EXAM CASE STUDY：INTRODUCTION TO MANAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION TO MANAGEMENT: EXAM CASE STUDY案例研究（20分）对学生的指示：阅读案例研究。通过在案例研究结束时回答每个问题来撰写回复。第2部分中的每个问题都值得：1。案例分析：（8分）2。将理论与实践联系起来：（8分）

 

谷歌从其寻求建立完美团队的过程中得到了什么（改编自纽约时报：2016年8月28日，M。Heffernan博士，O.A.M。）

朱莉娅的背景

当朱莉娅罗佐夫斯基25岁时，她有很多经历工作经验，但她觉得她不适合任何一个工作。朱莉娅曾在一家咨询公司工作，并在美国一所顶尖大学担任研究员，这很有趣但也很孤独。她想找一份更具社交性的工作。她说 “我想成为一个社区的一部分，这是人们共同建设的一部分”。朱莉娅想到了各种机会，但决定完成工商管理硕士（MBA）学位。

PART 2: CASE STUDY (20 marks) INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS: Read the case study. Write a response by answering each of the questions at the end of the case study. Each question in Part 2 is worth the following: 1. Case Analysis: (8 marks) 2. Linking theory and practice to the solution: (8 marks) 

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (Adapted from the New York Times: 28 /02/2016 by Dr. M Heffernan, O.A.M.)

JULIA’S BACKGROUND

By the time Julia Rozovsky was 25 years old she had had many experiences but felt she was not a good match for any of them. Julia had worked at a consulting firm, and as a researcher at a top university in America which was interesting but lonely. All she knew for certain was that she wanted to find a job that was more social. ‘‘I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people were building together,’’ she said. Julia thought about various opportunities but decided to complete a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree.

At university Julia was assigned to a study group carefully planned to foster tight bonds. Study groups were considered a way for students to practice working in teams and a reflection of the increasing demand for employees who need to be able to understand and work within group dynamics. A worker today might start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers, then send emails to colleagues marketing a new brand, then jump on a conference call planning an entirely different product line, while also juggling team meetings with accounting and the party-planning committee. To prepare students for that complex world, business schools emphasise team-focused learning.

Every day Julia and her four teammates gathered to discuss their studies, and prepare for assignments. Everyone was smart and curious, and they had a lot in common: they had gone to similar universities and had worked at comparable firms. These shared experiences, Julia hoped, would make it easy for them to work well together. But it didn’t turn out that way. ‘‘There are lots of people who say some of their best business-school friends come from their study groups, but it wasn’t like that for me.’’ Instead, Julia’s study group was a source of stress. ‘‘I always felt like I had to prove myself,’’ she said. The team’s dynamics could put her on edge. When the group met, teammates sometimes argued who would take the leadership role or criticised one another’s ideas. There were conflicts over who was in charge and who got to represent the group in class. ‘‘People would try to show authority by speaking louder or talking over each other. I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around them.’’

So Julia started looking for other groups she could join. Teams were being formed for business case-competitions, contests in which participants proposed solutions to real-world business problems that were evaluated by judges, who awarded trophies and money. The competitions were voluntary, but the work wasn’t all that different

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from what Julia did with her other study group. The members of her business case-competition team had a variety of professional experiences: Army officer, researcher at a think tank, director of a health-education non-profit organization and consultant to a refugee program. Despite their different backgrounds, however, everyone clicked. They emailed one another silly jokes and usually spent the first 10 minutes of each meeting chatting. “When it came time to brainstorm we had lots of crazy ideas. We all felt like we could say anything to each other. No one worried that the rest of the team was judging them,’’ Julia said. They won the competition.

Julia’s study group disbanded in her second semester. Her business-case competition team, however, stayed together for the two years she was undertaking her study. She found it odd that her experiences with the two groups were dissimilar. Each was composed of people who were bright and outgoing. When she talked one on one with members of her study group, the exchanges were friendly and warm. It was only when they gathered as a team that things became troubled. By contrast, her case-competition team was always fun and easy-going. In some ways, the team’s members got along better as a group than as individual friends.

GOOGLE

Our technology-saturated age enables us to examine our work habits with detailed scrutiny. Today, researchers are devoting themselves to studying everything from team composition to email patterns in order to understand personal productivity; to understand how to make employees into faster, better and more productive versions of themselves, and why some people are more effective than everyone else. Five years ago, Google became focused on building the perfect team. The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. The technology industry is not just one of the fastest growing parts of our economy; it is also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture. And at the core of Silicon Valley are certain beliefs: everything is different now, data reigns supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are clear-eyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new.

In 2012, Google embarked on Project Aristotle to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Julia was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle. Some groups that were ranked among Google’s most effective teams were composed of friends who socialized outside work. Others were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups sought strong managers. Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Most confounding of all, two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness. As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Julia and her colleagues kept coming across research that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’

Project Aristotle’s researchers began looking for norms. After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams. But Julia, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms mattered most. Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes

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the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Imagine you have been invited to join one of two groups.

Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch a video of this group working, you see professionals who wait until a topic arises in which they are expert, and then they speak at length, explaining what the group ought to do. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates. The meeting ends as scheduled and disbands so everyone can get back to their desks.

Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle managers with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of discussions. People interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk about their lives.

Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘‘And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences while I was studying my MBA,’’ Julia said. ‘‘I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.’’ For Project Aristotle, the research pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. Julia and her colleagues had figured out which norms were most critical. After Julia gave one presentation on their findings, an employee named Matt approached the Project Aristotle researchers. Matt had an unusual background for a Google employee. Twenty years earlier, he was a member of a security team but left to become an electronics salesman and eventually landed at Google as a midlevel manager, where he has overseen teams of engineers who respond when the company’s websites or servers go down. ‘‘I might be the luckiest individual on earth,’’ Matt said. ‘‘I’m not really an engineer. I didn’t study computers in college. Everyone who works for me is much smarter than I am.’’ But he is talented at managing technical workers, and as a result, Matt has thrived at Google.