Team Experience: Role of Completer Finisher

Introduction

My experience as a member of the group was relatively complex but interesting. Playing the role of a complete finisher, I learnt the need for ensuring consciousness in focusing on specific theories employed during the presentation. The theories proved effective in influencing the dynamics, performance, and team behaviors. They include Belbin’s Team-Roles theory (1981), Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory of Motivation (1943), and the Theory X and Y (1960). For those seeking management dissertation help, understanding and applying these theories can be crucial in crafting a well-rounded and impactful dissertation.

For the nine study weeks, our team formed, stormed, normed, and mainly stormed to the end managing to complete the tasks effectively. Although the roles were completed efficiently, our experience faced challenges that made our initial experience relatively negative the positive progress never produced a great team as I expected.

Reflection on Our Presentation

The primary group meeting held on week 1 was positive and engineered high expectations for the team. During the first meeting, we (four members) met and introduced ourselves to each other successfully. I was impressed by the team commitment and given that we were all native English language speakers, we expected minimal communication challenges. We hoped to ensure effective commitment through regular communication to promote innovation as a strategy for realizing the expected goals. Nevertheless, communication and commitment became key issues for the group as from week 1, communication halted until week 5. I had personally missed week 3 due to pre booked travel plans with expectation of catching up upon return but lack communication made it impossible which made me realize stagnation.

Specifically, our group task related to dynamics of groups and team roles. The task is complex and limited meetings during weeks 2, 3, and 4 saw us lag behind in task completion. Fortunately, even though the issue of communication continued to affect the performance of the team, we managed to catch up by discussing different theories through the qualitative approach. Basically, the qualitative approach focuses on sharing experiences of others in their own words through narration. The primary aim of utilizing the qualitative approach during our presentation was to ensure that our audience were able to understand the topic through the utilizations of evidence-based cases.

After experiencing the communication challenge between week 1 and week 5, and taking the role of a complete finisher I focused on improving interaction efficiency during and after meetings. During the week 5 meeting, I realized that regardless of the positive introductory meeting held during week 1, verbal communication was equally problematic. As a result, I discussed the need for improving communication efficiency through the use of real communication utilizing both verbal and nonverbal methods. Verbal methods are normally assumed effective due to the efficiency of understanding individual perspectives while the nonverbal methods promote the understanding of untold speech signals (Kubasova, Murray, & Braley, 2019). The efforts managed to improve presentation skills more so in application of nonverbal features such as reflection pauses, comprehensible body language, and ensuring maintenance of eye contact with audience. Equally, member A suggested the importance of utilizing role play to enhance behaviors and characteristic understanding for proper decision making (Krebt, 2017). This was supported by the team perspectives noting that “successful teams need range of abilities”.

Understanding the significance of knowledge sharing and building in teams in the 21st century (Noroozi et al., 2019), we emphasized on including the emotional, social, and cognitive learning aspects. The team understood the effectiveness of “reflection to both learning and practice” thus settled on reflective learning theory. Experts acknowledge the changes in human connectedness and interactions resulting from establishment of gaming, social media, and social networking (Odendaal, 2018). Reflective learning focused on Kolb’s experimental learning theory which perceives learning as experimental (Illeris, 2018). The team adopted the concept of continuous practice review aiming to utilize the theory in accordance to Schon’s understanding that perceives reflective learning as enabling individuals to understand their knowledge through personal experience.

Although the communication challenges experienced by the group through the 9 weeks were a significant avoidable challenge, we managed to realize the task goals successfully including completing the effectiveness survey. Regardless of the catching up challenge noted during weeks 5, 6, and 7, we managed to update tasks to the specified timeframe and audience received our presentations positively. During presentation, the audience was attentive which was evinced by the continued confirmative body language and eye contact.

Group Dynamics

The first meeting of the group concentrated on formation and having met for the first time, we focused on introductions and defining our previous groupwork history such as responsibilities and roles played in teamwork. Members remained polite to each other and there was commitment in working together. During our second meeting that happened in week 5, we stormed through practicing our character traits and partialities in relation to leadership and alignment to the narrative approach. We had so much to catch up and made up an extra meeting hour for the week and still week 6 and 7. In week 6, we studied Belbin’s Team Roles theory (1981) to familiarize ourselves with the impact of different personalities and team roles in impacting team dynamics. More insight on the same was sought from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory of Motivation (1943). As we completed the meeting of week 7, team roles had formed effectively as members were showing their specific behaviors. Nevertheless, two our members had little awareness about the tasks and relied on my experience and skills in ensuring the participation of all individuals.

Evaluating team roles in relation to Belbin’s team roles test I play the ‘Completer-finisher’ role which is the ‘Protagonist’ in Myers-Brigg’s Type Indicator test. The outcome proved the reason for my commitment in focusing towards utilizing confidence and charisma to inspire people in realizing reliable and perfect outcomes (16Personalities,020). Although the role was crucial in speeding up the group position especially during the week 5 and 6, I realized that I could have inflicted undesirable frustrations on other members by my distrust perspective in relation communication and commitment. I remained conscious of my feelings together with those of others. Often, I felt my self-esteem weakened since I felt betrayed when the members failed to improve on communication.

During the first meeting in week 1, we could have managed to introduce the groupthink element but while politeness was achieved, the friendliness aspect was never achieved which complicated our communication abilities. Throughout the meetings to week 9, the aspect remained an issue that affected our decision-making process. I feared that students A, B, and C could have been affected by the concept of social loafing that makes individuals minimize their efforts after engaging in group tasks (Stouten, & Liden, 2020). In a bid to ensure the minimal impacts of social loafing, I ensured that we remained organized and from week 5, we monitored and filled the effectiveness survey weekly. The efforts facilitated our ability to keep progress and applied the 1960 the Theory X and Y evaluating the positive and negative behaviors of employees. Nevertheless, the communication challenges we experienced contributed lay back and kept storming and only managed to get to performance stage during the final meeting as we completed the effectiveness survey.

My Role in the Group

As a complete-finisher and protagonist, I normally focus on leading team activities. I primarily focus on utilizing my organizational and creative abilities to enhance the performance of the group. My altruistic aspect pushed me to motivating other members towards improving communication and discussing their views openly thus the focus of insisting on participation of all members. Due to my experience as operations manager, I took the role of managing the team and ensuring that our two male members contributed to the task despite noting they had minimal expertise. Working together with the members, I managed to push the team towards completing the role although the performance was unfulfilling while compared to outcomes realized in previous teamwork achievements.

Learning from the Task

My primary lesson from the group experience was that despite the known importance of utilizing teamwork to boost performance and outcome efficiency, teams proved to be a challenge. I realized that team abilities can never realize positive outcomes without effective communication abilities in teamwork. Inability to realize effective communication could result to delays in project completion as well as inhibit performance. Equally, commitment is yet another important factor in promoting teamwork performance (Ramdhani, Ramdhani, & Ainissyifa, 2017). The utilization of reflective/ experimental learning though role play a crucial role in increasing commitment of members. Equally, I realized that utilizing participatory leadership skills could increase member commitment (Banjarnahor et al., 2018) while role play improves communication.

Conclusion

Being in a group where members showed minimal commitment in group tasks together with lack of communication skills, our team delayed in completing the tasks as required. However, with reflective learning, participatory leadership, and role play; we managed to compete the complex theories and complete the effectiveness survey in time. Nevertheless, the communication challenge contributed performance issues since unlike other groups, we never managed to leverage our potential in teamwork. The commitment we showed during the last half of the study duration proved that if we had managed to acquire the element of groupthink during week one, we would have managed to form, storm, norm, and perform.

References

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Krebt, D. M. (2017). The effectiveness of role play techniques in teaching speaking for EFL college students. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 8(5), 863-870.

Kubasova, U., Murray, G., & Braley, M. (2019). Analyzing Verbal and Nonverbal Features for Predicting Group Performance. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.01369.

Noroozi, O., Alikhani, I., Järvelä, S., Kirschner, P. A., Juuso, I., & Seppänen, T. (2019). Multimodal data to design visual learning analytics for understanding regulation of learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 100, 298-304.

Odendaal, D. (2018). A framework for using experiential learning theory to develop game-based learning (Doctoral dissertation, Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University).

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Stouten, J., & Liden, R. C. (2020). Social Loafing in Organizational Work Groups: The Mitigating Effect of Servant Leadership. In Individual Motivation within Groups (pp. 55-80). Academic Press.