MGMT 527 Week 4 DB Forum 2 Replies Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: Replies

MGMT 527 Leading Project Teams, Discussion Board Forum 2: Replies (two)

Thread by [Student Name]

The two classmates, their threads and the forum prompt on motivating a team one does not supervise are composites standing in for the course's own; Scripture and the peer-reviewed studies cited are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 527.

Reply to Tanya

Tanya, your thread on starting up a cancer drug trial across nine sites at your contract research organization described a problem I think every matrix project manager knows. Your coordinators, data managers and regulatory specialist were borrowed from their departments, their annual reviews were written by their functional managers, and when site activation fell three weeks behind, you had no authority to make them prioritize your study.

The research suggests that authority may not be the missing piece. Seibert et al. (2011), in a meta-analysis covering both individual and team empowerment, found that psychological empowerment was associated with job satisfaction, commitment and performance, and that team empowerment was related to team performance. Empowerment in their review grew from conditions a leader can influence, including the design of the work and the support the leader provides. A project manager without formal power can still shape those conditions.

One way to apply this would be to hand the startup team the site activation schedule itself. Instead of assigning dates, you could ask the coordinators and regulatory specialist to build the schedule together, decide which sites to activate first, and report progress to the sponsor in their own words. People tend to protect a plan they built. You might also make the team's progress visible to their functional managers, so that the work counts where their reviews are written.

Did your organization give you any way to contribute to your team members' annual reviews?

Reply to Omar

Omar, your account of moving your church's food pantry was honest about the disappointment: forty volunteers on the first Saturday, twenty-two on the second and nine on the third, while the shelving and two refrigerators still sat in the old fellowship hall. You concluded that people simply lost interest.

Kirkman and Rosen (1999), studying 111 work teams in four organizations, broke team empowerment into four parts. Potency is a team's confidence in itself, meaningfulness its sense that the job is worth doing, autonomy its room to choose methods, and impact its view of what its effort changes. The more empowered teams got more done, acted before problems arrived and served customers better, and the people on them liked their jobs more and felt more loyal to team and employer. Your volunteers probably had meaningfulness, since they chose to serve hungry families. But they may have lacked the other three. They were told each week which boxes to carry, they could not see how close the move was to finishing, and nobody had shown them that the families would be served sooner because of their work.

Peter wrote that each person has received a gift and should use it to serve others as a good steward of God's grace (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Peter 4:10). Carrying boxes uses one gift; planning the move would have used many more. Your volunteers included an electrician, two retired teachers and a truck driver, and giving them pieces of the plan might have kept them coming.

Would a simple progress board at the new building have helped the volunteers see their impact?

References

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

Kirkman, B. L., & Rosen, B. (1999). Beyond self-management: Antecedents and consequences of team empowerment. Academy of Management Journal, 42(1), 58-74. https://doi.org/10.2307/256874

Seibert, S. E., Wang, G., & Courtright, S. H. (2011). Antecedents and consequences of psychological and team empowerment in organizations: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(5), 981-1003. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022676