An Unfamiliar Situation In Group Work Case Study

Analysis of an Unfamiliar Situation in Group Work
Introduction
Henry Tam was a Harvard graduate student, and he expected severe problems with employment after graduation from the university, so he decided to participate in the School's annual business plan contest (Polzer, Vargas & Elfenbein, 2003). The HBS Business Plan Contest trains students to be future entrepreneurs, and this competition allows only group projects. Henry decided to join one group, which goal was to create an interactive online music game, and this idea was innovative for 2002. However, the team could not determine the target audience of this product, which adversely affected the speed of their work. Teamwork on the project of creating an interactive music game requires
In fact, the three of them were engaged in the position of leaders, which was useless. However, there were some misunderstandings and disagreements even among these friends, such as the language of communication, since Roman wanted to speak English, while Sasha and Igor preferred Russian. When the amount of the team’s members increased with Henry and Dana, the work on the project became slower, because the intra-command communication was low. Also, the project participants could not determine the target audience of the product, which was a severe obstacle to the creation of an interactive music game. Participants had no general idea of the purpose of creating the game, and it was also the result of a weak level of communication between them. As a result, the main problems of this team were the lack of a leader and corporate
Since this group is informal and poorly organized, there is a need for formation of an unofficial leader. An informal leader is a member of a group, which does not officially have a managerial post, but, due to certain personality qualities, combined with life experience and behavior, occupies a particular position (DuBrin, 2016). Such a leader has a significant influence on surrounding people in comparison with the formal leader. A particularly important circumstance is the system of rewards and punishments, which the leader uses to monitor the activities of the members of the group. An informal leader in the creation of a musical game will be able to regulate the duties of the members of the group and their fulfillment. This function makes high demands on the personal qualities of the leader, especially in the analyzed group, where more attention is paid not to the material but the moral factor (Cohen & Bradford, 2005). The leader must know the individual motivation for the activities of each member of the group, to measure the impact of incentive and penal measures in relation to each of the group members. In addition to regulating the activities of members and applying formal incentive measures, the leader can skillfully apply informal social sanctions, which usually take place in small