Chapter 9 Critical Thinking Case OECollaboration

At OECollaboration, a technology company that develops virtual collaboration software for new companies, Mike Jones is a new manager. One of the biggest challenges he has faced is that the team that he is managing is well established and because he is an outsider, the team members haven't yet developed trust in him. Two weeks into his new employment, Mike held a meeting and discussed all of the changes to the remote work agreements as well as implementing new meeting requirements for each employee to have a biweekly meeting scheduled with him to discuss their projects. The team was outraged, they were not excited, and the following days he wasn't greeted in a friendly way; in addition, his team seemed less engaged when asked to participate in team functions. Tracy James is also a new manager at OECollaboration who started at the same time as Mike, in a similar situation where she is a new manager of an existing team. Tracy was able to hold a meeting the first day on the job to listen to her team and get to know them. During this meeting she also told the team about herself and her past experiences. Additionally, she held one-on-one meetings to listen to each of her team members to discuss what they were working on and their career goals. After observation and discussion with upper management, she aligned her own team goals closely with the skills and experiences of her new team. She met with the whole team to make changes to a few policies, explaining why they were being changed, and set the strategy for the team moving forward. Because she got her team involved and learned about them before implementing her new strategy, this was Chapter 9 Group and Intergroup Relations 319 well received. Her team still had questions and concerns, but they felt like they could trust her and that they were included in the changes that were being made.

Questions:

1. What challenges can a new manager encounter when starting to manage an existing team?

2. What strategies can a new manager implement to ensure that his new team is engaged with him and builds relationships to succeed in his new role?

Chapter 10 Management Skills Application Exercises

1. Do you agree with Katzenbach and Smith's key practices that make teams effective? Why or why not? Which of these practices have you personally experienced? Are there any additional practices that you would add?

2. Have you ever been part of a team that made it through all four stages of team development? In which stage did the team remain the longest? In which stage did the team remain the shortest amount of time? What did you learn?

3. Why do you think it is so important to manage a team's boundaries? How can external stakeholders impact the function and performance of the team? Why is emotional intelligence such an important skill to have when managing a team?

4. In your experience, have you ever been in a situation in which conflict became a negative thing for a team? How was the conflict handled? How can a team manager ensure that conflict is handled constructively?

5. What is the difference between cultural intelligence and emotional intelligence? How can the cultural intelligence of a team improve performance? Have you ever been on a multicultural team that was high on cultural intelligence? How about a team that was low on cultural intelligence? What were the impacts?

Chapter 11 Critical Thinking Case Facebook, Inc.

Facebook has been in the news with criticism of its privacy policies, sharing customer information with Fusion GPS, and criticism regarding the attempts to influence the 2016 election. In March 2014, Facebook released a study entitled "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks." It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journal. The paper explains how social media can readily transfer emotional states from person to person through Facebook's News Feed platform. Facebook conducted an experiment on members to see how people would respond to changes in a percentage of both positive and negative posts. The results suggest that emotional contagion does occur online and that users' positive expressions can generate positive reaction, while, in turn, negative expression can generate negative reaction. Facebook has two separate value propositions aimed at two different markets with entirely different goals. Originally, Facebook's main market was its end userspeople looking to connect with family and friends. At first, it was aimed only at college students at a handful of elite schools. The site is now open to anyone with an Internet connection. Users can share status updates and photographs with friends and family. And all of this comes at no cost to the users. Facebook's other major market is advertisers, who buy information about Facebook's users. The company regularly gathers data about page views and browsing behavior of users in order to display targeted advertisements to users for the benefit of its advertising partners. The value proposition of the Facebook News Feed experiment was to determine whether emotional manipulation would be possible through the use of social networks. This clearly could be of great value to one of Facebook's target audiencesits advertisers. The results suggest that the emotions of friends on social networks influence our own emotions, thereby demonstrating emotional contagion via social networks. Emotional contagion is the tendency to feel and express emotions similar to and influenced by those of others. Originally, it was studied by psychologists as the transference of emotions between two people. According to Sandra Collins, a social psychologist and University of Notre Dame professor of management, it is clearly unethical to conduct psychological experiments without the informed consent of the test subjects. While tests do not always measure what the people conducting the tests claim, the subjects need to at least know that they are, indeed, part of a test. The subjects of this test on Facebook were not explicitly informed that they were participating in an emotional contagion experiment. Facebook did not obtain informed consent as it is generally defined by researchers, nor did it allow participants to opt out. When information about the experiment was released, the media response was overwhelmingly critical. Tech blogs, newspapers, and media reports reacted quickly. Josh Constine of TechCrunch wrote: " . . . there is some material danger to experiments that depress people. Some people who are at risk of depression were almost surely part of Facebook's study group that were shown a more depressing feed, which could be considered dangerous. Facebook will endure a whole new level of backlash if any of those participants were found to have committed suicide or had other depression-related outcomes after the study." Chapter 11 Communication 371 The New York Times quoted Brian Blau, a technology analyst with the research firm Gartner, "Facebook didn't do anything illegal, but they didn't do right by their customers. Doing psychological testing on people crosses the line." Facebook should have informed its users, he said. "They keep on pushing the boundaries, and this is one of the reasons people are upset." While some of the researchers have since expressed some regret about the experiment, Facebook as a company was unapologetic about the experiment. The company maintained that it received consent from its users through its terms of service. A Facebook spokesperson defended the research, saying, "We do research to improve our services and make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. . . . We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process." With the more recent events, Facebook is changing the privacy settings but still collects an enormous amount of information about its users and can use that information to manipulate what users see. Additionally, these items are not listed on Facebook's main terms of service page. Users must click on a link inside a different set of terms to arrive at the data policy page, making these terms onerous to find. This positioning raises questions about how Facebook will employ its users' behaviors in the future.

Critical Thinking Questions

1. How should Facebook respond to the 2014 research situation? How could an earlier response have helped the company avoid the 2018 controversies and keep the trust of its users?

2. Should the company promise to never again conduct a survey of this sort? Should it go even further and explicitly ban research intended to manipulate the responses of its users?

3. How can Facebook balance the concerns of its users with the necessity of generating revenue through advertising?

4. What processes or structures should Facebook establish to make sure it does not encounter these issues again?

5. Respond in writing to the issues presented in this case by preparing two documents: a communication strategy memo and a professional business letter to advertisers.

Chapter 11 Review Questions

1. Describe the communication process.

2. Why is feedback a critical part of the communication process?

3. What are some things that managers can do to reduce noise in communication?

4. Compare and contrast the three primary forms of interpersonal communication.

5. Describe the various individual communication roles in organizations.

6. How can managers better manage their effectiveness by managing e-mail communication?

7. Which communication roles are most important in facilitating managerial effectiveness?

8. Identify barriers to effective communication. 9. How can barriers to effective communication be overcome by managers?

Chapter 12 Critical Thinking Case The Leadership Challenge at United

Anyone who has traveled even a little has at least one airline horror story: being stranded at an airport, obnoxious passengers, missed connections, flight delays, or just bad in-flight food. Even the most seasoned travelers would be hard-pressed to match Dr. David Dao's experience of being forcibly removed, kicking and screaming, from a United Airlines flight. Most airline horror stories don't end in a concussion, missing teeth, and a broken nose. Chapter 12 Leadership 411 United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz's strangely detached response only made things worse. The incident was caught on video, and that video went viral almost immediately. Munoz issued a response that mischaracterized what plainly happened in the video and termed the violent assault as a passenger "reaccommodation" (Taylor 2017). Social media erupted with condemnation, which was echoed by late-night monologues. United was left with a damaged reputation, and its management was left wondering why their processes failed, what to do to mitigate the damage, and how to both restore their reputation and ensure that company values are followed in the future. William Taylor (2017), in a commentary in Fortune, attributes United's "re-accommodation" disaster as the product of company policy, airport security procedures, pilot protocols, and the "wisdom of crowds." At each step, the gate agent, pilot, airport security, and the passengers themselves could have intervened but didn't. Brian Fielkow, business leader, author, and keynote speaker, writing at Entrepreneur.com, outlined some points that apply to Munoz's response and the first reactions by United. Citing United's core values, Fielkow points to Munoz's failure to address the incident in light of the company's values, take the blame, or even accurately describe what happened on the plane. Any one of these lapses in leadership would have caused confusion or stymied the recovery process. As a leader, Munoz was setting the tone for thousands of people. Seemingly abandoning United's core values likely caused a rift in trust or just simple confusion company-wide. Miscasting the situation in a world of smartphones and social media reach only multiplied the effect. As a leader, Munoz was duty-bound to take responsibility for what literally the entire world sawa breach of social ethics, let alone United's core values. Failing to do this immediately created a problem larger than poorly planned company policy or just a perfect storm of contributing outside factors. Fielkow is keen to point out another crucial part of a company response "You can't walk it back" (2017 n.p.). Before responding, leadership should take time to gather the facts and thoroughly consider the possibilities of how the message will be received. Again, Munoz's response failed at several key points, leading to the perception that Munoz's second statement was "an attempt at damage control" (Fielkow2017 n.p.). Al Bolea, a leadership trainer, also attributes the incident to leadership failure. In a piece written for Applied Leadership, Bolea writes, "It's about front line employees getting the wrong messages from the most senior levels of the company." He contends that the mindset within United put procedures above context in the minds of the employees. What the gate agents should have considered was the company's reputation, which should have prevented them from doing something most airline customers see as "profoundly immoral" (Bolea 2017 n.p.) William C. Taylor, cofounder of Fast Company, also criticized the lack of leadership across United. As the presumptive leader of the flight, shouldn't the pilot have done something? Why didn't the gate agent think outside the box to solve the problem of getting the crew members from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky? Why didn'tor couldn'tthe gate agent use what Taylor refers to as a "common sense and a little bit of creativity" and prevent a highly embarrassing (and ultimately expensive) fiasco? Taylor muses that he would like to think he would have done more than shoot video, but the passengers on the flight remained quiet and submissive, expressing no group outrage. Finally, Taylor questions the weak initial response from United's CEO, Oscar Munoz, writing, "If CEO Oscar Munoz's goal was to make a disastrous situation even worse, well, he gets credit as a leader for succeeding at that" (2017 n.p.). And of the board, he questions their response, and says that response will be a "make or break test" of the company's character (Taylor 2017). So what will it take to lead United out of such a public mistake? According to Brian Fielkow, the incident flew in the face of United's core values, values which should never be sacrificed. United should have acknowledged this and addressed that failure. United should have held itself accountable for the incident rather than try to deflect blame. Fielkow contends that Munoz's first response 412 Chapter 12 Leadership This OpenStax book is available for free at http://cnx.org/content/col29124/1.5 was to blame the passenger when Munoz should have accepted responsibility instead. Further, Fielkow writes that companies should anticipate what "can" go wrong, something the gate agents at United failed to do. Increasing passenger compensation to even three times the normal ticket price would have been cheaper than the PR nightmare (and stock price drop) that followed. After Munoz's tepid response failed to quell general complaints about United's handling of the passenger, he tried to issue a second "more appropriate" statement, but by then the damage had been done. Fielkow recommends waiting before issuing a response if need be. It's better to prepared and issue a suitable response than to try to walk back a bad response. Above all, Fielkow recommends leaders "be human." The first response Munoz gave had little empathy and made him, and United, appear insensitive and callous. A company's first response should be to empathize with the customer, even if the customer is wrong. He writes, "When triaging a difficult problem, above all recognize the human factor" (Fielkow 2017 n.p.). Writing in Forbes, Glenn Llopis emphasizes that how managers react to failure shapes their futures as leaders. Not only how leaders respond, but what is learned from a failure, will affect how future decisions are approached. Remember, you have to be doing something to fail, and if you never fail, then you aren't stretching yourself. Venturing into the unknown and unfamiliar always risks failure (Llopis 2012). Sources: Fielkow, Brian. 2017. "5 Leadership Failures that Contributed to the United Fiasco." Entrepreneur. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/292820 Bolea, Al. 2017. "United Airlines: A System Failure?" Applied Leadership. http://appliedleadership.co/leadership/ united-airlines-system-failure/ Taylor, William C. 2017. "Where was the Pilot on That United Airlines Flight?" Fortune. http://fortune.com/2017/ 04/11/united-airlines-video/ Llopis, Glenn. 2012. "5 Things Failure Teaches You About Leadership." Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ glennllopis/2012/08/20/5-things-failure-teaches-you-about-leadership/2/#2f44c3873e70

Questions:

1. How have other airlines handled similar situations?

2. How much was in United Airlines's control, and how much was actually outside their control? What social or company factors caused a seemingly common practice to escalate to this level?

3. How did the other airlines or the industry respond to the United Airlines incident?