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Benjamin Gartmann

Internal Competition A Curse for Team Performance

Team Characteristics
Characteristics
The Project team was built for a set amount of time, from two months to one year, in
order to complete the ERP training materials that support the major ERP implementation project.
The team consists of a project manager, Philly, a team leader, Rishi, senior developers, and
junior developers. All employees were selected based on their skills and experience, and then
interviewed and confirmed by the client team.
Diversity
After the team arrived a small group was formed of people who had worked in a previous
organization, they viewed themselves as similar and according to the similarity-attraction
approach they formed their group in order to reduce the likelihood of disagreements. The project
team was mixed when it comes to experience, onsite experience as well as experience working
for FIS.
Processes
Taskwork Processes.
The team had one goal to meet, create the ERP training materials. To meet this goal each
team member was given a portion of a larger component to complete, later the individual

components would be combined to create the final product.

Teamwork Processes.
The team had levels of preparation for the training material, first, second, and final drafts.
These drafts are transition processes that allow the team to get prepared for future work, which is
the presentation of the final product to the customer. With the addition of new members some
interpersonal processes came into play. The most important was the Relationship conflict,
disagreement among team members, between Philly and Sara.
Interdependence
The members of this team operate under pooled interdependence, which is all members
get assigned their own portion of the work and complete it individually, then pool the work
together. The project team also has outcome interdependence, which is when team members
share in the rewards that the team earns, however, they care more about their own rewards and
performance over the success of the team. This outcome interdependence causes people to act in
their own benefit, not for the teams. For example, Rishi would agree and do whatever Philly told
him to, without ever contesting it, regardless of the ideas validity. Rishi agreed with everything
Philly said, not because it was right, but because he felt that doing so would give him the best
chance to get promoted or have some personal benefit after this project concluded.
Communication
There is a lack of communication in the team. The members have low communication
competence, which is the skills needed to effectively communicate, leading to a sort of task
conflict, where members dont know the specifics of their actual tasks. According to Lia Aarthi
the team members did not know that the project required the pooling of each individual task to

create the end project. It seems the team was never told the most important aspect of the project.
That they were supposed to act as a team. This caused arguments because of confusion in the
integration issues, misunderstandings, clashes and disagreements.

Process Loss
Philly
All of the characteristics that make up this project team also led to its ultimate failure.
The project manager, Philly, was undergoing a divorce, a negative life event, that caused him to
be stressed. To cope with the stress Philly vented his anger and avoided a lot of his
responsibilities as the project manager. Philly was described as lackadaisical and that his
approach towards each project started irritating the client team. The team recognized his loss in
motivation and they too lost motivation, job performance and organizational commitment. Philly
was the root cause to a lot of other issues as well. While venting his anger Phillys relationship
with Sara, a junior developer, turned negative. He started mocking and snubbing Saras ideas, as
well as purposefully moving her due dates forward and lying that she didnt turn her work in on
time. He changed his team role from the project manager, to the aggressor, needlessly lashing out
at other people to cope with his emotional pain. When Philly started to ignore and avoid his own
work Rishi, the team leader, started finishing some of his work. There came a point to which
Philly was reliant on Rishi to do his work, and at this point social loafing occurred. Social
loafing is when there is a reduced sense of accountability that makes members do less work as a
group than if they did the work individually.

Grouping
The small group that formed around the same previous employment caused a rift in the
overall team. They created production blocking situations, when members need to interact in
order to complete their task but one or more members will not cooperate. An example of this is
when Abey Sidharth would not share information with Sara, someone outside of his group,
because he felt that she should do the same amount of work he did to get the results. After Sara
asked for the work she witnessed Abey share the information with another one of his groups
members causing her to feel stressed and upset. In order to deal with this stress Sara exhibited
problem-focused coping by trying to create a shared folder that everyone can access instead of
avoiding the problem. This small group would also hold up the office van because they refused
to get in until their entire group was in. The individual members within the group would respond
to questions in meetings with we instead of I, leading to an even more divided sense of a
team.
Conclusion
The FIS team was set up for success, they brought in the right people to do a well
specified project, but the team ended up failing. Why is that? The project leader experienced a
negative life event causing him to become stressed. This stress made him hostile and overly
aggressive creating personal conflicts as well as making him lose motivation. The team split up
into sub-units causing a rift between them. Lastly, most of the team members were never
informed that their individual tasks would be combined to make the finished ERP training
module. All of these major issues, as well as the smaller ones, caused the team fail miserably.