Organizational Behavior: Benefit Dinner For Girls Softball Dug Outs

Community Project

Organizational Behavior

Benefit Dinner for Girls Softball Dug-outs

The Wisdom Seekers

May 12, 2005
Introduction

The MBA Class at Averett University has been tasked with creating and implementing a community project for our Oganizational Behavior class. Community projects refers to a service that a person performs for the benefit of his or her local community, or to solve particular problems related to the needs of their community.
The team decided to sponsor a Mother's Day spaghetti dinner for the athletic department at the United Christian Academy (UCA). The funds would be used exclusively to build dug-outs for the girls softball team. The United Christian Academy is a small private Christian school
Due to the time constraints many activities had to take place at the same time. One example of this would be when the dinner event had to be advertised while donations were still being solicited from merchants. Not knowing the number of people who would attend the event put added stress and pressure on the team because once the event had been advertised we were committed to having the dinner. We had to have the dinner regardless of the food or cash donations to support this function, we just had to find a way to make it happen. This put a great deal of stress on our team to ensure that we continued to visit and solicite donations from our merchants to have enough stock on hand to feed everyone who showed up for dinner.
The stress led the team to experience conflict and the team found ourselves working down the path of the conflict process. At first we had some communiction errors and then we had to realize what was the perceived conflict and outline a plan for resolution. Once we realized we had some real tough conflict we had to take action so we could handle the conflict. We all collaborated and compremised and in some cases avoided the problem until we couldn't bear it any longer. At this point we changed our behavior in order to increase the group's
A large part of the activities involved in this project consisted of convincing a community saturated with solicitation that our cause was worthy and they should donate. Since there was a lot of solicitation already in this area it was very difficult to pierce through the skepticism and suspicion of merchants. Our team found it hard to convince the area merchants to make a donation of goods or money. Every positive outcome was doubly appreciated because it was a success of our tactics and also brought us closer to our goal. We asked 38 merchants for donations and received 22 donations of money, food, or merchandise. Every yes we received caused enthusiasm to persevere and the momentum was used as a tool to convince others about the great cause. The team broke the donations down into a yes or no vote. If the merchant agreed to donate time, money, goods, or food we solidified their response with a yes. The team broke it down into percentages to realize that most of our merchants approached said yes, in fact, 58% said