Commities, Juries, and Teams:

This article both enlightened me and also disturbed me. It talks about how some teams come to decisions even before looking at the evidence in front of them. The analogy with the two types of juries were interesting. One type looks at the evidence and discusses it while the other type comes up with a verdict then tries to convince everybody that their decision is the right one. The MMT in the article would be considered the second type. The leader of it already made his decision even before the "team" discussed it. He shot down anyone who tried to throw in another opinion. He kept going back to the saying "If something is wrong, there is nothing we can do anyway." That really bothered me. The Team did not even try.

The author explained this by explaining how a person interacts with a crowd. If people remain indecisive in their opinion, they will tend to sway with the majority. People in the "team" should have tried harder to to speak up. If thee had, that whole disaster with the space shuttle Columbia could have been avoided.

Class on Tuesday: Carter racing

That activity was tougher than anticipated. I initially thought we would get into groups and discuss which was the right decision to race or not. I was not expecting for Dr. Goates do do all of this math and ridiculous graphs to show which is the smarter option. There is much more to coming up with something than just discussing the problem among peers. You actually need to look at and analyze all the data to come up with a logical decision. I learned it is not always to go with your gut decision even if you are an expert.

Managing Multicultural eam

After reading "Managing Multicultural eam" I realized the difficulties of working with people from different cultures. Some difficulties are obvious like language barriers and accents, but it is the subtle differences that are the hardest to overcome while working in a group with people of different cultures. The differences can harm the team causing both relational conflict and task conflict. The one story in the article shows this where a Bank Manager of Mexican heritage thought he was being humble with the customers but instead of himself coming off as humble, the customers thought he did not know what he was talking about.

It takes a lot of effort to get over the cultural walls. Managers are usually appointed to try and keep these teams or group of people on track of the common goal. The Managers job is very tough and involves a good amount of work, but hopefully if the team is permanent then eventually his job will fade away or at least become easier and the team can function successfully without the need for a manager. The article gave some strategies that were used successfully in the field.  Those strategies are Adaption, Structural intervention, Managerial Intervention, and Exit. All of the strategies seem successful when a situation arrises.

The Wisdom of Teams

In my opinion, the working group scenario is the best option to pick for a group of people. It puts responsibility on each individual of the group instead of the group as a whole. Everyone who has been to school knows what it is like to work with a small group of people. A few things can happen. The group could experience no problems what so ever and they will get a good grade, but problems will occur and it is up to the group to fix it. This takes time to fix that a group doesn't usually have. The more people that work on a small task the more time it takes to be done. The group will start to argue and get in each others way to try and fix the problem.

It's better for the group to assign different tasks to each individual so work is done efficiently and if a problem comes up, it is up to the individual or the group leader to decide how to handle it as quickly and accurately as possible. Now the individual can ask his/her group members for help, that's the point of a group.

A working group is necessary  for people who have met for the first time and only plan to do this one project together. But if this group continues to work with each other on a regular basis then the group can eventually evolve into a Real Team and they they may one day reach the level of High-performing Team.

Discrimination at Wal-Mart

Going Back to the class discussion about "Is Wal-Mart discriminating against women?", I did not get to talk during the discussion do to my own shyness so now I want to share my opinion. What bothered me about the article "Patriarchy at the Check-Out Counter" were a couple of the graphs. A couple of the graphs were dated for only one year, yet the whole arguement was; "Was Wal-Mart discriminating against women over the course or several years not just one." The graph clearly showed that women were being payed less than women. Some of the pay differences were a bit extreme, but just as a curiosity i would like to see if this trend continues.


My opinion on the whole thing is that Wal-Mart at the higher levels were not discriminating, but at regional and or local levels discrimination was obvious. Even though I am curious to see where the higher up positions get their pay checks because the Men and women who were Regional Vice-Presidents had big difference in pay. Women made significantly less then men. Without a good reason for this difference points to discrimination against women at the higher levels of Wal-Mart as well as the lower level positions.

Can You Handle Failure?

I read the article and found it interesting for the most part but there were a few times where it seemed to drag out an explanation for something. The article was very informative on the ways people tend to handle failure and how to handle it the right way in the future. I like how this article met with a similar conclusion with the "Personality Plus" article. They both agreed that a person may have one response for one situation but the person may have a completely different response to another yet similar situation to the first one. I am glad that both authors realize that a test that labels someone's personality as this type or that type is flawed and can change depending on the situations.


After I finished reading the article I looked back on pass failures. I seem to fall into the categories, RESERVED: “INDIFFERENT DAYDREAMER” -Ignores potentially helpful feedback and Seems not to care about failure or blame and DUTIFUL: “MARTYR”-Accepts more blame than he/she deserves in order to preserve work relationships, blames himself/herself so harshly that others typically refrain from criticizing him/her. By looking at these two types, it looks like I cannot accept criticism from other people when I fail. 


That is me categorizing myself. Now to a another person, I could be considered to handle failure in a different way.