Team Building Exercise for Conflict Resolution Name Organizational Behavior Class Number Instructor Date Team Building Exercise for Conflict Resolution Within the world’s largest oil and gas metal tubular manufacturing facility, metrics were maintained in all aspects of the business to include; production, safety, quality, logistics, budget, etc. Historically, the 200 acre facility, with 30 or so departments, 40 buildings and an average 800 plus employees prided itself on its production capability as well as meeting customer demands for a quality product with on-time deliveries.Within a few years the growing pressure to improve the safety statistics moved it to the number one priority with no less demand for production efficiencies and demand on employee performance to do more with less. As a result, there was an increased demand on each and every employee to adopt new policies, procedures, practices, and workload.
This in turn caused poor employee morale, less internal customer satisfaction and poor metrics across the board.After several quarters of poor performance, quality assurance issues, poor audit results, numerous serious safety incidents, and a threat of losing major clients the investigation findings were clear. Poor communication with internal and external customers, conflict within and between departments, and the pressures to perform without meeting desired targets and objectives were contributing causes. The root cause(s) came down to lack of effective teamwork, employee mentoring and supervisory support for almost all departments.
As a result building effective teams and changing the culture to place employees first and everything else second was established as a corrective action. The management team was tasked with developing an action plan that would address the findings and implement a system of controls to help keep the organization on track. The establishment of workplace teams, developing the skills and competencies for not only manufacturing employees, but for lead people supervisors and managers was required. (Kinicki & Kreitner, 2009, p. 261) The anagement team proposed a team building workshop, by department, off-site that would include a review of statistics or metrics for their respective department and a comparison to the organization.
The workshop also included specific team building exercises, rope courses, which allowed employees to develop trust and cohesiveness between each other and supervisors. As well as a module on effective communication, mentoring training, a section on building a safety culture with a departmental action plan with implementation and follow up dates committed by each individual.The long term goal was to instill accountability from each employee to commit to, live and mentor a culture of looking out for their co-workers, building a safety culture and pride in their work to create a world class organization. Craig Runde, director of new programs at the Leadership Development Institute at Eckerd college of Florida, and Tim Flanagan director of custom programs illustrate “behavior integration” which is characterized by mutual accountability, collaboration, collective decision making, and shared expectations.
(Fazzi, 2009, p. 8,90) Each department was scheduled to complete the week-long workshop, as a team, performed at an off-site location providing both classroom and active learning methods. Some departments were large enough to require two to three workshops to envelop all employees. “Experiential learning techniques such as interpersonal trust exercises, conflict role-play sessions, and competitive games are common. Some prefer off-site gatherings to get participants away from their work and out of their comfort zones. ”(Kinicki & Kreitner, 2009, p.
62) Through the initial investigation process, some of the characteristics of social loafing were identified, such as; “Everyone else is goofing off, so why shouldn’t I? ”, “I’m lost in the crowd, so who cares? ”, “Why should I work harder than the others when everyone gets the same reward? ”(Kinicki & Kreitner, 2009, p. 271) The lead people, supervisors and managers were also contributing causal factors in the investigation. Evidence was found that behaviors from leaders were present in the workplace that created conflict such as yelling, blaming, reacting defensively, assumptions, and avoidance of conflict. Approaching Conflict, 2001) Each department went through the workshop then decided whether to commit or not, then developed their action plan or solution for resolution by establishing the desired goal, how to meet the goal, and reaching a consensus.
(Approaching Conflict, 2001, Chapter 12) Each department then, established an implementation, verification and validation with scheduled dates for completion and expectations from management to continue a system of mentoring and workshops for updates and new hires.The systemic findings of the investigations along with the recommendations for the team building workshops were presented to upper management in a condensed version of the workshop. The return on the investment was expected within a reasonable time after a majority of departments had completed the workshops. Ever growing pressure to improve the safety statistics keeps it the number one priority with no less demand for production efficiencies and demand on employee performance to do more with less.
Employees now as a result have adapted to the performance standards established by the industry and now have accepted it as the norm.Employee morale, customer satisfaction, performance metrics, client, community and employee expectations are all drivers to improve, establish higher goals and continue to improve. References Communicating effectively for dummies [1487717361]. (2001).
doi: 1487717361 Fazzi, C. (2009). Dispute Resolution Journal [Entire issue]. How to Build a Winning Team, 64(1). doi: 2010604671 Kinicki, A. , & Kreitner, R.
(2009). Chapter 9 Effective Groups and Teamwork. In Organizational Behavior (4th ed. , p.
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