QUESTION 4 Earlier this year, you were assigned to represent your department on the cross-functional marketing task force. The purpose of the taskforce is a marketing plan for cross-product promotions and offerings, but your immediate deliverable, as a team, is to develop a forecast of the best possible combination of offerings. You have been meeting weekly via zoom (you are all remote) and have agreed to use Google docs/sheets as your working platform. Each week, you decide as a group what further analysis is needed from each of the product areas and members are expected to post their analyses before the next meeting, so that you can use the meeting time to look over the big picture and set direction. But so far it has been a disaster. One member, Ben is consistently late in adding his contributions. Several times you have had to decide next steps without his data, only to change the direction once he provides his numbers. Another member, Jaylin, keeps rearranging other people's spreadsheets to match the formatting and structure of her own, which at best irritates others and at worst risks over-writing formulas or assumptions. Then, in your last meeting, tempers erupted when the fourth member, Ian, started actually yelling at Ben and Jaylin, claiming that they were both unprofessional and clearly not committed to the project. You have some sympathy for his frustration. This task force work is on top of an already full-time job and you have a young family at home as well. Yet, you still manage to put in many hours a week on the analysis - far more, you suspect, than Ben, or, for that matter, Ian, who seems to spend more time complaining about the group than providing the detailed level of data you need from his division. Focusing on what you have learned about Teams and Interpersonal Conflict (though drawing from other topic areas as well, if you wish), answer the following two questions Please number your responses in the text box.

1. Analyze what is happening in this group. That is, how would you characterize the conflict they are experiencing? What might be contributing to it?

2. What might you do to improve the situation, and why?