 Hi everyone, it's Dr. Laura Portales and I'm here to talk a little bit about some of the major concepts that you learned in Unit 6. So let's go ahead and get started. We are now moving on to Unit 6 and Unit 6 is about managing groups and teams and there are eight total units so we're more than halfway there. Thanks for watching this video and let's go ahead and get started. As you already know, it's very important to review the learning objectives for each of the units that you're working on. And this slide, I'd like us to take a look and read them together. Just because learning objectives are tied to exam questions and the practice case questions as well as other contents. So understanding them and making sure that you can meet each of the learning objectives after you finish a unit is really important. So again, let's take a look at those together. Explain the importance of authentic leadership on group dynamics and task cohesion. Explain why diversity is important to team and organizational success and the effect of discriminatory practice of managing and resolving conflicts and team members. Explain how teamwork is impacted by individual laws and behavior, group behavior and the characteristics of group development. Evaluate team effectiveness using insight into individual behavior and theories of motivation and finally, our last one is explain the effects of individual behavior on the behaviors of team members in the workplace. So now that we've taken a look at the learning objectives, let's now take a look at a list of topics that we've covered in this unit. The slide here lists the vocabulary that we will be discussing throughout this video and also words that you should know and be comfortable with to get yourself ready for the practice exam. As you've already guessed, this unit is about teamwork. So some of the topics we're going to look at in unit six include teamwork and group structures. We're also going to take a look at effective management of teams, how we as leaders and managers can create group cohesion. We also will look at diversity and inclusion within teams and the importance of that. We'll look at conflict and management of conflict, particularly within teams and we'll also look at some methods for effective teamwork. So let's go ahead and dig into some of the concepts. Take a look at our first topic which is authentic leadership and relational cohesion. Authentic leadership has characteristics of being honest, having self-awareness and also self-regulation. So self-awareness in this context refers to the ability to understand the situation that you're in and the proper behavior and traits that should be exuded in the situation. And also self-awareness a lot of times from an emotional intelligence perspective. I really address we're aware of our own place in the world, we're aware of our own personal feelings and then the regulation part comes in where we're able to manage all of those things based on situational situations. So the authentic leader has these characteristics which make them effective, especially when they're managing teams. And we can also look at that in relation to the idea of relational cohesion. And relational cohesion is the idea of your perception that you have good relationships with the people that you're working with. So as you can imagine, this is important as we're talking about teamwork in this unit because relational cohesion, the higher perception you have of that in that you work well with your team members, you're all collaborative and you're close, the better the team is going to function. So oftentimes we find that authentic leaders are better able to create relational cohesion among their teams because of those qualities that they possess in terms of being an authentic leader. Another topic we addressed in this unit is the idea of diversity and team leadership. So it's been proven that companies that have diverse teams and that could be in diversity in terms of gender, age, race, disabilities and many other differences that may not be apparent, such as social status, economic status and those types of things. We know that companies with diverse teams end up doing better financially than organizations that don't have diverse teams. And a lot of times this is because when you bring in a diverse group of people, you have different and new ideas, you have more of a global mindset and a global perspective. So this is why diversity is so important as we talk about it in relation to managing people and of course, leadership and teamwork as well because we wanna make sure that we have diverse teams to create success within our organizations. When we look at inclusive leaders, an inclusive leader is someone that attempts to break down barriers that may occur for people that may traditionally have been excluded from certain aspects of the workplace because of how diverse they are. Many, many years ago, women oftentimes were excluded, chief executive positions simply because they were fee. So when we look at inclusive leadership, we look at a leader in this context that tries to break down those barriers for women that are wanting to be promoted. So that's just an example, but of course there are many other examples that we could use about inclusive leaders. But the important thing to remember here is that that person is committed to and takes action to break down the barriers for other individual maybe that had challenges before. So in order to do this, an inclusive leader needs to have commitment to that as an end goal. They need the courage to do that because sometimes it can be challenging. They need to be aware of or cognizant of their own personal biases. They need to have curiosity and cultural intelligence. So they need to have curiosity about why things are done, the way that they're done in other cultures, and then the curiosity to try to find the answers to that. And then they also must be collaborative as well. So when we have a leader like this that's managing a team, particularly when it's a diverse team, the team is able to feel more inclusive, they have better relationships with each other, and then of course the team functions in a more productive manner. So this is why diversity is really important from the perspective of managing people and of leadership also. When we talk about leadership in terms of managing teams, one of the challenges we see is that leaders may have some biases that prevent them from being very effective at managing these diverse. One of the first biases is the like me bias, and that is the tendency of people to associate with or have preference for people that look and sound and talk like themselves. So as you can imagine, if I'm a CEO of an organization and I only hire females that are my same race right around my same age, well that would be like me bias. And of course that doesn't create a diverse work environment. Ultimately what we're looking for. Also stereotypes is a bias that can occur and be really harmful to our teams. Stereotypes are generalizations that we make about particular groups of people based on characteristics that we believe to be true. Stereotypes, while it's not discrimination, a stereotype is what ultimately leads to discrimination. So we really wanna keep ourselves and check about the different stereotypes that we have. And just be aware that everybody has stereotypes and we wanna try to limit those as much as possible, especially when we're managing people. Another barrier is the idea of a perceived threat of loss. And we can also refer to this as a status threat. So when we allow other people to be included, sometimes that could be a threat to our own status, whether that be our position or our title. And of course that type of bias is detrimental in trying to create diverse work teams. Also being ethnocentric is another barrier to inclusive leadership. And being ethnocentric means to evaluate another culture in comparison to your own culture. So rather than letting another culture just be what they are, we tend to make comparisons about our own culture to another. And this can be harmful because it doesn't bring about a sense of acceptance. It's really just a comparison. So when we look at leadership and when we look at managing people, especially in diverse teams, we wanna make sure that we are aware of these different types of barriers and biases that we may have and that we keep them in check in order to get the best work from the different teams that we're working with. Our next topic in this unit is about conflict. And the first thing that I wanna point out is that we think of conflict as a negative thing, but conflict is not always bad. A conflict a lot of times within an organization, as long as it's done in a healthy way, can actually push the company forward and push the boundaries and have them think in a different way than maybe they have in the past. So if groups of employees are within conflict, this can be a good thing as it requires people to look at things in perhaps a new and different way, which could end up being profitable and full for the business. So from that, if we take the idea that conflict isn't always bad, we can look at three main types of conflict. The first is cognitive conflict. And this is when an individual or a group, each other, and this is where conflict can be good when you have this cognitive conflict because then you have all of these different ideas that you can put together in order to solve a problem. But if it's not managed correctly, of course it can be a negative type of conflict. So as a manager and a leader, we wanna make sure that we handle this type of conflict effectively. Effective conflict is a conflict that occurs when just two people simply don't get along. They don't have or they have opposite personality traits. They just don't like each other. And this type of conflict, although negative, if people manage to be professional within their engagement of each other, then this type of conflict isn't that serious. But if they are not professional in the way that they deal with this type of conflict, that can have negative consequences ultimately on the entire team. Behavioral conflict is the idea when one person or a group does something that others don't think is the right thing to do. So an action has already been taken and then the other group is uncertain or unsure that that was the right action and a conflict could arise from that. So if you put these together and think about it in a bigger picture context, if you allow people to have cognitive conflict from the very beginning and work through their ideas to come up with an idea that has bits and parts of everybody's perspective, you may avoid at least behavioral conflict in this situation. So these are the types of conflict and the key point here is to remember that conflict isn't always bad as long as it's handled in the right way. Now you may be wondering what are some of the reasons for conflict? So we discussed some of the different types of conflict. Now we're going to look at some of the reasons for conflict. So some organizations depend on each other, which we call task interdependencies. So this means in order for one group to accomplish their goal, they need this other group to do this other thing. And conflict can occur when the other thing isn't done in the way that they think that it should or perhaps it's not in the timeframe that the other group wants it done. So when we're dependent on others in order to effectively do our job, some conflict can occur and that's what we refer to as task interdependencies. We also can have status inconsistencies and ultimately this is where people look at different statuses. So job title, for example, and because of this, they believe that they are not being treated fairly because they have a different status within the organization. So this is more of an interpersonal conflict and as opposed to our last one task interdependencies, which is really focused on how we get the work done. Juridicial ambiguities is the idea that we're not sure who's responsible for a task. Not one person specifically has been put in charge of the task and therefore we don't know ultimately who is in charge or who is responsible for it and this can create conflict. Of course, issues in communication and individual differences like personality and perception can be a reason for clicked. Dependence on resource pool. So if there's a certain budget to complete a project and one department wants X amount and one department wants a certain amount, there could be conflict among those two departments because they're both vying for the same versus that have limited availability. And then finally, another reason for conflict is the lack of performance. So perhaps one department has very stringent performance standards and another one doesn't cause not only performance issues, but definitely conflict among the two departments since the expectations are so different for those two departments. Now we're gonna discuss a little bit about conflict and how you can actually handle conflict. So as you can see from this slide, there are two main categories. We have assertiveness and cooperativeness. So when we look at assertiveness, we can look at whether we should be unassertive or assertive and that's related specifically to how important it is to us in order to have our own concerns in the conflict addressed. So if it's not very important for that to occur, then we could say that we can be unassertive whereas if it's really, really important that we may move up that scale to be more assertive. Then if we look at the bottom where it says cooperativeness, this is the attempt to satisfy the other person's concerns. So uncooperative means that there really isn't that much of a reason to try to satisfy their concerns while cooperative means that there's a strong reason that you're going to have to work with this person again, for example. So then we can move around the axis and look at things of style. So for example, as you can see here, if you're assertiveness level, if you are really trying to get your own needs met and it doesn't matter so much that you're going to have to work with this person again or maybe you're never going to see them again. In that case, you would use a competing style which is focused mostly on trying to win and trying to get exactly what you want within the conflict. But on the other hand, if we don't feel like we need to be very assertive, so we're going to be unassertive and also we need to be really, really cooperative. So we don't care so much about the outcome but we care about the relationship. That's where we move over to the accommodating conflict management style which then encourages us to ultimately do what the other party wants. And that's because we don't care so much about the assertiveness. We don't necessarily care about our own needs and wants on that particular topic, but yet the cooperativeness is important in that relationship or in that situation. So ultimately we'll look at this. Nothing is cut and dry, so there may be some situations where you want to use a combination of styles but at least this gives you an idea of the different types of styles and how you might want to consider which style you should use. Some conflict styles, however, that don't usually work no matter what the situation and not taking action if there's a conflict is one of those. So especially as a manager, if there's a conflict we want to address that conflict as immediately and as thoroughly as possible. There's also the idea of administrative orbiting which when your employee asks for something and follows up on it, you tell them that you're researching it or that you're not sure yet or that you need to look at that further or something along those lines. So that's putting that in pull-off and that can create a lot of frustration and some mistrust for you as a leader or as a manager in your organization. So administrative orbiting we definitely want to avoid which again, idea that we're putting off the conflict with something that we hope he's someone in the short term such as, oh, I'm working on it or something along those lines. And then also see is definitely something that you don't want to engage in because of course that creates mistrust as well. So these are the conflicts we want to avoid because they're not very productive. Next slide, we talk about the cultural differences on a team and we've already addressed a little bit why diversity is so important. And these are some of the differences as a manager or a leader that you may see and that you may want to consider addressing as needed. So the first is whether people use direct or indirect communication. If someone uses really direct communication to someone that tends to prefer indirect communication, you can imagine that they may end up thinking that that person is rude and appropriate. So we want to be sure that we use and our team to use the right and appropriate communication style direct versus indirect based on the team that we're working with. Another challenge that we may face when there are cultural differences on a team is language differences. So this could be accents and the level of fluency someone has with the lynch. There may also be status and hierarchy perspectives from a cultural perspective that we want to be concerned about. For example, in some countries someone would never suggest something if they're not the manager or they wouldn't share an idea unless they're specifically asked. So understanding the status levels and hierarchy of the course that you're working with are very, very important. And then of course, decision-making norms. So some cultures tend to make decisions really quickly while decisions very, very slowly and want all of the data before they make a decision. So understanding these different types of cultural differences and ultimately how they impact is important for us to effectively manage a multicultural. Another thing we looked at in this unit is the idea of team assessments. So while we'll do performance evaluations for individuals and our individual employees we may want to consider doing an assessment for the team as a whole to measure how well they work together and how productive they are. So when we look at individual assessments that can include self-evaluation, self-monitoring and self-regulating. But when we look at evaluating teams we may look at a peer evaluation perspective as long as a peer evaluation of other team members is confidential and objective then this might be a way to assess the team and how well the team is functioning together. And in the next slide we're gonna take a little bit closer look. So if you are going to measure team performance there are a few things that you want to make sure that you consider doing. You definitely want to create clear goals that are goals for the team and not for the individuals. You want to identify and share examples of quality work so that you know what the expectations are. You want to address and utilize team discussion and reflection to compare the performance to their goals. And you also wanna identify the strategies that are needed to address any performance issues that you may be having. So in other words, it can be really important to measure team performance but we just want to make sure that we do it in the right way so it's fair for everybody. And we'll take a look at that topic. One of the main reasons why we might want to measure team performance along with individual performance is that the research has shown that when we measure team performance teams tend to have higher goal attainment. So in other words, as a whole when they know they're being evaluated as a team as a group they tend to help each other more which results in goal attainment. So that can be really important. Also measuring team performance can help the relationship in the team and also strengthen the team commitment with one another. So these two are more relational and are really important to help to keep the team moving forward and productive. So when we think about measuring team performance as we've talked about there are definitely ways that we want to go about that and there are advantages to doing that as well. We just want to make sure that we do it in the fairest way. Last topic we look at is heroic leaders and independent leader differences and a heroic leader tends to set goals that they think can be independently delivered. So they may have this big goal and then they have all of these smaller pieces that need to be in which they divide out for a deal. And interdependent leader, however, tends to look at these high level goals and then works with their team in order to work through what the plan on how they're actually going to achieve it. So that's the main difference between these two different types of leaders. Another difference is that interdependent leaders tend to announce goals before they're making this plan to reach and this can get a lot of buy-in from employees. So they announced the big goal but then they work with the employees and the team members on how they can actually achieve the goal at the work. So this is the big advantage is that you have employee involvement which can be a lot more motivating to the teams of people that you. As we conclude this unit, let's take a look at some of the things that you learned and compare those back to our learning objectives. We talked about authentic leadership and how that is key to group dynamics and task cohesion. We talked about diversity and why diversity is important to organizational success and definitely in leadership and managing teams. We talked about practical and theoretical methods of managing and resolving conflicts. We talked about teamwork and how that's impacted by our individual values, our individual behavior, group behavior and the characteristics of group development. We also talked about team effectiveness and finally we talked about the effects of individual behavior on the behaviors of the team members in the workplace. So let's now take a look. Let's take a look now at what's next to prepare you for the practice exam. I definitely recommend that you do another review of the material, maybe especially some of the material that you had some challenges with. Once you review that material, you should be all set to take the practice exam and I wish you the best.