Group Research Project

This assignment is worth 25% of your final grade. It gives you an opportunity to work with a group of peers to research and develop a team charter that will guide your work on the Group Consulting Project. Your charter should be the original work of your team; the team may not use papers or any part of papers from a previous class or from another person. If you have any questions about this assignment, please post them in the Ask the Professor discussion forum so that everyone can benefit from the answers. The assignment addresses Course Objectives1, 2, and 3.

ORDER    NOW

Introduction

In your first assignment, you analyzed and wrote about the trends you observed in the High Performing Work Teams (HPWT) survey.  You also discussed what team members could learn from taking such a survey.

Some of what you may have learned by working through the assignment was that the survey and the grouping of the questions provide a good model for the elements required to facilitate team efficiency and effectiveness.

· The mission provides a statement of the team’s purpose which provides the motivation and direction for team members.

· The goals are the results the team needs to achieve within specified time frames. Team members perform more efficiently and productively when the goals are easily understood.

· In addition to goals, role clarification helps team members understand what is expected of each person in order for the team to achieve its goals.  By discussing roles the team ensures that all the responsibilities for achieving the team’s goals are covered and being performed.

· HPWTs also decide early on the “rules of engagement,” or how they are going to work together.  They determine things like how and when they are going to communicate; the frequency of meetings; how disagreements and conflict will be handled; and how to handle social loafing, when team members don’t do their fair share of the work.

· Respect, honesty, and trust among team members are hallmarks of effective teams and how they work together.  People are different – they have different experiences and different values – so team members need to commit to work with each other despite their differences. The level of respect, honesty, and trust the team develops allows the team to work through conflicts that may occur and successfully achieve the team’s goals.

By paying attention to what you have learned from your analysis of the high performing work teams, in conjunction with the stages of team development, you and your team will be able to establish the roles, rules, and norms of how you will work together early on in your team’s development.  For more information on ensuring team success, please read the Team Work document posted in the Week 4 Supplemental module in our classroom. The document includes a 14-step action plan and some frequently asked questions (FAQs) about team work.

 

YOUR TASK

For this assignment you will be placed in a team.  This will be your team for this assignment and for the Group Consulting Project you’ll complete later in the term.  There are two deliverables for this assignment:

· a team charter and

· an individual reflection paper.

Team Charter

Working together with your team, you will research elements for an effective team charter. Please use the UMUC library to identify a minimum of five appropriate sources about team charters.  Appropriate sources are scholarly or practitioner journals and academic books published within the last ten years.  Your team will use the results of your research to create a team charter that will guide how you will work together to complete the Group Consulting Project. Your team charter should include, but is not limited to, the following elements:

· A team mission and vision – an initial team vision that summarizes what your team needs to accomplish and describes how you will interact in order to accomplish its mission. Include any other thoughts to help your team form and focus.

· A communications plan – agree on how you will communicate, parameters for communication (e.g., no phone calls after 9:00 p.m. EST); how frequently you’ll check in with each other; how your interactions will be documented (meeting agendas, minutes of meetings), etc.

· A work division plan – agree on how you will divide work, who will take on what role (will you have a team leader or coordinator or will leadership rotate?), expectations about quality and quantity of work.

· A conflict management plan – discuss areas of potential conflict for the team; decide and document how your team will deal with conflict and resolve disagreements.

Please add other elements to your team charter, based on your research. Once everyone signs off on the charter, one team member will post a copy in the appropriate discussion forum so other students can read and give your team feedback on the charter. Decide how you will handle responding to comments and questions posted in the discussion forum.

Each team member will upload a copy of the team’s final charter to his/her assignment folder. Make sure your team number and the names of all team members appear on the cover page of your charter.

Name your team charter this way:
Team X_Charter

(Example: Team 1_Charter)

Please include this academic integrity statement on the cover page of your team charter:

This charter is the work of our team that we jointly created specifically for this course and this section.  All research or material that we used in preparing this charter has been properly acknowledged within the assignment in accordance with academic standards for complete and accurate citation of sources.

 

Individual Reflection Paper

After your group has completed your team charter, each person in your group will then write a 2-3 page reflection paper (not counting cover and reference pages) discussing: (1) what you personally learned from working on developing the team charter; (2) your thoughts on how the process worked within your group; and (3) the advantages and disadvantages of using this process to create team charters. Since this is a reflection paper, you may write it in the first person (e.g., I, we, me, our). There is no minimum number of references required for your reflection paper; however, the paper should cite appropriate sources to support your statements and opinions and can include sources cited in your team’s charter. Use APA style for all citations, quotations, and references. Your paper should be double spaced, with one inch margins and a font size of 11 points or larger.

Name your reflection paper this way:
YourLastNameFirstInitial_Reflection

(Example: StudentJ_Reflection)

Please include this academic integrity statement on the cover page of your Individual Reflection Paper:

This paper is my own work that I created specifically for this course and this section.  All research or material that I used in preparing this paper has been properly acknowledged within the assignment in accordance with academic standards for complete and accurate citation of sources.

Due Date: Sunday, [insert date], 11:59 p.m. Eastern time.

Your grade for this assignment will be a combination of a team grade for the charter and an individual grade for your reflection paper. The team charter is worth 55% of the total grade and your reflection paper is worth 45% of the total grade. Please review the grading criteria on the following pages.