Review the following scenario and,using the material on the influences on team effectiveness,explain what the professor would probably say to Karia in explanation of this matter.Be sure to clarify any assumptions that you make in developing your answer.
Karia is a sales representative at a rapidly growing music company.She is becoming uncomfortable at some events that are beginning to transpire during staff meetings in her department.During these meetings,her newly promoted boss,Paul,sits at the head of the conference table,and the nine other members of the department sit at various positions around the table.Paul has never been particularly good at handling conflict.Unfortunately,several members of the department have very strong opinions,and tend to get rather aggressive in team meetings.On several occasions,arguments and growing unpleasantness erupted during staff meetings.The first time this happened,Paul,apparently quite perplexed,looked around the table as if in search of assistance.When he looked at Karia,she felt a pressure to respond,and therefore said some things that helped to smooth over and resolve the growing conflict.This pattern has been repeated on many occasions over the past six months.Now,whenever a disagreement erupts in the team,Paul and other members of the team just look at Karia,and Karia begins talking in an attempt to work things out.Unfortunately,Karia is very uncomfortable with this situation.Neither Paul nor anyone else in the department has mentioned anything about this either inside or outside of staff meetings.Karia is afraid that she might be doing something that she shouldn't,and doesn't want to jeopardize her career.In an attempt to better understand what is going on,she describes the scenario to her professor in the Organizational Behavior class that she is enrolled in as one of the requirements in her part-time MBA degree program.She asks her professor to comment on what might be happening in this situation.

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Zybrea Knight · Accepted Answer

Final Answer : While student responses may go in several directions on this item,one very appropriate area to address is the apparent emergent leadership phenomenon.Studies of teams in organizations emphasize the importance of emergent,or informal,leadership in accomplishing goals.An informal leader is an individual whose influence in a team grows over time and usually reflects a unique ability to help the team reach its goals.Because a team often has both relations-oriented and task-oriented goals,it may have two or more leaders.These two types of goals may require different skills and leadership styles,creating a total set of demands that one person may have difficulty satisfying.In teams,it is relatively common for relationship-oriented leaders to emerge informally when the appointed leader does not fulfill this function.This seems to be precisely the situation in the current scenario.Paul appears to lack the ability to engage in appropriate relations-oriented behavior (as manifest through his lack of response in conflict situations,and his reputation for weakness in this area).Karia,on the other hand,seems to excel at intuitively engaging in appropriate relations-oriented behaviors that work to effectively diffuse difficult interpersonal situations.Thus,Karia is emerging as a relations-oriented leader in her department to balance the task-orientation of her boss,Paul,and to allow both of these necessary roles to be fulfilled in order to facilitate overall team effectiveness.

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