Proceso Gestión Comisaria de Higiene y Mercados

5.7.1.1 Seeking Help and Feedback

Field data identified only a few sets of activities which members used to induce other team mates to participate in problematic situations. On the contrary, team members were engaged highly individually in small, less interdependent subtasks. In this sense, Vladimir, for example, was regarded by one of his mates as a team member who, “… at all costs needs to do his own thing, because he thought that would be the best idea, and often without any kind of relation to the team’s main task or what we were doing as a team.” (Interview: Thomas) In a similar vein, Xavier also paid little attention to teamwork and was regarded as, “...the ghost, he rarely attended our meetings”

(Interview: Thomas). Thus, over the course of each phase, members were mainly working individually on basic project actions that had little relation to each other’s subtask. Vladimir explained this individual focus as follows: “I think they did not care [about each other’s part]. And they only looked at their own part, everyone had their own problems, its own part to do, and that was it.” (Interview: Vladimir)

Nina was the only one in the team who actively tried to receive feedback from her mates. From time to time, when circulating her written parts, she first thanked her team colleagues for giving her feedback. Additionally, it was observed that Nina tried to approach her mates when experiencing problematic situations; in particular, she often asked Thomas for advice. Thomas acknowledged: “Nina, she often complained that she didn’t know what to do.” (Interview: Thomas) Primarily after receiving critical feedback from externals, Nina asked Thomas for his help. For example, at the end of the marketing phase, the team, except for Thomas, presented its final analysis to the designated tutor shortly before the team’s final presentation. However, the team’s tutor regarded the marketing analysis as incomplete and advised, amongst other things, expanding the team’s thoughts about the cava market. Thereupon, the team briefly discussed the received feedback and immediately split the new task among the various project members. After this meeting, Nina updated Thomas about on tutor’s feedback and asked him for assistance via e-mail: “Thomas, you have more insight into the cava industry. Could you help me with the research?” (E-mail: 06.03.2009)

However, the business policy team from consulting 3 and the tutor also disagreed with the team’s marketing analysis proposal and were adamant that a segmentation analysis needed to be done by the marketing team. Nina as the official team leader received this harsh external feedback and immediately informed the rest of the team via e-mail with the subject: “We have a problem,” including the following: “He said that the country analysis does not help at all and that two essential parts are missing…He said that our analysis is the worst of all groups. That’s quite hard feedback, but I think it’s good to know right now in order to make modifications and not be stuck on Monday, then we obviously have to do more analysis to back up our presentation. The key success factors, they would be easier to do than the segmentation analysis; in the latter case I do not know how to start yet. I would say we should wait for the feedback from our

professors and hope we hear something tonight. If not, we’ll have to do a task division tomorrow and see how to proceed….. For the rest, we’ll have to discuss. Hope to hear from you soon!” (E-mail: 06.03.2009) With this e-mail, she clearly indicated the need for help from the rest of the group.

Although the team experienced many problems related to its task, the members still did not manage to fully leverage on their tutor’s feedback. Over the course of this project, the team never attended a tutor’s meeting with all its members. One team member acknowledged: “In our team there was always something. We did not have a single meeting which all five of us attended. Not a single one!” (Interview: Thomas) Additionally, at most of these meetings observed, the team was not well prepared. On the contrary, I observed that team members even went to these meetings “empty- handed” and expected the tutor to make clear proposals as to what they should do in the project. In this respect, Thomas explained the team’s attitude: “I think our attitude was that when we went to the tutor, we would know what to do in the project after this meeting. And that wasn’t the case. And I understand that. The tutor’s role is not to present everything on a ‘silver platter’.” (Interview: Thomas) The team rarely managed to prepare something specific for these tutor meetings so that the tutor could comment on it. It was observed that the team repeatedly discussed similar points at the tutor’s meetings because different members attended these meetings and were not fully updated on what had been discussed with the tutor at the previous meeting (Researcher’s diary). In the interview, Xavier remembered: “The second meeting with the professor even started with the same topic as the first meeting, a repetition, because Vladimir and I [the only ones who attended this meeting] maybe, we were not able to transmit the idea to the rest of the group.” (Interview: Xavier)

5.7.1.2 Giving Help and Feedback

While this team only partially induced others to participate in problem solving efforts, these activities did not always ensure the collaboration of others. In this team, helping each other to solve project-related difficulties was restrained due to the team’s rather individual approach of doing team’s consulting project. Nina was the one in the team who often sought the assistance of other members, in particular from Thomas. Thomas

was willing to help Nina find ways of approaching Nina’s subtask. In Thomas’ own words: ”If [anyone sought for help], then it was Nina, who didn’t know what to do; when she had questions, concrete questions, then she wrote us an e-mail. I always tried to answer her in a constructive way, without knowing what she had already written in her report….”( Interview: Thomas) Some of the members indicated that giving help on an individual task was difficult due to the lack of knowledge of exactly what each member was doing. Thomas continued: “But, in general, when something like this [seeking feedback] came up, then it was like that, we took notice of it. But, honestly, it is really difficult when someone asks a question and you don’t know anything about it, you can state your opinion, but whether this makes sense is a different question.” (Interview: Thomas)

Yet, when Nina as the leader of the marketing team received feedback from the business policy group which forced her team to reshape its marketing analysis, Nina was left in the lurch. Although she clearly sought help, including her e-mail “we have a problem” (E-mail: 06.03.2009), only Thomas tried to assist her promptly in finding a solution to the team’s problem even though he was not in Spain. He also encouraged the rest of the team to help Nina to find ways out of this problematic team situation. Thomas responded as follows to Nina’s distress call: “This is really not a fun situation to be in, but given the fact that we still have the weekend, I'm sure we can come up with something by Monday! Off the top of my head [he then gave clear advice for each area to be improved] …sorry, this is all that comes to mind just now. I'm sorry I'm not there to support you better. I hope you are able to provide Nina with some feedback and help. I'm surprised I'm the first to send a reply to her e-mail ;-). She's working her b... off to get things going, I hope we're all aware of that! Ok, I will see you soon; keep me posted on the developments! ”(E-mail: 06.03.2009) Although Thomas was not on-site, he appeared to be the first member of the team who helped Nina most in this critical team situation. In his interview, Thomas remembered the incident as follows: “I responded with a long e-mail. I tried to respond immediately in order to help as much as possible. I realized that the rest of the team had not responded. This situation gnawed at my conscience as I was not there. … when I received the e-mail ‘we have a problem’ it was clear for me that I needed to help although I was not there. But, honestly, I expected the others to do something as well.” (Interview: Thomas) When the other team members

respond late or even ignored her appeal, Nina asked other members of consulting 3 to help her to come up with a segmentation analysis. Nina remembered this incident as follows: “I was hopping mad and then I called Maria and Xavier and they both came. But it did not help me that both were only physically there, they were not prepared for this task. In the end, I worked on this new task with Anna – a member of a different team of our consultancy. The sad thing was that I had to work with somebody from a different team instead of with my team!” (Interview: Nina)

Maria assessed this situation in a different way. When Nina asked other experts in the field of marketing at consulting 3, Maria felt redundant and insecure in supporting Nina. In her own words: “Nina added mainly the market segmentation. She worked on it with some other groups. I went to the meeting. I remember that this was a hard time for the team because Thomas had left for Germany and Vladimir had given some excuse that he could not come. Nobody knew where he was. Xavier somehow arrived late. I was there, but I did not contribute so much because I just did not know what to say, sometimes. Because I always felt there are so many people who had more experience than I do, so it was best for me to just shut up.” (Interview: Maria)

Nina relied mainly on members outside team’s boundaries when solving any team issues that arose. Nina was greatly disappointed in the team members’ low level of willingness to help in pulling the team’s chestnuts out of the fire. Even on the last evening before the presentation, one of the members clearly indicated via e-mail that he did not know where and when the team had met in this particular situation. Nina responded to this with a slightly desperate undertone as follows: “Sorry, I don’t understand. I said twice that the big meeting is today. That’s a pity because we will not meet again. See you tomorrow. BTW: All the work was done already this weekend.” (E- mail: 08.03.2009)

All in all, the team members indicated in their interviews that they had only given a low level of constructive feedback on each other’s written subparts at the end of each phase. Vladimir acknowledged: “I did not receive any feedback. They said it is okay or I like it or I like it very much, but I did not receive any constructive feedback. And in that sense I got the impression that maybe they did not look at it carefully. Because I was sure

some questions could arise from the interpretation of data, and nobody asked anything. So I am quite sure they did not put a lot of effort into it! I think this may have been a problem of group feeling. Everybody did their work in more or less a quality way, but then they did not look at the work of their team mates.”(Interview: Vladimir)

5.7.1.3 Reframing

After this team had reached the middle of the team’s life span, after the marketing presentation, the team felt the need to discuss their approach to doing project work. In particular, Nina and Thomas encouraged the team to rethink the team’s functioning in order to improve their performance in the second part of the project. This reconsideration of the team’s initial perception of its functioning was also reinforced by externals who pointed out the team’s need to change its group dynamics. In Thomas’ own words: “…people like Justin [official leader of consulting 3] came and asked me ‘Thomas, can I have a personal talk, I need to know what went wrong with your group, because something went wrong. We need to change something because it won’t work if you continue like this!’” (Interview: Thomas)

After finalizing the marketing phase, the team went out for dinner to discuss their pattern of interaction during the previous phase. In Vladimir’s own words: “We arranged to meet and talk. We discussed together that we should change the whole attitude. We needed to change the whole structure because we saw that we had failed, especially in comparison to the other group…” (Interview: Vladimir) At this informal meeting, the team, and in particular Thomas and Nina, questioned the team’s structure in order to find out: “‘What’s wrong with this group?’ I think he [Thomas] was the one who was trying to find the reason for what was not working in the group.” (Interview: Maria). Nina remembered in the interview: “ … it was not related to our specific task. We talked about our group dynamics, how the marketing phase had been and what we could improve in the future. We discussed that every member should be more proactive, that we should not only do the tasks which were assigned to us, but also to ask what the other members were doing and help them if they were experiencing problems. We discussed this in our group because we were disappointed with the team interaction at the time.” (Interview: Nina) The team members reframed their initial understanding of

teamwork to include more collaborative and supportive approaches to working together. Additionally, showing a higher level of dedication to the team’s task was mentioned as a new understanding of team’s approach. In Thomas own words: “I think we also talked about the quality problem and that we needed to work better from a qualitative viewpoint. We needed to put more effort into our project, because we have the capability to do better!”(Interview: Thomas)

Although this team showed some instances of reframing their process into a new understanding, there was only little evidence of collective reframing with regard to team’s task. Case data revealed that the team members mostly worked on individual, independent subtasks and rarely discussed the members’ ideas and developments in each subtask in detail. Hence, most of the time, the team members retained their initial perspectives of the team’s task and omitted to collectively reframe previously held assumptions of the team’s task. In Thomas’ own words: “I had the feeling that if one of us made some suggestions, the others were happy that proposals were being made. Most of the time, the members said, ‘OK, if you want to do it, go ahead!’ and did not object to any individually made proposals. But none of the team members said, ‘I will support you, yeah, we will do it together, that is a really good idea’, or ‘that is a good idea, but I would suggest we do it like this, in a slightly different way!’ we didn’t have this kind of discussion in our team. Definitely not!” (Interview: Thomas) Consequently, team members rarely built on each other’s ideas and thoughts. On the contrary, the team members worked separately on each task and retained their individually held initial frame.

For example, during the team’s final feedback meeting, the tutor asked each member for clear recommendations because those which the team had given were too broad. The team’s tutor assessed their proposals with the following words:”For these conclusions you did not need to research for five weeks” (Observation of team meeting: 06.03.2009) At this observed team meeting, the members proposed more concrete recommendations one after another. After the meeting, Nina asked each member to send her the proposed recommendations. Yet, the team did not collectively work any further on these recommendations in order to continue their elaboration, even though the team had received critical feedback from the external faculty advisor. After this feedback

meeting, Nina updated Thomas via e-mail on these recommendations as he was absent from this meeting: “He [tutor] said we must be much more concrete with that. For example, he asked each one of us to say in one sentence what the most import insight from our analysis was. And that’s what everyone is supposed to send me, so I can include them in the presentation.” (E-mail: 06.03. 2009) This incident shows that the team members did not grasp the opportunity to collectively discuss the recommendations after the meeting although they had been urged to do so. Instead, the team took the proposals for granted once the team members had put them forward individually during the meeting.

All in all, this team showed little evidence of collectively transforming the team members’ perceptions of the team’s task into a new understanding although the team even received external encouragement to do this. This retention of the individually held perceptions of each team member’s subtask was clearly indicated by Vladimir when contrasting the team’s final output with the structure of a wall: “Sometimes so, well, not very often, sometimes, yes. But overall it was not like a wall where you have one brick on another brick on another brick. It was not like that; I mean, it was just everyone working on his own part of the wall and then somehow it would come together. But it was not everyone building the same wall. It was like everyone was doing his part and then somehow we would put it all together, that was our attitude.” (Interview: Vladimir)

5.7.2 Action

5.7.2.1 Codification

Field data identified difficulties in the team when members were trying to translate the content of team meetings into concrete action items through a process of codification. The team’s undertaking was often characterized by a less structured procedure, as Nina explained: “Our project was not structured due to the lack of any agenda. We only