equipped Waste inhibited EMATs from stopping Human suffering and saving lives, which is the most costly of the avoidable waste that happened during the earthquake’s aftermath.

            The disaster has taken its toll. Taiwan’s government has implemented procedures and forms of communication to help EMATs stop avoidable Human suffering during future disasters.                 

How does emotion acted as disruption in decision-making process

Title: Being Emotional during Decision Making: Good or Bad? An Empirical Investigation

Author(s): Myeong-Gu Seo and Lisa Feldman Barrett

Source: The Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Aug., 2007), pp. 923-940

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20159897

There is a debate of emotion within the decision-making process.  Some people believe individual’s feelings will induce different biases into decision-making process, which hurts the performance of decision-making process. In contrast, other people argue that emotion can improve decision-making performance. As a result, a large number of researches have been done towards this debate. One interesting research conducted by Seo and Barrett in 2007 helps people to understand the impacts of emotion on decision-making process deeper than it was before.  This study suggests that whether being emotional is functional or dysfunctional in decision-making process depends on the intensity when an individual experiences the emotion, named affective reactivity, and the ability that person has to regulate the biases induced by those emotions, defined as affective influence regulation, during the decision-making process. Based on the data, the study concluded that participants have higher degrees of affective influence regulation and affective reactivity can make decision better than those with low affective influence regulation and affective reactivity. In addition, the study also finds out that a person’s ability to identify, distinguish, and describe specific feeling know as emotion differentiation may also impacts people's performance of decision-making process when they are emotional. This finding directs the authors' future research.

Congratulations!

Anthony Stillman has been awarded a prestigious Mary Gates Scholarship for Winter/Spring 2014 that will help fund his continued contribution to the research group and specifically the student of “Healthcare Teams in the Wake of Disruptions.” (See also: http://www.uwb.edu/news/uwbothell-news/2013/mary-gates-scholarships)

Jarvis Xu has been awarded an esteemed UW Bothell Founder’s Fellow Scholarship for Winter/Spring 2014. Jarvis will work on “Studying Team Disruptions” in a number of contexts and particularly through survey methods (press release forthcoming). 

You will be hearing more from these team members as they work on research objects an prepare their Spring term presentations. 

Way to go Anthony & Jarvis!!