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MGT602
Decision Analytics
Module 3, week 6
Team assessment 2 framework
Owen Seamons
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BRISBANE BASED STUDENTS ONLY
• From next week (Monday 3rd April 2023), your weekly class
starts at 6.30pm
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Assessment 1 Review
• Answer the assessment brief
• Analysis vs description
• Identity bias and blind spots
• Evidence of written feedback from classmates
• Appropriate references
– Misleading references
– Lack of references
• Collusion
• Ghost writing
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Intellectual Humility
• https://www.abc.net.au/religion/tenelle-porter-the-virtueand-benefit-of-intellectual-humility/102131596
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Increasing Customer Expectations
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/11/1
5/the-7-biggest-business-challenges-every-company-isfacing-in-2023/?sh=54bda4865688
• https://www.intercom.com/blog/bridging-thecustomer-expectation-gap/
• https://www.zendesk.com/au/blog/customerexpectations-meet-rising-demands/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2
021/10/14/15-strategies-to-manage-and-meet-yourcustomers-growing-expectations/?sh=5dfc95073ecf
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Why auction theory won two American
economists a Nobel Memorial Prize
• In what came to be known as the “Wilson Doctrine”, Professor Wilson
stressed how important it was, when using insights from game theory to
design auctions for the real-world, to accept that bidders never have
complete knowledge so they don’t behave like fully informed rational
agents.
That knowledge revolutionised the
field, and Professor Wilson became
one of the first researchers to design
auctions that could be used for
complicated real-world problems.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-16/whyauction-theory-won-two-americans-a-nobelprize/12771764
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Groupthink
• “Groupthink” is the term most often applied to the
tendency of groups to go astray.
https://youtu.be/CWEvJciU0Zc*
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Overcoming Errors in Group Decision Making
• Evidence of groups being more deliberative in their decision
making found to overcome many errors in information processing
• Groups have been found to be better than individuals in
correcting for ego centric bias.
• Group leaders who encourage information disclosure can reduce
self silencing
• Assigning roles to individuals in group formation can reduce
uncertainty, address reputational risk and bring error rates down
• Creation of a ‘devil’s advocate’ role in a group can be useful in
opposing conformity in information handling.
• Bringing diversity to groups functioning can, through creative
tension bring new, innovative approaches to play.
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Six strategies for overcoming group-based challenges include:
1. Identify groups’ problems. Implement relevant solutions.
2. Determine ways of overcoming self silencing in the group.
3. Bring diversity, devil’s advocacy to bear on groupthink
4. Identify, act on problems of informational signals, conformity,
reputational pressure at work in the group
5. Determine how group polarisation effect, cascading of
information can be overcome and decisions improved.
6. Determine ways of overcoming underestimating effect
Addressing Challenges in Group
Functioning
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TEAM WORK: will your group become a team?
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Assessment 2 preview
Have you checked the
requirements?
Have you checked the learning rubrics –
assessment criteria and standards for HD?
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a) Select and evaluate the usefulness of a range of decision
making tools and reflect on your decision making styles and
contrast with other styles to determine the respective levels
of rationality and intuition utilised.
b) Compare, contrast and critically evaluate sources of data
as influences for decision-making in a range of business
contexts
c) Examine and evaluate decision making systems and
techniques to engage group decisions and analyse how these
can enhance sustainable outcomes
d) Critically examine emerging tools and technologies for
decision making
.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
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• ASSESSMENT 2:
• 1. Apply decision-making systems and techniques in a group to interrogate and
interpret a range of data analytics pertinent to the topic nominated in the assessment
brief.
• 2. Evaluate those systems and techniques to support effective decision-making in the
nominated organisations
• 3. Engage as a team to present your findings in a visual, oral and written form that
informs and influences the audience to make effective decisions in organisations
• 4. Support your argument with relevant contemporary literature including major
resources from within the subject modules.
TEAM PROJECT: AS PER THE TOPIC NOMINATED BY YOUR LEARNING
FACILITATOR
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What is it that makes groups work well?
READ something from the literature -about individual v team decisionmaking in the MODULE 3 readings.
Once you have contributed to the discussion forum 3.1. ‘Collaboration
in a team’, then reflect on what you personally will do to ensure that
your team is performing well for the whole time from now until
submission in week 8.
How will you manage your time with the team to ensure you can
submit by the deadline?
What supporting evidence (reference) do you have for your
statement?
LEARNING PATHWAY
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Have you:
• Established Team Rules to help meet the required assessment
outcomes, eg, established roles (identity in the consulting/
management team + functional role in the team ; prepared a
project action plan (what-who-when); agreed on meeting times;
handling of tasks; set up reporting lines; dealing with conflict;
carrying out data analysis and information processing tasks; forming
initial conclusions and reaching decisions; agreeing on and writing
up and summarising the team’s conclusions, recommendations and
justifications?
• Read and understood relevant, up-to-date decision models and
theories, team process and group dynamics theories/practices/
frameworks drawn from academic research papers and articles in
support your argument?
PREPARATION FOR ASSESSMENT 2
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Assessment 2 Checkpoint
Oral Presentation
• You will present a short 5-10 minute in class PowerPoint
presentation of your proposed work in our online session in
week 7
• All team members need to present
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• How will you use these data to support your decision-making for your
organisational challenge?
• Select and utilise at least three different decision-making tools to support your
recommendations.
• Do these tools support each other, or suggest alternative pathways?
• How can you create a visual representation of the data patterns/ trends to
inform and influence your executive team to implement the recommendations
for your project?
• Do not simply copy and paste – you need to create your own visualisation to
support your story (review links to TED TALK presentations on visualisation- see
introductory slides ).
WEEK 7 SENSE-MAKING AND PREPARING REPORT –ORAL + WRITTEN
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STRUCTURE – CASE STUDY RESEARCH REPORT
a/ cover page – Names, Student id#, subject, class, WORD COUNT # ; academic integrity statement
( use cover sheet provided )
b/ Table of contents [section #- sub-title –p.#]
c/ Executive summary [write AFTER you complete report-key focus; points; results; recommendations;
significance]
d/The report should define: the brief; the aims of your study; the scope; key research questions; and
structure (Introduction)
e/Team introduction and summary of team diversity;
f/ Literature review on teams and decision-making;
g/ Use of data analytics; source of data, rationale for use; analysis, interpretation and presentation of
selected data;
h/ Discussion,
i/ Recommendations;
j/ So what (significance of using D-M tools and team dynamics); your key learnings?
k/ List of references, [see APA referencing guide, 7th ed.]
and
l/ Appendices to include team project plan, individual team process feedback and synthesised
evaluation summary agreed by all team members.
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• EVALUATION. Each team member needs to evaluate themselves
and other team members using the team matrix (1 low-5 high)
and providing some qualitative comments to support their
score.
• Together, you need to share with each other, and then agree on
a short summary for the team, ie average score for each person,
plus integrate qualitative comments. PLACE the team evaluation
in the appendices.
• Finalise written report AFTER presentation, submit and
celebrate your success with your team mates!
WEEK 8 – PROJECT COMPLETION- EVALUATION – SUBMISSION
How many references?
See criteria #1,2,3,4 – you decide- choose wisely
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• You must recognise all sources of information; including
images included in your report, according to the APA
edition guidelines.
• Ensure you commence with references from within the
subject modules and LESA library
• Pay attention to detail: match citations in text with a
detailed record in the list of references.
• See https://library.laureate.net.au/apa
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Submission Instructions
• Only one team member has to submit
• Ensure all team member names are on front sheet
• Submit as Word Doc
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Developing a Positive Team
• Team members operating in a positive environment hold
each other responsible for task completion and team
functioning.
• Important to establish an environment offering
psychological safety and certainty of role.
• Develop an open mindset, encourage active listening and
questioning of decisions free of criticism.
• View video on group development (HumberEDU,2015):
https://youtu.be/2QbXc6E08H4 ** Tuckman Model
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TEAM –PEER REVIEW – to be completed and added to the report as an appendix; see also the
individual reporting matrix, to be submitted separately
Each team member should complete a row on their own contribution and performance; add as many
points as you like, with the opportunity for other team members to agree/ disagree, and additional
comments added (as a team) in Qs1-3.
1. What our team did well-
2. How we performed in relation to our project plan –
3. How could we improve as a team, especially in relation to decision-making

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https://youtu.be/HjEvSjkD7L0
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Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Model
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TEAM GROUP
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Team competencies

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https://youtu.be/-efhOLVgEvM
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https://skillslab.tue.nl/pathtoimg.php?id=557
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Decision-making challenges:
Group-think
• Group-think (Irving Janis), when the team passively follows a dominant
voice, when there is pressure to perform, or do things a certain way, when
not everyone is given a chance to say something, when people are afraid to
state the facts for fear of loss of status and job, when there is no emotional
buy-in.
• Example: NASA Challenger and Columbia Space shuttle disasters. Shift to
culture of ‘faster, better, cheaper’ meant that full attention was not given
to potential problems and safety was compromised.
• Image: www.wired.com
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https://youtu.be/ptOhoizsHaw **
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Decision making trap: stuck in the past
• The ‘past predicts the future‘ thinking leads to ‘managerial
recipes’ and mechanised thinking and new data are not taken
into account, eg, IBM before Lou Gerstner, and Xerox photocopier
giant.
• Only see what they expect to see, don’t notice the rule changes
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Online Question
• What is The Abilene Paradox?
• Is it the same as groupthink?
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Decision-making challenge: compromise
• The Abilene paradox
• Social conformity;
• different to group-think in that
individuals agree to do some thing
to please others, and do not state
what they really want, so that they
all end up doing something no-one
really wants (Harvey, 1974).
• www.mystrategicplan.com
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The Abilene Paradox
Hot dusty day in Brisbane
Family is playing dominoes
Dad says, ‘Let’s go to
Caloundra, 100kms north, for
dinner.’

your mother wants to go.’
Mother says, ‘Yes, let’s go.’
The drive was long and hot.
The food was terrible.
4 hours later, home again
exhausted.
‘It was great, wasn’t it?’
‘No, I only went because you
said you wanted to.’
‘I was just trying to please you
all.’
So, why did we do something
that no-one really wanted to do?
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Decision-making
• Difficult to know the optimal (best)
decision
• We can rarely know all the options
available in order to make the best
decision.
• Based on the data and resources (time,
$, people) available, we can make a
‘satisficing’ decision (satisfy + suffice);
• it may not be the best one overall.
• Image: bryanbraun.com
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Managing Virtual Teams
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Learning Activity 3.4: Virtual teams
• What are the daily challenges facing members of work teams
in their decision making?
• How can virtual teams’ communication be best managed
across physically separate, disparate team membership?
• How can virtual team members’ psychosocial needs be best
met by the manager in charge of the virtual team?
• https://youtu.be/AJQdT637szs **
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6 Strategies for Overcoming the Tendency Toward
‘Groupthink’
By Shutterstock | February 25, 2015
• 1. Recruit a diverse team
• 2. Remain an impartial leader
• 3. Encourage conflict and debate
• 4. Assign the role of devil’s advocate
• 5. Gather outside opinions
• 6. Allow for independent evaluation
https://youtu.be/8k8smOgzV9Y *
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Groupthink
Consequently
• Groups do not merely fail to correct the errors of their members;
they amplify them.
• They fall victim to cascade effects, as group members follow the
statements and actions of those who spoke or acted first.
• They become polarised, taking up positions more extreme than
those they held before deliberations.
• They focus on what everybody knows already—and thus don’t
take into account critical information that only one or a few
people have.
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Herding
• It is no exaggeration to say that herding is a fundamental
behaviour of human groups. When it comes to group
decisions and information flow, the favoured term among
social scientists is “cascade”—a small trickle in one direction
that soon becomes a flood.
https://youtu.be/0IJCXXTMrv8 *
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Polarising Groups Example
• Case study – involving group of participants from Boulder, known by its voting patterns
to be predominantly liberal, and Colorado Springs, known by its voting patterns to be
predominantly conservative.

• Group members were asked first to record their views individually and anonymously and
then to deliberate together in an effort to reach a group decision.
• Findings:
• People from Boulder became a lot more liberal, and people from Colorado Springs
became a lot more conservative.
• Deliberation decreased the diversity of opinion among group members.
• Deliberation sharply increased the disparities between the views of Boulder citizens and
Colorado Springs citizens
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Making Groups Wiser
• Silence the leader
• “Prime” critical thinking: engaging participants in a
prior task that involves either “getting along” or
“critical thinking” has been shown to have a big
impact.
• Reward group success
• Assign roles
• Appoint a devil’s advocate
• Establish contrarian teams
• The Delphi method.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SzWrazgt7Y *****
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Delphi Method
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Google Case study
• In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — codenamed Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s
teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.
• Project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a halfcentury of academic studies looking at how teams worked.
– Were the best teams made up of people with similar interests?
– Or did it matter more whether everyone was motivated by the same
kinds of rewards?
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• Based on those studies, the researchers scrutinized
the composition of groups inside Google: How often
did teammates socialize outside the office?
–Did they have the same hobbies?
–Were their educational backgrounds similar?
–Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of
them to be shy?
–They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping
memberships and which groups had exceeded their
departments’ goals.
–They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender
balance seemed to have an impact on a team’s success.
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• No matter how researchers arranged the data, though,
it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any
evidence that the composition of a team made any
difference.
• Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through
the data they had collected, looking for norms. They
looked for instances when team members described a
particular behaviour as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when
they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s
culture.’’
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• Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another
constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behaviour by
interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders
enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a
teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to
wait his or her turn.
• Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting
with informal chitchat about weekend plans.
• Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip.
• There were teams that contained outsize personalities who
hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which
introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.
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• After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year,
Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and
influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s
teams.
• In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and
Union College began to try to answer a question very much like this
one. The researchers eventually concluded that what
distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups
was how teammates treated one another.
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• The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s
collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble
a team, even if, individually, all the members were
exceptionally bright.
• Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to
optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success
is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions
and complicated conversations and discussions of who we
want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that
can’t really be optimized.
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Broad Overview of weeks 5 and 6
• General team theory
• Group and team dynamics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGFLOi4OOU **
• Royal Society https://youtu.be/ptOhoizsHaw **
• Cohesion and Groupthink https://youtu.be/jwHfmlbJX5Q **
– Herding https://youtu.be/0IJCXXTMrv8 **
• Social loafing
• Diversity
• Working successfully in teams
• Team roles
• Virtual teams Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DVFTWXCsII **
• Team meetings & Team conflicts
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References
Caldicott, S.M. (2013). Midnight lunch: The 4 phases of team collaboration process
from Thomas Edison’s lab. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
Chalkiti, K. (2012). Knowledge sharing in dynamic labour environments: Insights
from Australia. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management,
24 (4), 522-541.
Harvey, J.B. (1974). The Abilene paradox: The management of agreement.
Organizational Dynamics, 3, 63–80.
Harvey, J.B. (1988).The Abilene paradox and other meditations on management.
Mass.: Lexington Books.
Tellaria, K., Little, D. & MacBryde, J. (2002). Managing processes through teamwork,
Business Process Management Journal, 4 (2), 338-350.