Assessment of Team Projects in MBA Courses

K.B.C. Saxena

Fortune Institute of International BusinessNew Delhi19 June 2014

What is a Project?

• Temporary work systems that are constituted by teams within or across organizations to accomplish particular tasks under time constraints.

• An on-going project is usually called (or evolves into) a program.

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What is a Team?

• A group of people linked in a common purpose. Especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks.

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Team versus Groups• A group does not necessarily constitute a team.• Team normally have members with complementary

skills and generate synergy through a coordinated effort which allows each member to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

• A team becomes more than just a collection of people when a stronger sense of mutual commitment creates synergy, thus generating performance greater than the sums of the performance of its individual members.

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Why Team Projects?• Successful experience of working in teams, especially

managing teams, is one of the most sought out professional skill MBA recruiters seek during placement.

• Reason being that team-work encourages the development of skills useful in employment: co-operation, negotiation, compromise, leadership, delegation, etc.

• Generally neither the BBA nor any other undergraduate programs provides ‘team project management’ experience. Thus your PGDM program provides you this unique opportunity of skill-building, perhaps as part of assessment in several courses in both the years of your study.

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Team Projects: Benefits to Students• Properly structured team projects can reinforce skills

that are relevant to both group and individual work, including the ability to:– Break complex tasks into parts and steps– Plan and manage time– Refine understanding through discussion and explanation– Give and receive feedback on performance– Challenge assumptions– Develop stronger communication skills.

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Team Projects: Benefits to Students (cont.)• Team projects can also help students develop skills

specific to collaborative efforts, allowing students to:– Tackle more complex problems than they could do on their

own.– Delegate roles and responsibilities.– Share diverse perspectives.– Pool knowledge and skills.– Hold one another (and be held) accountable.– Receive social support and encouragement to take risks.– Develop new approaches to resolving differences.– Establish a shared identity with other team members.– Find effective peers to emulate.– Develop their own voice and perspectives in relation to peers.

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Team Projects: Benefits to Faculty• Faculty can often assign more complex, authentic

problems to groups of students than they could to individuals.

• Team work also introduces more unpredictability in teaching, since teams may approach tasks and solve problems in novel, interesting ways.

• However, in spite of the teaching benefits, faculty should take care only to assign as team project work that truly fulfill the learning outcomes of the course, and lend themselves to collaboration.

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Challenges of Team Work for Students• Coordination costs represent time and energy that team work consumes

that individual work does not, including the time it takes to coordinate schedules, arrange meetings, meet, correspond, make decisions collectively, integrate the contributions of group members, etc. The time spent on each of these tasks may not be great, but together they are significant.

• Motivation costs refers to the adverse effect on student motivation of working in group, which often involves one or more of these phenomena:– Free riding: all work assigned to few members. Erodes motivation.– Social loafing: exerting less effort than they can or should. Low

productivity.– Conflict: can erode morale and cause members to withdraw.

• Intellectual costs refers to characteristics of group behavior that can reduce creativity and productivity. These include:– Groupthink: perceived majority view– Escalation of commitment: tendency to become more committed.– Transparency illusion: believing their thoughts and reasons are obvious.– Common information effect: focus on shared information, ignore unique

information.

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Strategies for Reducing Coordination Costs1. Keep teams small.2. Designate some school time for team meatings.3. Use skill inventories to help team delegate

subtasks.4. Assign roles (e.g. team leader, scheduler, etc.) or

encourage members to do so.5. Consider members to use digital tools (e.g. Google

calendar) that facilitate remote and/or asynchronous meetings.

6. Actively build communication and conflict resolution skills.

7. Designate time in the project plan to integrate project parts.

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Strategies for Addressing Team Motivation1. Explain in the project description (given in course

outline) why working in teams is worth the frustration!

2. Establish clear expectations for team members by setting ground rules and/or team contracts.

3. Increase individual accountability by combining team assessment with individual assessments.

4. Assess group processes via periodic process reports, self-evaluations, and peer evaluations.

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Strategies for Increasing Creativity of Teams1. Use nominal group technique – preceding group

brainstorming with a period of individual brainstorming. This forestalls ‘groupthink’.

2. Encourage team members to reflect on and highlight their contributions in periodic team meetings/evaluations.

3. Assign roles to team members that reduce conformity and push the team intellectually (devil’s advocate, doubter, the Fool).

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Challenges of Team Work for Faculty• Allocating time• Teaching group process skills• Assessing team process as well as product• Assessing individual as well as team learning

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How to Configure Teams?There are two main factors to consider when configuring groups:

• Size: Small teams tend to work efficiently because it is easier to coordinate efforts and schedules among fewer people.

• Roles: Some projects may require that each team member plays a specialised role to mimic workplace environments (project manager/leader, data analyst, etc.).

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Possible Roles on Teams• Project teams work most effectively when members have

designated roles, such as given below:– Facilitator. Moderates team discussion, keeps the team on task, and

distributes work.– Recorder. Takes notes summarizing team discussions and decisions,

and keeps all necessary records.– Devil’s advocate. Raises counter-arguments and (constructive)

objections, introduces alternative explanations and solutions.– Explorer. Seeks to uncover new potential in situations and people,

and explore new areas of inquiry.– Checker. Checks to make sure all team members understand the

concepts and the team’s conclusions.

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Identifying Relevant Characteristics of Team Members

Below are common characteristics to consider when composing teams:

• Prior knowledge, previous experiences, and skills

• Motivation• Diversity of perspectives• Students’ familiarity with each other• Personality

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Monitoring Team ProjectsEffective monitoring of team projects depends on:

• Providing a constructive framework for group interactions (e.g. project methodology, minutes of meetings, interim reports)

• Gathering information and giving feedback on group interactions (e.g. participate in meetings)

• Anticipating and preparing for potential problems (e.g. no progress by a team; project too broad or too narrow; project sponsor not available).

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Ways to get Results from Team Projects• Always have a team-leader.• 7 fundamental RIGHTS

R right to be respectedI right to inform and have na opinion and express itG right to have goals and needs and express theseH right to have feelings and express theseT right to have trouble, make mistakes and be forgivenS right to select how you will respond to others

• 4 NO’s:Contempt, criticism, defensiveness and withdrawal

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Assessment of Team ProjectsAssessing team work has added challenges:

• Depending on the objectives of the project, the course faculty might want to assess the team’s final product (e.g. design, report, presentation), their group processes (e.g. ability to meet deadlines, contribute fairly, communicate effectively), or both.

• Team performance must be translated into individual grades – which raises issues of fairness and equity. Complicating both these issues is the fact that neither group processes nor individual contribution are necessarily apparent in the final product.

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Innovating Team Project ManagementUse of social media in managing team projects:– Wikipedia– Blogs– Tweets– Face-book page

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