Week 11

"Group Dynamics and Teamwork"

This week we talked about groups which are made up of two or more freely interacting individuals who have a common goal or purpose. It is a very essential for managers to have a working understanding of group dynamics, afterall they are the baseic building blocks of any organization.

Building mature groups was broken down to a six step process, where during the first three stages (orientation, conflict and challenge, and cohesion) power and authority problems are resolved. groups are faced with the obstcle of uncertainty over interpersonal relations during the last three stages (delusion, disillusion, and acceptance).

Among group work, many different aspects can work against the group's effectiveness, but we did discuss an important aspect that was Organizations politics, which is usually associated with larger organizations, but could also happen in any organization. Political tactics such as posturizing, empire building, coolecting and using social UOU's, creating power and loyalty cliques, and destructive competions need to kept on check if the organization is to be effective.

Among all aspects of group work, the chapter listed Trust, as a key ingredient of effective teamwork, which is actually very low in the American workplace today.

Managers can build trust in an organization or group by creating an environment of better communication among workers, in addition to support, respect, fairness, and competence within the company.

When group members trust one another, there will be a morea active exachange of information, more interpesonal influence, and better results overall which is the pretty much the goal of any company.

Story of Stuff

Watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

©Tides Foundation & Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Week 10

"Motivating Job Performance"

Some theories we studied this week was Maslow's five-level hierarchy of needs that makes it clear to managers that people are motivated byemerging rather than fullfilled needs. Differently, Herzberg believed that the most that waged and working conditions cand do is eliminate sources of dissatisfaction. According to Herzberg the key to true satisfaction and motivaitons, is an enriched job that provides and opportunity of achievement, responsibility, and personal growth.
The expenctancy theory is based on the idea that the strength of one's motivation to work is the product of perceived probabilities of acquiring personally valued rewards. Both effort-performance and performance-reward probabilities are important in expectancy theory.
Goals can also be an effective motivational tool when they are specific, difficult, participatively set, and accompanied by feedback on performance. Goals motivate performance by directing attention, encouraging effort and persistence, and prompting goal-attainment strategies and action plans.

Update in Construction Spending

Construction spending was sharply higher than expected for September but a large downward revision to August was essentially offsetting. Overall construction spending advanced 0.8 percent in September after slipping a downwardly revised 0.1 percent in August. The increase in September was well above the consensus forecast for a 0.2 percent dip. However, the decrease in August is now significantly lower than the original estimate of a 0.8 percent gain. The boost in spending in September was led by a 3.8 percent surge in private residential outlays. Private nonresidential declined 1.8 percent and public outlays decreased 0.1 percent in the latest month.

On a year-ago basis, overall construction outlays slipped to minus 13.0 percent in September from minus 12.5 percent the previous month.

Overall, housing continues a moderate recovery. However, now that housing is on an uptrend, the nonresidential and public sectors are still in recession and it may be some time before they turn up.

Inclusive of revisions, September outlays were close to expectations. But there were other reports out at the same time that clearly were positive. Pending home sales spiked and ISM manufacturing rose further. Equities advanced on these other reports while Treasury yields firmed.

Week 9

This week we talked about Communicating in the Internet Age.

Modern technology has made communicating easire and less costly but has had the unintended side effect of information overload. Managers are challenged to improve the quality of their communication because it is a core process for everything they do.
Links in the communication process include sender, encoding, medium, decoding, receiver, and feedback. Noise would be any source of interference.

In this chapter we also saw that e-mail, supposedly a real time saver has quickly become a major time waster. Organizations need to create and enforce a clear e-mail policy to improve message quality and curb abuses. Cell phone users need to be discreet and courteous to avoid broadcasting privileged information and/or offending others. Videoconferencing restricts how people communicate televised conteacts are more mechanical than face-to-face meetings.
Although telecomunicating can reduce travel time and expense and can offer employment to nontraditional employees, it restricts normal social contact and face to face communication in the workplace.

This weeks subject was a good opportunity to see how communication is important in the workplace, specially in times of such diverse workforce.