People and Organisation

Drawing on your experience of the Role Play Negotiation Exercise and the Group Presentation, analyse the theoretical organizational behaviour issues that these tasks raise.

In this essay I will discuss theoretical organisational behavioural issues, drawing on my experience of the role play exercise and the Group presentation. I will look at the role play as a whole and see how power, emotion, and roles interlink in the negotiation, and what I have learnt from this experience. This essay will also aim to examine the role of teamwork within this exercise and connect this with varying theories of organisational behaviour. Furthermore, it will draw comparisons to other real life examples, such as my basketball team and my Business in Society group, to show how these theories can be combined with other experiences in my life.

We were given the task of presenting a role play to the rest of our class. We were each allocated different roles within an organisation with the aim to debate a proposal that would affect each role individually in varying ways. Our group was required to negotiate a new proposal that the tea breaks for staff at British Airways should be timed and strictly planned.

In the role play, I was appointed to be the team leader, and was against the new proposal. This role made me emotionally attached, as it raised my concern about losing the trust of my employees which I had been established up for the last years. Antonio Damasio (lecture 21, 19.02.09) argued that our decision making process is affected by our emotions, which was evident in this exercise, in the way that the individual’s opinions were taken into account when deciding the conclusion of the debate. Not everybody was attached to the issue, such as our company accountant for instance was only thinking about efficiency and had problems seeing it from my point of view. Our human resource investigator was for the proposal that the tea breaks should be planned and timed, but was also... [continues]

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