Organisational Behavior Assignment
Groups and Organizational Dynamics Assignment Prof. Nafisa Kattarwala Submitted by – Ryan Pereira PT-MBA Div. B Roll No. 39 What are the types of groups you have worked with in an organization, what are the conflicts that had arisen and how did you resolve them? A group is defined as two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives. Groups can be either formal or informal. Formal groups are those groups that are defined by the organization’s structure, with designated work assignments establishing tasks.
Informal groups are alliances that are neither formally structured nor organizationally determined. Informal groups are natural formations in the work environment that appear in response to the need for social contact. Formal groups are further classified into command groups, task groups and functional groups whereas informal groups are classified into interest groups and friendship groups. As an employee of JPMorgan, I had the privilege of working with a wide variety of groups ranging from functional (formal) groups to interest and friendship (informal) oriented groups.
The formal functional group which I was associated with had been formed in order to achieve the organizational objective. As a part of the corporate actions and income processing team, my groups’ primary function was to ensure corporate action notices were sent out to clients in a timely fashion and ensuring payment of incomes (dividends and coupons) to all entitled JPMorgan clients were completed as per the specified deadlines. We were a group of 5 individuals (4 males and 1 female). The conflict that had initially risen within this formal functional group was the work allocation to males and females.
As the team was usually heavily burden with volumes throughout the major part of the week and as the female in the group had to leave early to take care of household activities, she had informed the group that she would not accept additional work and will be working for only a fixed number of hours. This did not go well with the rest of the male employees who had to put in extra hours in order to complete the work. The male employees felt that she was taking undue advantage of the fact that she was a female and taking on less work and responsibilities as compared to them.
As the team leader was on an extended leave, it was the operations analyst’s responsibility to handle the situation and maintain order in the group. As I was the operations analyst in the group, I ensured that the interests of all the parties in the group were met by requesting the female member of the group to do an early shift (early morning 7 AM to 5 PM) so that she could handle a majority of the workload in the morning and could leave at her scheduled time so that she could also complete her household activities.
In this way the interests of the female employee was met as well as that of her male colleagues who had relatively less workload at the latter part of the day as compared to before the conflict. The second group that I was associated with was informal in nature and was an interest group. JPMorgan has a wide variety of hobby groups that an employee can join, in order to enrich the employees’ interest in certain hobbies like reading, trekking, etc.
I had enrolled myself in the reading group as I am an avid reader and knew that JPMorgan has an extensive collection of books and literature and could benefit extensively from my associations with the group. The group used to give out books (novels of all genres – management, science fiction, adventure, autobiographies, crime, detective, etc. ) to employees for a period of two weeks after which the employee would be requested to return the book to the group so that the group could lend the books to others.
The group used to also hold book reviews and discussions on many occasions. The conflict that arose in this group was that a few group members felt that only they were actively participating in the reading group and the others were just there for name sake and were like sleeping partners. The members felt that there were individuals in the group who were not even responsible for the books lent by them to employees nor did they keep accurate tabs on those who had taken the books and had not yet returned the books as per the scheduled deadlines.
As a result of this irresponsibility, the group had lost/ misplaced several titles from its collection and the books could not be replaced as the group was formed as a recreational group without any funding from senior management for purchasing books. The books that were in possession with the group were donated by employees and colleagues over the years and the collection had amassed to an impressive one.
The group decided that as there were indeed individuals who were contributing relatively less as compared to the other individuals in the group, the group should list down all the activities that it entails and should allocate jobs/ tasks to each individual in the group. There should be primary, secondary and tertiary roles assigned to individuals so that no task/ group activity is left unchecked if one or two employees of the group were absent on a particular day.
This way each individual in the group is given the responsibility of a certain group activity or task and no individual is sitting idle in the group without any work or with making any contribution in the group. Furthermore, it was decided that the tasks/ group activities would be rotated amongst the group members so that no one individual gets bored/ uninterested with the same activity and so that all the members in the group gets a hands on approach to all the activities of the group. The rotation was done on a month to month basis and quarter basis depending on the activity.
The third group that I was associated with was an informal friendship group. In JPMorgan, I had the privilege of meeting some amazing and extremely talented people. I was fortunate enough to form a lasting bond of friendship with such individuals. These individuals were from different backgrounds and had different thought processes and hence I was able to learn a lot from them. We were a total of seven friends at JPMorgan – four males and 3 females. All of us were from different departments and used to sit on different floors of the same building, but we used to meet up to have lunch together as a group.
We used to co-ordinate amongst ourselves and used to meet in the office cafeteria. In a p of one year we had become really good friends and had some truly memorable times with each other. One day when the entire group was seated for lunch at the office cafeteria, a conflict of sorts broke out amongst the group when one of the guys in the group made a general statement and one of the girls in the group took the statement personally and felt that the statement was directed at her as an insult.
The guy in the group did not intentionally want to insult the girl but the girl took the statement in that manner. Due to this miscommunication, there was a cold war between the girl and the guy and those that were around them. The rest of the friends in the group did not understand why the two were behaving in such a negative manner towards each other. All those who were part of the group started acting differently around each other as they too were friends with the guy and the girl in some way or the other and they could not take sides.
Due to this there were a lot of petty issues which were brought up and made into big issues as the group started fighting amongst themselves. In the end, we all split up and are no longer in touch with each other. We decided to stay apart as the incident created a riff in the friendship which could not be bridged. These are some of the groups that I was associated with along with the conflicts that had been faced and how they were resolved.
