Dr Jiafang Lu
Dr Junjun Chen
Dr Miron Bhowmik

Groups and teams are bearing increasingly more responsibilities for making organizational decisions and implementing tasks in the workplace. Groups have the potential to outperform individuals acting alone, but this potential all too often goes unrealized.

This course aims to offer a practical framework for understanding group development, internal operation of groups, group functioning, group decision-making processes, diversity and conflict in groups, as well as social and cultural factors that help or hinder group performance. Evidence-based concepts, theories and techniques that have proven to be effective in managing diversity in teams are encompassed in order to help leaders and NGO professionals in their pursuit of carrying out inclusive practices.

It will examine how middle leaders can support group members and foster healthy relationships by considering the emotional facet of teamwork, and how leaders can support team well-being.

(a) Preparation task: Comparative interview analysis (20%): Using an ethically approved semi-structured interview guide developed by the course instructors, participants collect a real-life teamwork problem from their organizations and summarize the case problem. (900-1,000 words)

(b) Team presentations and class participation (30%): Participants work in groups and select one teamwork problem as the focus of case analysis. In the presentation, participants apply more than one theoretical framework into analyzing, evaluating, and solving the team case problem.

(c) Case development and analysis (50%): Participants propose an innovative initiative in their organization, and apply the frameworks introduced in this course to develop a high- impact team for the innovative project.