MGMT 501 Week 6 Group DB Forum 5: Dees Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 5: Individual Thread and Group Summary

MGMT 501 Executive Leadership and Management, Group Discussion Board Forum 5 (individual thread and collaborative summary)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the call center and the group members are composites standing in for the course's own; the books, Scripture and the published research are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 501.

When an ice storm knocked out power to 240,000 of our utility's customers in January, our customer call center took three times its usual volume for eleven straight days. Our 85 agents spent long shifts with callers who were cold, frightened and often furious. The team came through without losing anyone, and two months later our engagement scores were higher than before the storm. I believe that happened because our managers treated resilience as a team capacity, not an individual one.

Alliger et al. (2015) describe team resilience in three phases: minimizing the impact of a challenge before it arrives, managing it while it is happening and mending afterward. Our center had minimized in advance. Storm procedures had been rehearsed each fall, supervisors had cross-trained agents on outage scripts, and a rule allowed agents to end calls that turned abusive after one warning. During the storm, managers managed: they opened every shift by briefing agents on the latest restoration estimates, rotated agents off the phones for twenty minutes every two hours, and assigned two supervisors to do nothing but support agents after difficult calls. Afterward, they mended with a debrief in which agents described what had worked and what had not, followed by two paid days off for everyone who had worked the full eleven days.

Two findings explain why these practices mattered. Edmondson (1999), studying teams in a manufacturing company, found that where members trusted that a mistake or a request for help would not be held against them, the team did more of the asking, checking and talking about errors that lets a group improve. Our agents raised problems with the outage script on the second day, and the script was fixed by the third, because they knew they would not be blamed. Sonnentag and Fritz (2015) argue that psychological detachment from work during time off is central to recovery from job stress, and that high demands make detachment harder. The mandated breaks and the paid days afterward gave agents a chance to detach that they would not have taken on their own.

Dees (2013) writes that resilient leaders build resilience in the people they lead, not only in themselves. The Preacher in Ecclesiastes notes that a partner can pull a fallen companion back to his feet, and that three cords twisted together are hard to snap (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Ecclesiastes 4:9-12). Resilience in our center lived between the agents, in the supervisor who took the next call after a bad one and the coworker who covered a break. That is the kind of strength leaders can plan for.

Group Summary (Group 1)

Our group compared four teams that faced sustained adversity: a utility call center during an ice storm, a hospital emergency department during a winter surge of respiratory illness, a church staff that lost its senior pastor to sudden illness, and a commercial construction crew that fell six weeks behind schedule after a crane collapse injured a coworker. Each member described what helped the team recover and what made recovery harder, and each interviewed at least one leader of the team to check the account against their own memory. We found that the practices of resilient teams fell into the three phases described by Alliger et al. (2015), minimizing, managing and mending, and that four practices appeared in every successful case.

The first practice is preparation that builds shared understanding. Stoverink et al. (2020) propose that team resilience emerges from team-level resources, including a shared sense that the team can succeed, a common understanding of how its members work together, a capacity to improvise and psychological safety. In each of our cases, teams that recovered had built these resources before the crisis. The call center had rehearsed storm procedures and cross-trained agents. The emergency department had practiced surge protocols twice a year, so nurses and physicians knew who would open overflow beds and who would staff the hallway. The construction crew, by contrast, had never discussed what it would do after a serious injury, and the foreman told our member that the first week after the collapse felt like starting from nothing. No one knew who should speak with the injured worker's family, who should talk to the general contractor or how the crew would be reorganized while the site was closed for inspection. Those questions were answered eventually, but each was answered under pressure and by whoever happened to be available, which left several crew members feeling that nobody was in charge.

The second practice is open communication protected by psychological safety. The same study by Edmondson (1999) links that trust to the behaviors through which a team corrects itself. Our emergency department member described how charge nurses invited staff to say when they were overwhelmed and moved resources in response, and how this made the department adapt quickly as the surge changed. The church member described the opposite at first: staff hesitated to raise concerns after the pastor's illness because they did not want to appear disloyal. Things improved only after the executive pastor said directly that questions and worries were welcome, and began each staff meeting by asking how people were holding up. Once concerns could be spoken, the staff discovered that several of them shared the same worry, that the church's youth ministry would collapse without the pastor's involvement, and they were able to plan for it together rather than carry the fear privately.

The third practice is deliberate recovery. Sonnentag and Fritz (2015) show that detachment from work during time off helps people recover from job stress, and that heavy demands make detachment harder to achieve. Every member's team struggled with this, and the struggle looked similar across settings: the people most committed to the work were the least willing to step away from it. The call center mandated breaks and gave paid days afterward. The emergency department scheduled protected days off during the surge, though staff sometimes came in anyway. The construction crew worked seven-day weeks for a month to recover the schedule, and our member reported that two experienced workers quit during that period. The group concluded that recovery must be planned by leaders because team members under pressure will rarely take it on their own.

The fourth practice is mending through reflection and meaning. Teams that recovered well held some form of debrief: the call center's after-action review, the emergency department's huddles after the surge, and the church's day of prayer and reflection three months after the pastor's death. Dees (2013) presents resilience as including the capacity to grow through adversity, not only to return to where one started. The debriefs gave teams a way to name what they had learned and to honor what they had lost. Our church member noted that the day of reflection was when the staff first spoke openly about grief, and that staff turnover, which had been feared, did not occur. The construction crew never held a debrief, and our member believes that the absence of one is part of why two experienced workers left: the crew returned to work without ever talking about what had happened to their coworker.

The group found Scripture repeatedly relevant, and members were struck by how often the same passages surfaced in very different workplaces. Ecclesiastes 4 describes the strength of people who stand together, and Paul's picture of the church as a body in which members suffer and rejoice together (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Corinthians 12:26) gave our church member language for what her staff experienced. For Christian leaders, the group agreed, building team resilience is part of caring for people, not only a strategy for performance. Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) make a parallel point from a secular perspective, arguing that organizations that handle the unexpected well are those that stay sensitive to operations and committed to resilience rather than assuming everything will go to plan.

The group disagreed about rest. The construction member argued that in some industries, schedules and contracts leave little room for mandated recovery, and that crews accept long weeks as part of the work. The other members agreed that constraints are real but noted that the construction crew's lost workers cost more time than rest would have. We settled on a shared position, which the construction member accepted after hearing the others' cases: leaders should plan recovery even when schedules are tight, perhaps through rotating crews or shorter days, because the costs of exhaustion arrive later and are larger.

From this synthesis, the group proposes that leaders build team resilience in three steps, which mirror the phases with which this summary began: prepare shared understanding and roles before adversity, protect communication and recovery during it, and lead a deliberate debrief afterward. Each step can be planned, and each draws on the conviction, shared across our cases, that people recover best together.

References

Alliger, G. M., Cerasoli, C. P., Tannenbaum, S. I., & Vessey, W. B. (2015). Team resilience: How teams flourish under pressure. Organizational Dynamics, 44(3), 176-184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2015.05.003

Dees, R. F. (2013). Resilient leaders: The resilience trilogy. Creative Team Publishing.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72-S103. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.1924

Stoverink, A. C., Kirkman, B. L., Mistry, S., & Rosen, B. (2020). Bouncing back together: Toward a theoretical model of work team resilience. Academy of Management Review, 45(2), 395-422. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2017.0005

Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2007). Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.